Capital punishment in Chile

Capital punishment in Chile is legally sanctioned but has been sharply restricted since 2001, when the Chilean Congress abolished it for ordinary crimes. Under Law No. 19,734, signed by President Ricardo Lagos, capital punishment for civilian crimes was replaced with a qualified form of life imprisonment (presidio perpetuo calificado) that carries a minimum of 40 years before the possibility of parole. The death penalty remains on the books solely for members of the armed forces convicted under military law of the most serious crimes—including war crimes and crimes against humanity—committed in wartime.

This makes Chile one of a small group of countries that have abolished capital punishment for ordinary offenses while retaining it for exceptional military crimes; Amnesty International's most recent survey places it alongside Brazil, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Israel, Peru, and Zambia in this category.

The method of execution historically used in Chile is shooting. The last executions took place on January 29, 1985, when two former Carabineros officers known as the "Viña del Mar psychopaths," Jorge Sagredo Pizarro and Carlos Topp Collins, were shot by firing squad in Quillota for a string of murders and rapes. Capital punishment had been part of Chilean law since 1875 and was first applied to an ordinary crime in 1890; according to official figures compiled by Congress, at least 57 people were judicially sentenced to death and executed between then and 1967, mostly for robbery-homicide and aggravated homicide, while numerous other death sentences were commuted.

Chile has supported the United Nations moratorium on the death penalty since 2007 and has consistently voted in favor of successive UN General Assembly resolutions calling for it. The country signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on November 15, 2001, and ratified it on September 26, 2008, while entering a reservation under Article 2.1 that preserves the wartime military exception. That same year, Chile also ratified the Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty, which contains a similar exception for serious military offenses committed in wartime.

History

Colonial era and 19th century The death penalty was applied in Chile as the ultimate criminal sanction from colonial times. It was formally codified in the Penal Code of 1875, which reserved it chiefly for robbery accompanied by violence or intimidation resulting in death, piracy, treason, and other crimes that ended in the victim's death. Among the earliest people executed under the code was Pedro Ñancúpel, a Chilote fisherman-turned-pirate convicted of piracy and several homicides, who was shot in Castro in 1888.

Historians note that the official tally of 53–58 executions carried out between 1890 and 1967 may be incomplete: journalist Marianela Baeza has pointed to the case of Nicanor Vicencio, reportedly shot in Quillota in 1899, as an example of an execution missing from the official record, and a 2022 academic study similarly concluded that the precise historical total of executions in Chile is likely uncertain.

Notable 20th-century cases One of the country's most widely publicized executions was that of Émile Dubois (born Louis-Amédée Brihier Lacroix), a French-born itinerant who was convicted of murdering several people in Valparaíso and shot there on March 26, 1907; he reportedly refused a blindfold and calmly smoked a cigar before facing the firing squad, and his grave later became a folk pilgrimage site.

The most contentious case of the era was that of Jorge del Carmen Valenzuela Torres, known as "El Chacal de Nahueltoro" ("the Jackal of Nahueltoro"), a farmworker who killed his partner and her five children in 1960. While awaiting execution over the following three years, Valenzuela learned to read and write, converted to Catholicism, and by many accounts appeared genuinely rehabilitated, which fueled a national debate over the morality of shooting a man who no longer resembled the person who had committed the crime. President Jorge Alessandri declined to commute the sentence, and Valenzuela was shot in Chillán on April 30, 1963; his story was later dramatized in the acclaimed 1969 film The Jackal of Nahueltoro.

Last executions The final judicial executions in Chile were carried out on January 29, 1985, in the prison at Quillota, where former Carabineros officers Jorge José Sagredo Pizarro and Carlos Alberto Topp Collins—dubbed the "Viña del Mar psychopaths"—were shot for ten murders, four rapes, and several robberies committed in Viña del Mar between 1980 and 1981. Sixteen riflemen armed with UZI submachine guns carried out the sentence at dawn; both men were the last people legally executed in Chile before capital punishment was abolished for civilian crimes sixteen years later.

Abolition, 2001 The Chamber of Deputies approved abolition on April 3, 2001, by a vote of 63 to 37 with four abstentions, with opposition coming from right-wing legislators; the bill had already cleared the Senate. President Ricardo Lagos promulgated Law No. 19,734 on May 28, 2001, making Chile the 109th country to abolish capital punishment for ordinary crimes and ending a regime that had been in force for 126 years; the law amended the Penal Code, the State Security Law, and the Code of Military Justice.

Prisoners who were still awaiting execution when the law took effect had their sentences automatically converted to ordinary life imprisonment, carrying eligibility for supervised release after 20 years. One beneficiary of this transition was Rubén Millatureo, convicted of a triple homicide, who was released in 2018 after 20 years in custody.

Legal framework The Constitution of Chile, in Article 19, No. 1, provides that the death penalty may only be established by a law approved with a qualified quorum (that is, by the absolute majority of the deputies and senators in office). A transitional provision of the 1980 Constitution kept pre-existing death penalty provisions in force until such a qualified-quorum law was enacted; no such law was passed before the penalty was abolished for ordinary crimes in 2001. Under the Penal Code as amended by Law No. 19,734, a person sentenced to qualified life imprisonment (the replacement penalty) may not be considered for parole until 40 years of effective imprisonment have elapsed.

Military justice retains the death penalty for wartime offenses under the Code of Military Justice, applicable exclusively to members of the armed forces convicted of the gravest crimes committed during a state of war. No one has been sentenced to death under this provision in the post-2001 period.

