The Murder of Fernanda Maciel

A young mother-to-be

Fernanda Maciel was a 21-year-old woman from the Conchalí district in northern Santiago. In February 2018 she was 30 weeks pregnant and about to have a daughter. She was last seen on 10 February 2018, and her family began a search that would last well over a year and draw national attention.

A long and troubled search

The investigation was led by the Fiscalía Centro Norte, the prosecutors' office for northern Santiago, with both of Chile's police forces, the PDI and the Carabineros, carrying out inquiries. Attention soon fell on Felipe Rojas Lobos, a neighbour and friend of Maciel who looked after a storage warehouse a few metres from her home. As Radio Bío-Bío later revealed, a PDI report in April 2018 concluded that Rojas could be directly or indirectly involved, mainly because he was the last person known to have seen her alive and his account contained inconsistencies. Yet an October 2018 report listed eight possible hypotheses and gave the most weight to suicide. In February 2019 a further PDI report, based on security-camera footage, concluded that Maciel had never left the warehouse while Rojas had gone in and out several times, and asked prosecutors to treat him as a suspect rather than a witness. That request was not accepted at the time.

The discovery

In June 2019, one year and four months after she disappeared, Carabineros found Maciel's body buried in the warehouse. The discovery provoked anger: the family's lawyer, Pedro Díaz, criticised the lack of rigour in the search, and the Chilean Network against Violence towards Women protested outside the national prosecutor's office, alleging negligence and questioning the prosecutor's explanation for failing to find the body in a space of roughly 800 metres. Andrés Chadwick, then acting as vice president, said the prosecutor in charge had to answer those doubts. Rojas, the only person accused, was brought before a Santiago court to be formally charged.

Trial and sentence

The trial opened in early 2023, a little over five years after the disappearance. On 11 April 2023 the Second Oral Criminal Court of Santiago found Rojas guilty, and on 25 April 2023 the three-judge panel, presided over by Raúl Díaz Manosalva, with Judge Eduardo Gallardo Frías writing the ruling, unanimously sentenced him to presidio perpetuo calificado, Chile's most severe penalty, for rape with homicide and for causing an abortion without consent. Under this sentence he cannot apply for any prison benefit until he has served 40 years. The court found aggravating circumstances, including that he had acted treacherously and with the expectation of impunity by burying and hiding the body near the home. It gave only limited weight to his cooperation, noting that although he had taken part in a reconstruction of the events, he had stayed silent for about two years about where Maciel was.

Rojas's defence appealed, but on 19 June 2023 the Santiago Court of Appeals rejected the appeal and confirmed the sentence.

Femicide and the justice system

The case is widely described in Chile as a femicide, but the formal charges were rape with homicide and abortion, together with violations of burial rules. The conviction for abortion meant the court formally took into account the loss of the unborn child; El Dínamo reported that the judges examined the viability of the pregnancy, which was at 30 weeks.

Why the case matters

Fernanda Maciel's case became a reference point in Chile for criticism of how disappearances of women are investigated. The fact that police reports had pointed at the eventual culprit more than a year before the body was found, only a short distance from her home, raised serious questions about coordination between prosecutors and the two police forces, and about how quickly the disappearance of a woman is treated as a possible crime. Those questions were put publicly by her family's lawyer, by women's rights groups and by the government itself in 2019.