José Zara
DINA exterior department officer sentenced to fifteen years for the Prats murders, released from Punta Peuco on August 25, 2025, rearrested within two days for the killing of Ronni Moffitt, and convicted in June 2026.
José Zara Holger, a retired brigadier of the Chilean army, served in the exterior department of DINA, which Judge Paola Plaza found to consist of one group for international policy and another for operations abroad.1
Prats
In 2010 the Chilean courts convicted him, with Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, and Raúl Iturriaga, of the murders of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, and sentenced him to fifteen years. He served them at Punta Peuco and was released on Monday, August 25, 2025.12
Moffitt
He had been charged, with Iturriaga, as an author of the killing of Ronni Moffitt, the 25-year-old colleague of Orlando Letelier who died in the same car on September 21, 1976, on complaints brought by the Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos and the former interior under-secretary Rodrigo Ubilla. Until then the only Chilean convictions in the case, those of Contreras and Espinoza by Judge Adolfo Bañados, concerned Letelier alone. Zara had been left at liberty in that case because he was serving the Prats sentence. On August 27, 2025, on the order of Judge Alejandro Aguilar, standing in for Plaza, the investigative police's human rights brigade arrested him and returned him to custody; his appeal was rejected. "No tengo que pedirle perdón a nadie," he told an interviewer that October. "Yo no tuve ninguna participación." On June 15, 2026, Plaza sentenced Zara, Iturriaga, and Espinoza to fifteen years each for Moffitt's death.13
Sources
- Basso Prieto, Carlos. "José Zara Holger fue detenido de nuevo: esta vez por crimen de Ronni Moffitt," El Mostrador, August 27, 2025. ↩
- Chilean press reports of the 2010 judgments of Judge Alejandro Solís and the Supreme Court (La Tercera, El Mostrador), not read in full. ↩
- Kornbluh, Peter. "A Modicum of Justice for Ronni Karpen Moffitt," The Nation, September 2026.; The Clinic, interview of October 15, 2025, as quoted in press summaries. ↩
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