The Murder of Nicole Saavedra

Who Nicole Saavedra was

Nicole Saavedra Bahamondes was 23 years old and lived in El Melón, a small community in the Quillota province of Chile's Valparaíso Region. She was openly lesbian and often dressed in loose, masculine-style sportswear, a detail that her relatives and supporters would return to again and again as they argued that her identity was part of why she was targeted. She would have turned 28 in August 2021, the year the man responsible for her death finally went on trial.

The disappearance

In the early hours of 17 June 2016, Nicole had been at a party and set out for home before dawn. She never arrived. According to the facts later established in court, at about 7:40 on the morning of 18 June she boarded a local bus in the Rebolar area of Quillota. The driver was Víctor Alejandro Pulgar Vidal, who worked the route between El Melón and Limache. He took her mobile phone, cutting her off from anyone who might have helped, and then held her captive for roughly six days. On 24 June he assaulted and killed her.

Her body was found a short time later at the Los Aromos reservoir in Limache. Most reports give the date as 25 June 2016, although at least one national outlet dated the discovery to 26 June. Her hands had been bound. Her family came to describe the killing as a crime motivated by her sexual orientation and identity.

Three years without a suspect

For years the investigation went nowhere. The case passed through the hands of four different prosecutors, and the family repeatedly complained that obvious leads were ignored. One of them was Nicole's phone: relatives asked early on for it to be traced, but the request was not acted on.

The family, led by Nicole's cousin María Bahamondes, campaigned publicly for answers. In 2019, at the end of a march marking the third anniversary, a group of women occupied the Quillota prosecutor's office. Five of them, including Bahamondes, were later charged with public disorder and faced the prospect of prison, a prosecution that supporters criticised as punishing the family for demanding justice.

The breakthrough

On 16 October 2019 the Valparaíso regional prosecutor's office announced that a suspect had been identified and arrested. Investigators from Chile's PDI detective police had shifted to a more technical line of inquiry that included comparative DNA testing. Nicole's missing phone was eventually found in the hands of one of Pulgar's relatives, who allegedly had acquired it from him after the killing. At the time of his arrest, Pulgar was already in prison serving a ten-year sentence for the rape of a girl under 14, and he was the subject of a further sexual-offence case. He was also convicted of a rape committed in November 2016, about five months after Nicole's death. Bahamondes said bitterly that, had he been stopped earlier, her cousin might still be alive.

Pulgar was formally charged at the Quillota guarantee court on 6 January 2020 with kidnapping, rape, homicide and simple theft. The trial date was postponed more than once before the case finally reached court in 2021.

Verdict and sentence

On 21 October 2021 the Quillota oral criminal court found Pulgar guilty as the direct perpetrator of kidnapping with rape and of homicide. He was acquitted of the separate theft charge relating to the phone. By majority, the judges accepted the aggravating circumstance of treachery, finding that he had deliberately left Nicole unable to resist or call for help. However, the court unanimously rejected the hate-crime aggravator introduced by Chile's anti-discrimination law, known as the Ley Zamudio, which the prosecution and the family had sought. Judge Leticia Morales explained that while Nicole's sexual orientation and gender expression were proven, the evidence did not show that discrimination was the main motive.

On 29 October 2021 the court imposed presidio perpetuo calificado, the harshest form of life imprisonment in Chilean law, which the prosecution had requested. The public defender's office challenged the ruling with a nullity appeal, but in February 2022 the Valparaíso Court of Appeals unanimously rejected it, leaving the conviction and sentence in place. The family has also said it believes an accomplice was never brought to justice.

Why the case matters

The Saavedra case became one of the most widely cited examples of violence against lesbian women in Chile, with activists describing it as a lesbofemicide. The ruling also exposed the limits of the Ley Zamudio: even with the victim's identity accepted as fact, the hate aggravator requires proof that discrimination drove the crime rather than merely accompanied it, a demanding standard for prosecutors to satisfy. Beyond that legal debate, the case is remembered for how long it took to name a suspect, and for the way a grieving family and feminist organisations kept public attention on it until the state did. No further change to the conviction has been reported since the 2022 appeal ruling.