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The femicide of Ámbar Cornejo, 16, in the city of Villa Alemana - some 110 kilometers from Santiago de Chile - has unleashed a conflict between the powers of the Chilean State. The main suspect in the murder committed on July 29 was on probation. Hugo Bustamante, 55, had been sentenced to 27 years in prison for the murder of his concubine and the woman's nine-year-old son, committed in 2005. After serving less than half his sentence, he was released from prison in 2016, after the benefit was granted. Given his alleged recidivism, in a case that has shaken the South American country for its cruelty, the decision that the Justice took four years ago has been criticized by the Chilean Government and Parliament. In Congress, a group of right-wing deputies are seeking to remove the judge from the Valparaíso Court of Appeals, Silvana Donoso, who led the parole commission four years ago.
"We have to see what is the way to punish a judge who, due to his ideology or his ideas, becomes a danger to society," said the Undersecretary of Children of the Government of Sebastián Piñera, Carol Bown. In addition, it opened a debate on the death penalty, repealed in Chile in 2001. "We understand that the issue of the death penalty has been raised as an option in situations as painful as Ámbar and many that we have known" , he said in an interview with CNN Chile.
His words unleashed the annoyance of the Supreme Court, which defends the independence of the judges and, incidentally, rejected citizen harassment of the magistrates on social networks and the publication of their personal data, as happened with Judge Donoso in the last days. Both the spokesman for the Executive, Jaime Bellolio, and the Minister of Justice, Hernán Larraín, tried to extinguish the controversy and expressed their total respect for the separation of the powers of the State and their distance from the words of Undersecretary Brown, who had to apologize and clarify that he had spoken in a personal capacity and not on behalf of the Government.
Two of the parties on the ruling right, Renovación Nacional and Evópoli, are pushing in Congress a constitutional accusation against Judge Donoso, who is seeking her removal from the Judiciary. They accuse her of having a deliberate and arbitrary pattern of conduct to grant conditional release to highly dangerous inmates, which would constitute a notable abandonment of duties established by the Constitution as grounds for dismissal. To approve it, they will require the support of the majority of the deputies present in the chamber, made up of 155 parliamentarians.
The attack against Judge Donoso has ignited a deep debate in Chile about the failures of the system, prison benefits or criminal populism. The spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, Gloria Ana Chevesich, indicated that "the Judicial Power recognizes the powers that Congress has to deduce a constitutional accusation against the members of the supreme courts of justice." The magistrate, however, indicated that in the decision made four years ago by the conditional release commission of the Valparaíso Court of Appeals, “the law and the respective regulations were applied and it was deemed that all the requirements established by the regulations, which are not the same as those currently in force ”. Chevesich was referring to a reform that came into effect in 2019 and that clarified that conditional liberties are a benefit and not a right of the convicted person, as interpreted to date.
Bustamante was known in Villa Alemana as the murderer of the drum , because in 2005, when he committed the double homicide, he hid the bodies in a drum with water and lime, which he later buried. Currently, it was the partner of Ámbar's mother, Denisse Llanos, 38, who last Thursday related to the police the sequence of events that the man would have confessed to before escaping together to a nearby town, while the community searched through the streets some trace of the young woman who disappeared on July 29. Her story was the central clue to find six days ago with the remains of Amber, who did not live with the couple, but in a nearby house. The biological father of the teenager, who works in the north of the country, sued her ex-wife for the alleged crime of cover-up.
According to the details provided by the Prosecutor's Office in the hearing on Monday, where Bustamante was formalized for the crimes of rape with femicide and illegal burial, everything happened at the home of the alleged murderer, where the man and the girl had a discussion. He repeatedly hit her with his hands and with a blunt object on various parts of her body. "He put a cloth in her mouth, obstructing her breathing" and then he sexually violated her "until causing her death, clinically established as suffocation due to obstruction of respiratory orifices," said prosecutor Claudia Perivancich. Then, according to the Public Ministry, "he cut the body into 15 segments" using two knives and a handsaw and hid them in three coolers that he buried under his house in a 52-centimeter-deep hole.
According to Perivancich, Bustamante "planned" the crime: not only had he previously bought the boards with which he hid the body, but between July 20 and 28 he had searched for different concepts on the web such as "prices of electric weapons" , "Use of chloroform to sleep", "sale of psychiatry straitjacket", "Chinese torture with bamboo", "torture to bend the will", "how to change the first and last name", "prices of meat grinders".
The main suspect in Ámbar's femicide, which has mobilized the powerful Chilean feminist movement, has remained silent and has not handed over his version of events to investigators. According to a Gendarmerie report prior to his parole in 2016, Bustamante accepted his crimes, "but in a very contemptuous way." "He only recognizes the harm to himself, he does not include his victims or what he could have caused socially," the letter stated.