Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired colonel in the Chilean military, was arrested in the rural southern town of Puyehue on Saturday following his identification by authorities. A judge ordered his immediate imprisonment after his capture. Haase Mazzei had been a fugitive since August 2023, when he and six other retired soldiers were convicted in absentia for the murder of singer Víctor Jara and Littré Quiroga, the national director of prisons under Salvador Allende’s government.
Jara was arrested on 11 September 1973, the day after General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against the socialist administration. He was detained at a small covered stadium in central Santiago alongside thousands of others. Four days after his arrest, Jara was killed in the stadium’s changing rooms, where he had been tortured and subjected to extreme violence. His body was recovered near the main cemetery with 44 bullet wounds and 56 broken bones. Quiroga’s body was found at the same location with 23 gunshot wounds.
Haase Mazzei was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for his role in the killings. He had long maintained he was not present at the stadium, though sworn testimony placed him at the scene. He served in the Chilean army’s Tejas Verde brigade beginning in 1972 and later worked with the regime’s secret police, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), under the leadership of Manuel Contreras.
The Víctor Jara Foundation, established by Jara’s widow Joan Jara, acknowledged the arrest while noting the difficulty in characterizing the delayed justice as meaningful more than 50 years after the crimes. Of the seven soldiers convicted, one took his own life in 2023 when police arrived to arrest him, while another, Pedro Barrientos, was deported from the United States and arrested in December 2023. Haase Mazzei’s defense team has requested his transfer to Punta Peuco, a specialized facility built to house human rights offenders from the Pinochet era.
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