Punta Peuco Prison (), officially the Centro de Detención Preventiva y Cumplimiento Penitenciario Especial Punta Peuco and, since November 2025, the Centro de Cumplimiento Penitenciario de Til Til, is a prison in the municipality of Tiltil, in Chile's Santiago Metropolitan Region, about 64 kilometers (40 miles) north of Santiago. Built in 1995, it was for three decades the country's only prison reserved specifically for former members of the armed forces, Carabineros and state security agents convicted by Chilean courts of crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses committed during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Many of these cases are still tried under the criminal procedure code of 1906, which lacks the evidentiary safeguards introduced by the criminal justice reform carried out in Chile between 2000 and 2005.
The facility, administered by the Chilean Gendarmerie like the rest of the country's prisons, has long been criticized by human rights groups, judges and journalists for affording its inmates conditions markedly better than those in ordinary Chilean prisons, including tennis courts, barbecue areas, a library and satellite television. A sister facility with even more comfortable conditions, Cordillera Penitentiary Compliance Center, was closed in 2013 and its ten inmates transferred to Punta Peuco. During the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly 70 percent of Punta Peuco's population was infected and at least five elderly inmates died between October 2020 and September 2021.
After a first, unsuccessful attempt by President Michelle Bachelet to shut the prison in 2018, President Gabriel Boric announced in June 2025 that Punta Peuco would be stripped of its special status and folded into the ordinary prison system. Chile's Comptroller General approved the corresponding decree on November 3, 2025, ending Punta Peuco's 30-year status as a facility reserved for dictatorship-era human rights convicts and renaming it the Til Til Penitentiary Compliance Center; the government said the change would allow the site to be used, like any other prison, according to the security classification of its inmates, easing overcrowding elsewhere in the system.
History
Establishment Punta Peuco was created by decree 580 of June 14, 1995, signed by Justice Minister Soledad Alvear under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle; Public Works Minister Ricardo Lagos initially opposed the project and tendered his resignation in protest, which Frei declined to accept. The prison was built between January and June 1995 specifically to hold retired general Manuel Contreras and brigadier Pedro Espinoza, the two senior DINA officers convicted that year in the Letelier case for ordering the 1976 car-bomb assassination in Washington, D.C., of former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt; Contreras received a seven-year sentence, which he served until 2001. The facility's construction was overseen by then-director of the Gendarmerie, Claudio Martínez Cerda, a member of the Socialist Party, who has since said the site should eventually be converted into a museum. Because the prison was still being finished when Contreras's sentence was handed down in May 1995, he initially resisted arrest and was instead admitted to a naval hospital in Talcahuano, ostensibly for a hernia operation, until the facility was ready to receive him that June. Espinoza was incarcerated at Punta Peuco that October. On July 22, 1995, roughly 1,500 people, many of them serving army personnel, held a rally outside the prison in solidarity with Espinoza, reflecting the insubordination and protest within the military that had accompanied the human rights convictions.
Penal Cordillera and population growth In 2004, under President Lagos, the government built a second special facility, Cordillera Penitentiary Compliance Center, on an army base in Santiago, in part to relieve overcrowding at Punta Peuco. Cordillera offered its ten inmates even greater comforts than Punta Peuco, including a swimming pool, private cabins and daily tennis; public anger peaked in September 2013 when supporters of inmate Miguel Krassnoff attempted to hold a barbecue in his honor there, around the 40th anniversary of the 1973 coup. Citing the principle of equality before the law, President Sebastián Piñera ordered Cordillera's closure on September 26, 2013, and its inmates, including Contreras—by then serving combined sentences of more than a century for kidnapping and murder—were transferred to Punta Peuco, which became Chile's only remaining special prison for dictatorship-era human rights convicts. By 2015, with several landmark human rights trials concluding in guilty verdicts, Punta Peuco's population had risen to around 104, near its then-listed capacity of 120, at a time when Chile's ordinary prisons were reported to be roughly 70 percent over capacity. Proposals to close Punta Peuco itself gained traction after Cordillera's closure, straining relations within the governing coalition of President Bachelet's second term.
2018 closure attempt On March 10–11, 2018, in the final hours of her second term, President Bachelet sought to close Punta Peuco as a symbolic last act of government, but her outgoing justice minister, Jaime Campos, twice refused to sign the necessary decree, arguing it was legally flawed and that he had already ceased his functions. Human rights organizations, including the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, criticized Bachelet for what they called a belated and ultimately unfulfilled promise, arguing she had never seriously intended to close the prison during her four years in office.
Overcrowding By September 2023, Punta Peuco had reached its rated capacity of 130 inmates—nine more than its designed limit—forcing newly convicted human rights offenders to be sent instead to the ordinary Colina I prison.
