On Friday morning the building at Morandé 440 in Santiago opened as it always does. There was only one difference: the man who had run its Property, Commerce and Water Registry for almost thirty years was no longer meant to be inside. Carlos Miranda, who is sixty and serves as the registrar of Mortgages and Encumbrances, came in early with one particular fear. He thought he might find Luis Maldonado Croquevielle sitting at his desk and working as if nothing at all had happened. Maldonado had worked a full day on Thursday and had gone home in the afternoon without a word to anyone. Miranda had already alerted the office of the judicial prosecutors of the Santiago Court of Appeals, and so, that Friday, two of those prosecutors, Javiera González and Jorge Norambuena, set themselves up in the building. They met Miranda first, then went from floor to floor, calling out names and asking the staff to show their identity cards. At about half past ten, Maldonado walked in. He made a circuit of the ground floor, greeted the people who until the previous evening had been his employees, and then came upon the prosecutors. When he and Miranda passed each other, the two men did not exchange greetings, according to people who work in the registry.
He was eighty-one years old, and his duties had formally ended at one minute to midnight the night before, under Law 21,772. The fact that he was in the offices does not in itself show whether he signed anything or carried out any official act after that hour.
That law is the reason the morning happened at all. It reformed Chile’s system of notaries and registries and came into force on 2 April 2026. It also did something the country had been arguing about for decades without ever settling it: it ended the lifelong nature of these posts and set seventy-five as the maximum age for notaries, registrars and archivists. From now on, new holders are to be chosen through public competitions organised by the National Civil Service Directorate, instead of the older method of interviews and short lists.
To see what was being taken from him, it helps to know how he got it. Maldonado started his career in the registry of Santa Cruz, a district where his family owned land nearby, and he took charge of that office in 1979. By 1983 he had moved up to Rancagua, a regional capital. Then, in 1997, Herman Chadwick Valdés, who had been registrar of Santiago for more than twenty years, died, and the most sought after post in the country fell vacant. At that time, candidates were interviewed by the judges of the Santiago Court of Appeals, who then drew up a short list from which the President of the Republic made the final choice. Maldonado never hid how he managed it. In 2001 he said quite openly that he had lobbied every single judge of the appeals court, and lobbied hard. He defeated the notary of Melipilla and the notary of Valparaíso, although he preferred to talk about his years of service in Santa Cruz and Rancagua and about his performance score of 6.95. It was President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle who rang him to say that he had been chosen, and he was sworn in on 16 December 1997. In the corridors of the courts, people made a different observation: the post had gone to the son of a former Supreme Court justice and the brother of a judge of the Santiago court. His official declaration of assets and interests lists twenty-nine properties, among them a house in Vitacura valued for tax purposes at close to one thousand million pesos.
The registry brought him around one hundred and fifty million pesos a month. He belonged to the group that people nicknamed the Immortals, and the criticism that followed him was not mainly about the money. It was about the people he employed. In recent months he had taken on his grandson, an architect called Agustín Palacios Maldonado, to work in the plans section. When questions were raised, the reply was that the young man was on unpaid leave. Journalistic investigations found that the internal structure of the Santiago registry contained sons, nephews, a daughter-in-law, a former partner of one of his daughters, a godson and people connected to him through personal friendship. In 2022, reports counted at least fifteen relatives or friends of Maldonado working in the institution. In 2023 the investigative unit of Radio Bío Bío showed that the payroll also included sons, daughters, nephews, brothers-in-law and other relatives of members of the judiciary, of members of Congress and of notaries. Specialists consulted at the time described this network of relationships as a way of protecting the most desirable posts in the auxiliary world of the justice system. The underlying complaint never changed: these offices carry out public functions, and the people who hold them give official legal force to private acts, yet they worked under far weaker rules of transparency than the rest of the state.
The new law shuts that door firmly. Notaries, archivists and registrars may no longer employ in their offices their direct relatives, their husbands or wives, or relatives on a side branch of the family up to the third degree. Nor can anyone be appointed to such a post if they are related by family or marriage to authorities such as the President, government ministers, members of Congress, the National Prosecutor or officials of the courts.
Maldonado did not give in without a fight. The Ministry of Justice ordered his removal in July under Law 21,772. He tried to block it with a legal action to protect his economic rights, which the courts refused to hear, and then with a claim that he was being discriminated against unfairly. Neither attempt moved the date. His final move was quieter and more practical. On 19 March he handed in the names of three lawyers as possible replacements, and asked the Court of Appeals to explain how temporary holders of the Property, Commerce and Water registries should be appointed. The report put before the full court was blunt: the list submitted by the registrar was not to be taken into account. Once the post became vacant, it said, a temporary holder had to be appointed on the proposal of the relevant judicial prosecutor, and until that was done the registry would keep running through substitution. That is precisely why Carlos Miranda was the man arriving early on Friday morning.
Maldonado was not the only one leaving. On that same Friday, thirty-five notaries, registrars and archivists over the age of seventy-five had to give up their posts. Their removals were set out in decrees signed by the Justice Minister, Fernando Rabat, and by the undersecretary, Luis Silva. Their average age was eighty-one. The list stretches from one end of the country to the other and includes Alfonso Barrientos, registrar and archivist of Los Andes, who is ninety-six. Their offices will not close. Temporary holders will run them while the competitions to find their successors are carried out.
In a message to the staff, Miranda tried to calm them. He invited them to go on working quietly and responsibly, and promised that, for his part, he would work alongside them in a spirit of mutual respect and trust. Behind the reassurance there is also a calculation. As the only remaining titleholder, Miranda will collect the earnings of three registries, and if the old rumour in the courts about the sums involved is correct, that could come to something near three hundred million pesos a month. He will go on receiving it for as long as the Civil Service, led by Pedro Lea-Plaza, has not opened the competition to replace Maldonado and the former registrar Kamel Saquel. The institution already has all the job profiles in hand. Whether the new system arrives quickly now depends on the day it decides to say yes.