Pinochet-era soldier jailed for killing folk singer Víctor Jara 53 years ago

Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired colonel, fled from authorities in 2023 after he and six other retired soldiers were sentenced in absentia for murdering Jara and another man.

Chilean police announced on Saturday that Haase Mazzei had been arrested in Puyehue, in the rural south of the country, with a judge ordering his immediate imprisonment.

The Víctor Jara Foundation, set up by his widow, the British dancer and activist Joan Jara, said in statement: “We learned that retired Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei, who had been a fugitive from justice since 2023, was found and imprisoned. We welcome this news.

“However, it is important for us to emphasize that, half a century after the murders of Víctor Jara and Littré Quiroga, it is difficult to see this as this justice.”

Jara, a singer and leftwing activist, was arrested in Santiago, the capital of Chile, on 11 September 1973, the day after Gen Augusto Pinochet’s bloody US-backed coup to depose the socialist president, Salvador Allende.

Jara was held along with thousands of others at a small covered stadium in central Santiago. Four days later, he was murdered in the changing rooms alongside Allende’s national director of prisons, Littré Quiroga.

Haase Mazzei’s arrest is likely to be the final act in the long quest for justice on behalf of Jara, one of the most recognisable victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which killed or disappeared more than 3,000 people and detained and tortured tens of thousands during 17 years of repressive rule.

At the stadium, Jara was tortured and humiliated by officers who played Russian roulette with him before breaking his hands, shattering his skull, and riddling him with automatic gunfire.

His body was found dumped near the main cemetery in Santiago with 44 bullet wounds and 56 broken bones. He was 40 years old. The body of Quiroga, who had been shot 23 times, was found at the same time.

After evading justice for nearly half a century, seven retired soldiers were found guilty of the murder and sentenced in absentia to varying jail terms in August 2023. Haase Mazzei received a 25-year sentence.

He claimed for years that he was not at the stadium, since renamed Estadio Víctor Jara, but sworn testimony placed him at the scene.

Haase Mazzei joined the Chilean army’s notorious Tejas Verde brigade in 1972, and was later part of Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), where he worked closely with its leader, Manuel Contreras, a renowned regime loyalist who was sentenced to more than 500 years’ jail time for crimes against humanity before his death in 2015.

Sentenced alongside Haase Mazzei was 86-year-old Hernán Chacón. When police arrived to arrest him at his home in a wealthy district of Santiago in 2023, he asked officers for a moment to take his medication, before slipping off into a side room and taking his own life.

Another Tejas Verde officer sentenced for the killing was Pedro Barrientos, who left Chile for the US in 1989 and was deported back in December 2023, more than a decade after his extradition was first sought.

One former soldier testified that Barrientos had the habit of brandishing his pistol and declaring: “I killed Víctor Jara with this!”

Barrientos was eventually arrested in the US after a routine traffic stop, and lost his US citizenship not because of his crimes, but on the grounds that he had failed to disclose his military background in his application.

Jara’s widow died at the age of 96, just weeks before Barrientos was returned to Chile to face justice.

Haase Mazzei’s defence has already requested his transfer from a prison in the southern city of Osorno to Punta Peuco, a well-appointed jail north of Santiago, built to house the human rights criminals of the Pinochet era.