End of special status (2025) In his annual state-of-the-nation address on June 1, 2025, President Boric announced he would end Punta Peuco's status as a special prison, directing the Ministry of Justice to prepare a decree transforming it into an ordinary facility that Gendarmerie could staff and allocate according to standard security criteria rather than the prisoners' social status. Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo confirmed on July 10, 2025, that the corresponding decree had been submitted to the Comptroller General's office for review. On November 3, 2025, Boric announced that the Comptroller General had approved the decree, declaring "from today, there are no first- and second-class prisoners in Chile" and calling the move "an act of justice." The decree, published in the Diario Oficial the following day, formally amended decree 580 of 1995 and renamed the site the Til Til Penitentiary Compliance Center. According to the Chilean government, the works underway include upgraded infrastructure, 32 additional prison places (raising capacity from 112 to 144), and a new visiting room bringing conditions in line with other prisons; the changes were expected to be finished in February 2026, after which the redistribution of inmates according to Gendarmerie's usual criteria would begin.
The announcement drew mixed reactions. Human rights groups and the political left broadly welcomed it as long overdue, while residents of Tiltil and the municipality's mayor objected, warning that housing ordinary offenders so close to the town could worsen local security; on November 7, 2025, neighbors blocked the Route 5 North highway in protest.
Facility and conditions Punta Peuco sits on a 3,900-square-meter (42,000 sq ft) inmate compound within a larger military property near the mountain after which it is named, Punta de Peuco. Cells are grouped into four numbered modules—originally called "Alfa," "Beta," "Gamma" and "Delta"—each with a shared living room, kitchen and shower area; individual rooms have a single or double bed and a private bathroom with a toilet. Inmates have historically been permitted to keep personal appliances, radios and televisions with satellite access, though not mobile phones, and courts have in a few cases authorized personal computers for educational purposes without internet access; the modules also share common computers without internet connectivity. Each module opens onto a shared yard used for talks, physiotherapy and a small library, and the compound also has a multi-purpose sports court and a tennis court. Roughly 70 meters (230 ft) from Punta Peuco, separated only by a wall, is the Centro Metropolitano Norte, a juvenile detention facility run jointly by Gendarmerie and Chile's former minors' service, SENAME.
Legal status of inmates Nearly all of Punta Peuco's inmates have been tried and sentenced under the criminal procedure code that was in force in Chile until the 2000–2005 judicial reform, since the offenses being prosecuted date from the 1973–1990 dictatorship. Legal commentators have argued this practice deprives defendants of evidentiary protections available under the modern accusatorial system used elsewhere in the country, while critics of the arrangement counter that it reflects the ordinary rule that crimes are judged under the law in force when they were committed.
COVID-19 outbreak Between October 2020 and September 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile, an outbreak swept through Punta Peuco: about 70 percent of its roughly 110 inmates, many of them elderly, were eventually infected. At least five inmates died: General Héctor Orozco, 93, who had been serving a ten-year sentence since 2017 for the murders of two left-wing activists, died on October 26, 2020. Colonel Jaime García Zamorano, 85, serving a seven-year sentence since 2014 for his role in the massacre of 18 peasants, died on September 3, 2021. Miguel Estay Reyno, 68, serving a life sentence since 1995 for the kidnapping and murder of three communists in the so-called Degollados case, died on September 4, 2021. Air force commander Luis Enrique Campos Poblete, 82, serving a 17-year sentence since 2017 for the murder of a leftist activist and the kidnapping of another, died on September 5, 2021. Marco Antonio Bustos Carrasco, 61, serving a five-year sentence since 2017 for complicity in the kidnapping of five leftists who were later murdered, died on September 11, 2021.
Protests and public reaction Punta Peuco has periodically drawn demonstrations from opposing sides: relatives of the disappeared and human rights activists have repeatedly rallied outside the prison to demand its closure, most notably around the 2013 closure of Cordillera and again in May 2017, while relatives and supporters of the inmates have organized counter-demonstrations and, in one case, a rally of roughly 1,500 people in 1995, arguing the prisoners are being unfairly singled out. Relatives of inmate Raúl Iturriaga have been among the most vocal defenders of Punta Peuco's prisoners, describing them publicly as political prisoners and appealing—unsuccessfully—for international intervention on their behalf.
Notable incidents The only inmate held at Punta Peuco who was not convicted of a dictatorship-era human rights crime was retired Army Major Patricio Cereceda Truán, found chiefly responsible for the deaths of 44 conscripts and a sergeant in the 2005 Tragedy of Antuco, when he ordered a march up the Antuco volcano in Chile's Biobío Region despite warnings of a coming storm. Cereceda was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served about three years and eight months before being paroled, and was held at Punta Peuco rather than at a conventional prison.
Notable inmates Manuel Contreras (1929–2015) Pedro Espinoza Álvaro Corbalán Miguel Krassnoff Raúl Iturriaga Jorge del Río Marcelo Moren Brito (1935–2015) José Zara Holger César Manríquez Hugo Salas Wenzel (1935–2021) Carlos Herrera Jiménez Guillermo González Betancourt Juan Fuentes Castro