Hugo Bustamante Perez has been convicted in Chile of three killings in two separate events, both in the town of Villa Alemana, in the Valparaiso Region. In January 2005 he killed his former partner, Veronica Vasquez, 49, and her nine-year-old son, Eugenio. He was sentenced to 27 years, served about 11, and was released on parole in April 2016, against the advice of the prison service. On July 29, 2020 Ambar Cornejo, the sixteen-year-old daughter of his new partner, disappeared in Villa Alemana; Bustamante and her mother were detained on August 6. In December 2021 a court in Vina del Mar sentenced him to presidio perpetuo calificado, the most severe penalty in Chilean law, for her murder, with other charges. Her mother was convicted with him.
In June 2024, while serving that sentence, he confessed to two more killings: those of Elena Hinojosa and her son Eduardo Paez, who had disappeared in Villa Alemana in 1996. Prosecutors confirmed the victims' identities on September 2, 2024. A Villa Alemana judge convicted him of both killings in January 2026, but in October 2026 the Valparaiso Court of Appeals revoked the conviction and dismissed the case because, in its view, the time limit for prosecution had expired. The victims' family has asked the Supreme Court to restore the conviction.
Bustamante was born in Quilpue, in the Valparaiso Region, in 1965, according to BioBioChile. Emol, the news site of El Mercurio, reported in August 2020 that he spent part of his teens, from about 14 to 17, traveling around Latin America, a period he later described as a search for "new sensations." From the age of 18 he built up a criminal record in Chile that included receiving stolen goods, drug dealing and robbing bus passengers after drugging them, Emol said. He was arrested for theft in May 1987, and in 1989 he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to a total of ten years for a series of burglaries, thefts and robberies. Emol reported that he was let out on a prison release benefit after about six years, broke its terms within eight months, and finished the full sentence in 1999. BioBioChile described a man with money problems and problems with alcohol and drugs.
It was during those prison years in the 1990s that he met Eduardo Paez. According to BioBioChile and the investigative outlet CIPER, the two met in prison and stayed in contact after their release. Meganoticias reported that they had been cellmates.
Eduardo Miguel Paez Hinojosa was 27 and his mother, Elena Isabel Hinojosa Cena, was 55 when they disappeared in 1996, according to BioBioChile and Meganoticias; one later Meganoticias report gave her age as 57. Meganoticias reported that mother and son lived across the street from each other in Villa Alemana. Their family filed a report of presumed misfortune, the Chilean term for a missing-person complaint, and an inquiry was opened. Eduardo's sister told investigators at the time that Bustamante was the last person to have seen them alive, Meganoticias reported. The file was later archived without result, and for almost three decades the family did not know what had happened.
In January 2026 a Villa Alemana judge found that Bustamante killed Eduardo Paez and Elena Hinojosa in Villa Alemana on June 27, 1996, BioBioChile and El Mostrador reported. The court found that the killings arose from a dispute over money Bustamante owed Paez.
Bustamante's own early accounts were different. In a January 2024 prison interview with the journalist Ivonne Toro Agurto, published by CIPER, he did not admit responsibility. He said Paez had been kidnapped and that he had tried to help free him, and that he had contacted Paez's mother to look for a way to do so. He also told Toro that Paez "had a problem," that he had got involved where he should not have and spent money he should not have spent.
Veronica Vasquez Puebla had been Bustamante's partner. Her son, Eugenio Honorato Vasquez, was nine; his family called him Quenito, El Mostrador reported. In January 2005 Bustamante killed them both in Villa Alemana. Emol placed the killings between January 8 and 15, 2005; in its October 2026 ruling the Valparaiso Court of Appeals took January 14, 2005 as the date of those killings, according to G5noticias. Press reports said the argument that led to the killings was over money from the sale of a house that belonged to Veronica Vasquez.
Veronica Vasquez and Eugenio were found dead in Villa Alemana on January 25, 2005, and the Investigations Police (PDI) arrested and charged Bustamante that day. BioBioChile reported that he confessed to detectives of his own accord.
He was tried late in 2005 before the Tribunal de Juicio Oral en lo Penal de Vina del Mar, the oral criminal court for the area, which had been set up under Chile's criminal procedure reform. The court sentenced him to 12 years for the killing of Veronica Vasquez and 15 years for the killing of her son, 27 years in all, Emol reported. BioBioChile said the sentence was due to end on January 26, 2032. Chilevision reported that at his 2005 trial he said: "I know I am going to spend the rest of my days locked up."
