March 16, 2026
Miguel Krassnoff
The issue revolves around Miguel Krassnoff, a former high-ranking officer of the Chilean secret police (DINA), sentenced to over a thousand years in prison for crimes against humanity. On March 4, the right wing began pushing a bill in parliament that could allow for the pardon of notorious murderers like Krassnoff, a process that could extend until mid March, as Kast settles into his office.
In the background lie not only the bloody years of the dictatorship, but also an ideological line inherited from reactionary thought and chauvinism. From the ultra-nationalism of Tsarism to Hitler’s National Socialism, the same dark thread runs through: a tradition to which he himself had committed. In the 1990s, he continued as a commander in Valdivia, in southern Chile, where he openly expressed the hatred inherited from the Cossack tradition against Jews and Bolsheviks, who—in his view—had destroyed the Tsarist empire.
Krassnoff differed from other high-ranking DINA officers in his explicit ideological conviction. In an interview with Mónica Echeverría, Gladys Díaz, the journalist and MIR leader, recounted that Krassnoff tortured her and then offered her coffee and cigarettes at Villa Grimaldi. On one such occasion, he explained to the prisoner that he was a National Socialist. He spoke of the need to exterminate first the members of the MIR, then the communists, socialists, and Christian Democrats, and finally even the business leaders. He made references to the Russian Revolution, to revolutionaries such as Trotsky and Lenin, and concluded with an absolute devotion to Pinochet.
It was later established that Krassnoff acted as the DINA’s ideologue; he was the man who selected prisoners who remain missing to this day. One survivor described him as “a narcissist, a bloody peacock,” while others spoke of a violent, primitive caveman. It wasn’t until 2005 that the courts found him guilty of numerous crimes against humanity. Today, in 2026, he is serving a sentence of 1,062 years in prison.
As this article is being written, the Chilean Supreme Court has upheld several previous sentences for crimes against humanity committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. Several convicted perpetrators have had to return to prison, and about twenty have had their sentences increased, including Miguel Krassnoff.
José Antonio Kast assumed the presidency of Chile on March 11. When asked about a possible pardon for Krassnoff—something he has hinted at in the past—Kast responds evasively. At the same time, he maintains that people like Krassnoff, who crushed political prisoners at Villa Grimaldi as if they were cockroaches, must be treated “with respect.”
For crimes of this nature—crimes arising from systematic state-organized terror—the principal Nazi criminals were tried at Nuremberg (1945–46). Death sentences were handed down there. The international community established a principle: crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitations, cannot be justified, and are not pardoned.
Nearly eighty years later, a crucial question arises:
Will Chile’s new president—the son of a former member of the German Nazi Party—pardon one of the most notorious executioners of the Pinochet dictatorship?
Should crimes against humanity also become subject to political clemency when the perpetrator belongs to the sphere of power itself?