Chilean police have captured Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired army colonel and the last remaining fugitive convicted of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of celebrated folk singer Víctor Jara. Haase was found on Saturday on a rural property in Puyehue, a town in the Los Lagos region some 950 kilometres south of the capital Santiago, bringing to a close one of the most prominent unresolved judicial chapters of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. A Santiago appeals court judge immediately ordered his imprisonment.

Jara, one of Latin America's most iconic protest singers and a leading voice of the Nueva Canción Chilena — the politically charged Chilean folk revival of the 1960s and 70s — was arrested at the Universidad Técnica del Estado on 12 September 1973, just one day after the military coup that overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende. He was taken to the Estadio Chile, a sports stadium in Santiago converted into a mass detention centre holding nearly 5,000 prisoners. There, he was singled out, subjected to brutal torture — soldiers crushed his fingers, taunting him that he would never play guitar again — and eventually executed with 44 gunshots on 16 September 1973. He was 40 years old. His body bore 44 bullet wounds and 56 bone fractures. The stadium has since been renamed Estadio Víctor Jara in his honour.

Haase was one of eight former military officers convicted in 2018 for Jara's murder and the killing of Littré Quiroga Carvajal, the government's prison director-general, who died alongside the singer. After years of appeals, Chile's Supreme Court issued a final sentence in August 2023, ordering Haase to serve 15 years for aggravated homicide and 10 years for aggravated kidnapping — 25 years in total. He failed to report to prison and disappeared. He was the only one among the convicted who remained at large. Another convicted officer, General Hernán Chacón, died by suicide when police came to arrest him; the remaining five convicted men are serving their sentences. In 2023, the United States also extradited to Chile retired lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, who had been found liable for Jara's murder by a Florida civil jury.

Jara's case remains one of the most powerful symbols of the political violence unleashed by Pinochet's 17-year military regime, during which thousands of people were tortured, executed, or forcibly disappeared. His wife, Joan, smuggled recordings of his music out of Chile after his death, helping his work gain international recognition. Songs such as "Te recuerdo Amanda," "El derecho de vivir en paz," and "Estadio Chile" — the latter a poem he secretly wrote while imprisoned — became anthems of the global human rights movement. The capture of Haase closes the last open chapter in the criminal proceedings over his murder, more than five decades after it was committed.