In 2006, from prison, he was interviewed for Mea Culpa, a program presented by Carlos Pinto on TVN. Asked whether he might do the same thing again if he were released, he did not rule it out. "I have thought about it," BioBioChile quoted him as saying. T13 reported that he told the program he could not be sure he would never commit a similar crime.
In April 2016, after about 11 years in prison, Bustamante was granted conditional release by the parole commission of the Valparaiso Court of Appeals, which was then chaired by Judge Silvana Donoso Ocampo. He was one of 787 prisoners released under the same decision, according to Meganoticias; Chilevision put the number of others at 788. The commission relied on his good conduct in prison and on Decree Law 321, which, as the reports described it, allowed parole for prisoners serving more than 20 years once they had served ten.
The prison service, Gendarmeria, had advised against it. As El Mercurio reported at the time, and as Chilevision recounted in 2020, its report described him as an inmate who "requires intervention and a longer period of observation inside prison" and said his psychological and social profile made his prognosis uncertain. It concluded: "Therefore it is not recommended to grant conditional release." Judge Donoso said in 2016 that Gendarmeria's reports were not binding on the commission and did not bear on the legal requirements for parole, Meganoticias reported. Without parole, Meganoticias said, he would have stayed in prison until 2032.
After his release he went back to the family home in Villa Alemana, according to CIPER. In an interview given at his house in 2016, broadcast by Chilevision on condition that his face not be shown, he said that talking about the case was harmful to him, that he would never be able to forget what he had done, and that "the greatest punishment, the hardest, I carry inside me." On his release he said: "the same law that convicted me gives me the right to go free." In a 2016 interview with El Mercurio's Sabado magazine, quoted by Emol, he said he could not promise he would not offend again. He told the magazine, as Meganoticias quoted it, that being a person who frightened others seemed to him somewhat horrible, but that he had to accept it.
He later lived in Villa Alemana with Denisse Llanos, the mother of Ambar Cornejo.
Ambar Cornejo was sixteen. She lived with an aunt in Villa Alemana, and her father lived in Antofagasta, in the north of Chile, Emol reported. Her mother lived with Bustamante elsewhere in the town. The journalist Ivonne Toro, who spent four years on the case, has said that Chilean child-protection authorities had known since she was three that her rights were being violated, and has criticized the decision to return her to her mother. Toro described a girl who answered her mother's coldness with affection and who worried about causing her mother trouble.
Ambar disappeared in Villa Alemana on July 29, 2020, El Dinamo reported. Her family reported her missing two days later, and the PDI's Villa Alemana criminal investigation brigade, under Subprefect Marcos Quinones Rivas, led a wide search. An aunt told Meganoticias that friends had heard nothing from her.
On Thursday, August 6, 2020, eight days after the disappearance was reported, the PDI detained Ambar's mother and Bustamante, working with the prosecution service, Emol reported. The Villa Alemana chief prosecutor, Maria Jose Bowen, said the mother had told investigators what Bustamante had told her: "She stated that it was the accused who killed Ambar." Bustamante had made no statement.
On August 10, 2020, at a hearing before the Juzgado de Garantia de Villa Alemana, the prosecution, led by the Valparaiso regional prosecutor Claudia Perivancich, formally charged Bustamante, and the judge ordered him held in pretrial detention as a danger to society, BioBioChile reported. He was moved to the high-security prison in Santiago.
Ambar's mother was at first treated as a witness. On September 25, 2020, prosecutors brought charges against her too, before the same court, and asked that she be held; Emol reported the charge as parricide. The deputy prosecutor Maria Jose Bowen said the evidence made her participation "clearly plausible." She was held in pretrial detention at the San Miguel women's prison from late September, according to Chilevision.
The trial of Bustamante and Ambar's mother opened on October 26, 2021, before the Tribunal de Juicio Oral en lo Penal de Vina del Mar, the same court that had sentenced him in 2005. Chilevision reported that about 30 witnesses were expected, along with the experts who had worked on the case, and that 113 documents had been admitted, among them DNA, psychological, psychiatric and telephone evidence. The prosecution sought the maximum penalty for both. The judge barred the broadcast of the reading of the charges to protect the dignity of the victims, and a group gathered outside the court to call for justice for Ambar.
On November 26, 2021, the court found both defendants guilty. Bustamante was convicted of the murder of Ambar Cornejo, with other charges; he was acquitted of illegal burial. On December 7, 2021, Judge Rocio Oscariz read the sentences. Bustamante received presidio perpetuo calificado for the killing of Ambar, plus further prison terms on the other counts. The court found that the two defendants had acted with premeditation, having agreed beforehand to attack and kill her. Ambar's mother was convicted in her daughter's death, with other charges, and also received presidio perpetuo calificado, with two further ten-year terms. Both were barred for life from public office and political rights. El Dinamo reported that under the life sentence they could seek prison benefits only after 40 years.
