Chile nabs fugitive in Victor Jara case

Chile’s Victor Jara case has taken another turn after police said they captured Nelson Haase, a former officer convicted in the killing of the famed singer during the early days of Augusto Pinochet’s rule. Haase had been sentenced to 25 years but disappeared before he could begin serving the punishment.

Police said Haase was found on Saturday in the country’s south. Local media reported that he was located in Puyehue, in the Los Lagos region, about 950 km south of Santiago. He had fled after the sentence was announced in August 2023, then remained out of reach for nearly three years. Haase was a retired colonel and one of eight officers found guilty in Jara’s murder in 2018.

The case reaches back to the violent aftermath of the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. Jara, a widely known folk singer, became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for protest songs and pacifist music, and he backed the ousted socialist president Salvador Allende. Five days after the coup, he was taken into custody and later tortured and shot 44 times, according to the account in the case.

Jara was among roughly 5,000 people arrested in the immediate wake of the coup and sent to a sports stadium in the capital. Survivors have described brutal treatment there. They said soldiers crushed the singer’s fingers and taunted him by saying he would never play guitar again. His killing has stood for decades as one of the clearest examples of how the Pinochet dictatorship dealt with its opponents.