Notable retrospective cases The last person in Chile to have been sentenced to death was Hugo Gómez Padua, a Colombian national who raped and murdered a child in Colombia in 1976, later breached parole there, and entered Chile illegally in 1995. In 1999, while living in Santa Cruz, he raped and dismembered a ten-year-old girl, Paula López Galdámez; because the death penalty for ordinary crimes had already been abolished, he could not be sentenced to execution and instead received a term of qualified life imprisonment. His subsequent requests for parole, made in 2020 and 2021, were denied.

Of the people executed under the pre-2001 regime, only two were foreign nationals—the German Guillermo Beckert and the Frenchman Émile Dubois—and no woman was ever shot, although several women were sentenced to death, including Corina Rojas (convicted of parricide) and Teresa Hidalgo (convicted of four homicides); both ultimately had their sentences commuted or overturned on appeal.

List of judicial executions, 1852–1985 The following list, compiled from official legislative history and contemporary press accounts, records people executed by the Chilean state for civilian and military crimes prior to abolition. Because of gaps in the historical record, researchers regard the list as probably incomplete.

DatePlaceNameCrimeRef.April 4, 1852ValparaísoMiguel José Cambiaso TapiaMutinyJune 9, 1879AncudJosé Domingo Nahuelhuen ChigüaiPiracyJuan Andrés Piuco LinanJuan Lepio MañaoNovember 6, 1888CastroPedro María Ñancúpel AlarcónPiracy and multiple homicidesFebruary 3, 1890OvalleEmilio Tapia ZapataRobbery with homicideSeptember 30, 1895San CarlosEulogio Vásquez ArzolaHomicideMay 11, 1901YungayAquilino Muñoz CarvajalRobbery with homicidePedro Rivas San MartínOctober 30, 1903ConstituciónEstanislao Aguilera A.Robbery with homicideSeptember 7, 1905ChillánLeopoldo Muñoz LópezRobbery with homicideSeptember 6, 1906ValdiviaSerafín Rodríguez PincheiraHomicideMarch 26, 1907Valparaíso Émile DuboisFour homicidesAugust 24, 1907Los ÁngelesMiguel Robles MejíasHomicideJuly 5, 1910Santiago Guillermo BeckertHomicide and arsonJuly 1, 1912QuillotaAlfredo Brito BritoHomicideSeptember 28, 1912AricaFortunato Soto RovinotHomicideMay 13, 1914CuricóManuel Besoaín MuñozHomicideOctober 3, 1914SantiagoLuis Jaque MorenoParricideNovember 2, 1914PitrufquénEleuterio Castro HerreraRobbery with homicideIsidoro Burgos BaezaJuan de Dios Muñoz RabilarNovember 19, 1928PeumoManuel Contreras ContrerasParricideDecember 5, 1928Punta ArenasAbelardo de la Puente FloresRobbery with four homicidesDecember 23, 1933TalcaFrancisco Antonio Manríquez ManríquezRobbery with homicideMay 12, 1934QuirihueGabriel Romero SobarzoRobbery with homicideArtemio Espinoza JaraMay 15, 1934San BernardoManuel Muñoz OrtegaParricideJune 19, 1934San FelipeJorge Pizarro AstudilloRobbery with homicideBernardo Gómez RomeroJuly 13, 1934TraiguénRafael Peña CarrilloRobbery with homicideSeptember 27, 1935RengoJuan Morales CalquínTwo homicidesOctober 3, 1936SantiagoVíctor Martínez TroncosoTwo homicidesNovember 30, 1936SantiagoRoberto Barceló LiraParricideApril 25, 1938SantiagoFrancisco Téllez JiménezRobbery with homicideNovember 19, 1942SantiagoTomás Órdenes SepúlvedaTwo homicides and rapeMiguel Lillo AlarcónSeptember 8, 1943TemucoEmilio Inostroza SepúlvedaRobbery with homicideAugust 18, 1945SantiagoJuan de Dios Osorio GaldámezThree homicidesOctober 6, 1950SantiagoAlberto Hipómenes Caldera GarcíaHomicideFebruary 12, 1951LautaroFederico Mardones UrreaRobbery with homicideRené Ferrada FerradaOctober 19, 1951SantiagoJosé Raúl SilvaRobbery with homicideJuly 1, 1952PeumoVíctor Ortega GuzmánRobbery with homicideFernando Soto SotoAugust 16, 1952SantiagoRamón Castro GonzálezRobbery with homicideDecember 2, 1953La LiguaAlfonso Carreño MenesesTwo parricidesJanuary 4, 1954ConstituciónLuis Bravo HenríquezThree homicidesRodelindo A. González BravoSeptember 29, 1954SantiagoAlberto Cabrera MuñozRobbery with homicideJanuary 25, 1955SantiagoArmando del Carmen Vidal MadariagaTwo homicidesCarlos Segundo Espinoza SilvaJune 16, 1955PitrufquénRicardo Ojeda PortalesRobbery with homicideVíctor Roa CortésApril 30, 1963ChillánJorge del Carmen Valenzuela TorresSix homicides and one robberyNovember 15, 1965TalcaCesáreo del Carmen Villa MuñozRobbery with homicideOctober 7, 1967SantiagoFrancisco Cuadra PérezRobbery with three homicidesLuis Alberto Osorio TroncosoOctober 22, 1982CalamaGabriel Ernesto Hernández AndersonRobbery with two homicidesEduardo Segundo Villanueva MárquezJanuary 29, 1985QuillotaJorge José Sagredo PizarroTen homicides, four rapes, and eight robberiesCarlos Alberto Topp Collins

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