Both appealed to the Supreme Court. On June 2, 2022, its criminal chamber rejected the mother's appeal for annulment and left both life sentences in place. On Bustamante's appeal it reduced one of his other sentences from seven years to five, El Dinamo reported.
Toro later reported that Ambar's mother had given her, in a prison interview, one of the reasons for the killing: "We also killed her because we wanted the IFE money." Toro said the mother showed no remorse and that the worst part, as the mother put it, was being alone.
The parole of 2016 became a political case. Deputies led by Andres Longton of Renovacion Nacional, with his party colleague Gonzalo Fuenzalida among the accusers, brought a constitutional accusation against Judge Silvana Donoso, charging her with a notable abandonment of her duties for setting aside Gendarmeria's negative report. Her lawyer argued that the decision had been taken by a panel and not by her alone, that the law provided for the benefit and she had applied it, and that questioning a judge's reading of the law threatened judicial independence. A review committee of the Chamber of Deputies recommended rejecting the accusation, but on September 10, 2020 the full Chamber approved it by 73 votes to 52, with 14 abstentions, Chilevision reported.
The Senate rejected it on September 24, 2020. On the first charge, serious neglect of duty, 8 senators voted in favor, 29 against and 3 abstained; the second charge failed by 34 votes to 1, with 5 abstentions, BioBioChile reported. The Supreme Court's spokesperson, Judge Gloria Ana Chevesich, had called the Chamber's vote very regrettable and a serious attack on judicial independence.
Ivonne Toro Agurto spent years on a book about Ambar's death. Between June 2023 and January 2024 she met Bustamante six times at the Rancagua penitentiary, where he was serving his life sentence, she wrote in CIPER. In one of their conversations she asked whether he had killed anyone else. He first replied that nothing of the kind appeared anywhere. Then, as El Mostrador later reported, he told her that she was treating him as if he were a person, and that he therefore had a gift for her: "About your question, write this down." He gave her two names, those of Eduardo Paez and his mother. He later explained to her, according to 24horas, that the gift was that the case had never been solved. At their last interview, on January 30, 2024, Toro showed him a 1996 police statement he had given about the disappearances; he still did not admit to killing them, and said, "I tried to do good, I did myself harm."
CIPER published Toro's report on June 6, 2024. That week Bustamante told a Gendarmeria officer at the Rancagua prison that he had taken part in two homicides, CIPER reported. Bustamante said in a later interview, quoted by 24horas: "I did not think it would bring me so much trouble."
The Valparaiso prosecution service confirmed the victims' identities on September 2, 2024, Meganoticias reported. Elena Hinojosa's niece, Eduardo's cousin, told Radio Bio Bio that the news closed a chapter after 28 years, but that it made her angry that the original investigation had not been pursued: "it makes you angry to see that the inquiry could have gone on." The family, she said, hoped Bustamante would never be released.
Toro's book, La nina Ambar, was presented at the school of communication and letters of the UDP in August 2024; CIPER had announced it would be published by Catalonia and Periodismo UDP. In an interview with El Desconcierto, Toro argued that a judge should not start from zero on a case that has a history, and that secrecy around children's cases, while it protects the children, "also ends up protecting the people who keep failing."
In March 2025 the Villa Alemana chief prosecutor, Osvaldo Basso, said the evidence placed the deaths at the end of June 1996, and that the case would therefore be sent to the Juzgado de Letras de Villa Alemana under the old procedure, Meganoticias and El Dinamo reported. The Juzgado de Garantia, a court of the reformed system, had declared itself without jurisdiction, and Basso explained that in Valparaiso the reformed courts handle only cases from 2003 onward. Basso described the killings as aggravated homicides and argued that the time limit for prosecution had been interrupted by the 2005 killings, so the case was not time-barred.
On January 30, 2026, Judge Javiera Opazo Vaccaro of the Juzgado de Letras de Villa Alemana convicted Bustamante of both killings. BioBioChile, reporting the Poder Judicial's account of the ruling, said he was convicted of two aggravated homicides. Applying the rules of the old Code of Criminal Procedure, which allowed repeated offenses of the same kind to be punished with a single increased penalty, the judge imposed one sentence of ten years and a day of presidio mayor en su grado medio, with no substitute penalty, and permanent disqualification from public office and political rights. The ruling was made public in mid-February 2026.
