Land of Jackals

In 1634 a bishop asked for an investigation into what was happening on an estate north of Santiago. The Royal Court of Appeals took twenty-six years to send anyone. By 2001, fourteen young women had disappeared in Alto Hospicio and the police were still explaining to their mothers that poor girls leave home.

Four centuries separate those two moments. The entire country changed in between. The only thing that did not change was the gesture of looking away.

Twelve cases, from 1622 to 2024: the colonial landowner who ordered a thousand masses for her soul and five hundred for the people she harmed; the pirate of the southern channels; the Frenchman Valparaíso turned into a saint; the butcher of San Felipe; the Jackal of Nahueltoro and the three years that split a country in two; the poisoned bottles of Buin; the police officers who hunted couples on the coast road; the white taxi in the Atacama; the house in Villa Alemana that held five bodies across thirty years.

A work of narrative non-fiction built on court judgments, archives and contemporary reporting, one that names the victims before it names the killers.