It did not stand. In a ruling reported on October 26, 2026, the Valparaiso Court of Appeals revoked the conviction. The court found no proof of treachery and reclassified both killings as simple homicides, which carry a ten-year limitation period. According to G5noticias, which quoted the ruling and credited La Estrella de Valparaiso with first reporting it, the court held that the period had restarted with the January 2005 killings and had run out in January 2015, that the 2020 killing of Ambar Cornejo could not interrupt a period that had already expired, and that the 2024 investigation did not revive the case. It declared the criminal action extinguished and ordered a final dismissal, a sobreseimiento definitivo. The ruling was drafted by Justice Rafael Corvalan Pazols, G5noticias reported.
The family's lawyer, Jose Ignacio Tapia, argued that Bustamante's later convictions had interrupted the limitation period and that it should have been counted again from zero, Emol reported. The family has appealed to the Supreme Court to annul the appeals court's ruling and obtain a new conviction. As of October 26, 2026, the case was still pending. The dismissal did not affect his life sentence for the murder of Ambar Cornejo.
As of October 26, 2026, Hugo Bustamante was serving presidio perpetuo calificado for the murder of Ambar Cornejo, with other charges, a sentence made final by the Supreme Court in June 2022. In 2024 he was held at the Rancagua penitentiary. Ambar's mother's life sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2022. The 1996 killings of Elena Hinojosa and Eduardo Paez, which he confessed to in 2024, stood dismissed as time-barred at the appeals stage, with the family's appeal to the Supreme Court pending.
Elena Hinojosa's age is given as 55 in most reports and as 57 in one Meganoticias report from March 2025. In a CIPER interview excerpt Bustamante called her Isabel, her middle name.
The legal classification of the 1996 killings is in dispute. The prosecution and the first-instance judge treated them as aggravated homicides; the Valparaiso Court of Appeals found them to be simple homicides. Under the court's view the case was time-barred by 2015; under the prosecution's and the family's view, the limitation period was interrupted by the later crimes. The Supreme Court has the final word.
Bustamante's own accounts have shifted. Before his June 2024 statements he described Paez's disappearance as a kidnapping he had tried to help resolve, and he later told reporters he regretted speaking.
1965: Hugo Bustamante Perez is born in Quilpue, Valparaiso Region.
May 1987: Arrested for theft.
1989: Arrested for robbery; sentenced to a total of ten years; the sentence is completed in 1999.
June 27, 1996: Eduardo Paez Hinojosa, 27, and his mother, Elena Hinojosa Cena, are killed in Villa Alemana; their family reports them missing and the file is later archived.
January 2005: Bustamante kills his former partner Veronica Vasquez, 49, and her son Eugenio, 9, in Villa Alemana.
January 25, 2005: Veronica Vasquez and Eugenio are found dead in Villa Alemana; Bustamante is arrested.
Late 2005: The Vina del Mar oral criminal court sentences him to 12 and 15 years, 27 in all.
2006: Interviewed in prison for TVN's Mea Culpa.
April 2016: Released on parole by the Valparaiso Court of Appeals parole commission, against Gendarmeria's advice.
July 29, 2020: Ambar Cornejo, 16, disappears in Villa Alemana.
August 6, 2020: Bustamante and Ambar's mother are detained.
August 10, 2020: Bustamante is formally charged and held in pretrial detention.
September 10 and 24, 2020: The Chamber of Deputies approves a constitutional accusation against Judge Silvana Donoso; the Senate rejects it.
September 25, 2020: Ambar's mother is formally charged.
October 26, 2021: Trial opens in Vina del Mar.
November 26, 2021: Both defendants are found guilty.
December 7, 2021: Both are sentenced to presidio perpetuo calificado.
June 2, 2022: The Supreme Court upholds the life sentences and reduces one of Bustamante's other terms from seven years to five.
June 2023 to January 2024: Ivonne Toro Agurto interviews Bustamante six times at the Rancagua penitentiary.
June 2024: CIPER publishes Toro's report (June 6); Bustamante confesses to the 1996 killings.
August 2024: Toro's book La nina Ambar is presented.
September 2, 2024: Prosecutors confirm the identities of Elena Hinojosa and Eduardo Paez.
March 2025: The 1996 case is sent to the Juzgado de Letras de Villa Alemana under the old criminal procedure.
January 30, 2026: Judge Javiera Opazo convicts Bustamante of both 1996 killings and imposes ten years and a day.
October 2026: The Valparaiso Court of Appeals revokes the conviction and dismisses the case as time-barred; the family appeals to the Supreme Court.