The building on Morandé 440 in Santiago opened on Friday morning much as it does every morning, except that the man who had run its Property, Commerce and Water Registry for almost three decades was no longer supposed to be inside it. Carlos Miranda, sixty years old and the registrar of Mortgages and Encumbrances, arrived early and with a specific worry: that he would find Luis Maldonado Croquevielle at his desk, working as though nothing had changed. Maldonado had put in a full day on Thursday and left in the afternoon without saying anything to anyone. Miranda had already warned the judicial prosecutors’ office of the Santiago Court of Appeals, and so that Friday two judicial prosecutors, Javiera González and Jorge Norambuena, installed themselves in the building, met with Miranda, and then went floor by floor calling out names and asking the staff for their identity cards. At around half past ten, Maldonado walked in. He circled the ground floor, greeted the people who until the previous evening had been his employees, and ran into the prosecutors. When he crossed paths with Miranda, according to people inside the registry, the two men did not greet each other.
He was eighty-one years old, and his functions had formally ceased at 23:59 the night before, under Law 21,772. His presence in the offices did not by itself establish whether he signed anything or performed any act of the office after that hour.
That law is the reason the morning happened at all. It reformed Chile’s notarial and registry system, took effect on 2 April 2026, and did something the country had argued about for decades without result: it abolished the lifetime character of these posts and set a maximum age of seventy-five for notaries, registrars and archivists. New holders are to be selected through public competitions run by the National Civil Service Directorate, rather than through the older route of interviews and short lists.
To understand what was being taken away, it helps to know how it was obtained. Maldonado began his registry career in Santa Cruz, a district where his family had land nearby, taking over that registry 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 coveted post in the country came open. At the time, the selection method involved interviews with judges of the Santiago Court of Appeals and then a short list from which the President of the Republic chose. Maldonado made no secret of how he worked it: in 2001 he said openly that he had lobbied intensively with every judge of the appeals court. He beat the notary of Melipilla and the notary of Valparaíso, though he liked to point to his service in Santa Cruz and Rancagua and to his performance rating of 6.95. It was President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle who telephoned to tell him he had been chosen. He was sworn in on 16 December 1997. In the corridors of the courts, the remark people made was that the post had gone to the son of a former Supreme Court justice and the brother of a judge of the Santiago court. His declaration of assets and interests lists twenty-nine properties, among them a house in Vitacura with a fiscal valuation of close to one thousand million pesos.
The registry itself was worth roughly one hundred and fifty million pesos a month to him. He was known as one of the group nicknamed the Immortals, and the criticism that followed him was not mainly about money but about who worked for him. In recent months he hired his grandson, an architect named Agustín Palacios Maldonado, to work in the plans section; when questions were asked, the answer was that the young man was on unpaid leave. Journalistic investigations found that the internal structure of the Santiago registry included sons, nephews, a daughter-in-law, a former partner of one of his daughters, a godson and people close to his personal friendships. In 2022, reports identified at least fifteen relatives or friends connected to Maldonado employed in the institution. In 2023 the investigative unit of Radio Bío Bío documented that the payroll also contained sons, daughters, nephews, brothers-in-law and other relatives of members of the judiciary, of members of Congress and of notaries: a web of relationships that, according to specialists consulted at the time, helped to protect the most desirable posts in the auxiliary world of the justice system. The complaint underneath all of it was constant: these offices perform public functions and their holders are official attesters of legal acts, yet they operated under standards of transparency far below those demanded of the rest of the state.
The new law closes that door directly. Notaries, archivists and registrars are forbidden to employ in their offices their direct relatives, spouses, or collateral relatives up to the third degree. Nor may a person be appointed to such a post if they have family or marital ties to authorities such as the President, ministers, members of Congress, the National Prosecutor or court officials.
Maldonado fought. The Ministry of Justice decreed his removal in July under Law 21,772, and he tried to stop it with an economic protection action, which was ruled inadmissible, and then with a claim of arbitrary discrimination. Neither changed the date. His last attempt was quieter and more practical: on 19 March he submitted a list of three lawyers as possible replacements, and asked the Court of Appeals to clarify how interim holders of the Property, Commerce and Water registries should be named. The report presented to the full court was blunt, stating that the list submitted by the registrar was not to be considered. Once the vacancy occurred, it said, an interim holder must be appointed on the proposal of the relevant judicial prosecutor, and until that happens the registry continues to operate by substitution. That is why Carlos Miranda was the man arriving early on Friday morning.
Maldonado was not alone in leaving. That same Friday, thirty-five notaries, registrars and archivists over seventy-five had to vacate their posts, their removals formalised in decrees signed by the Justice Minister, Fernando Rabat, and the undersecretary, Luis Silva. Their average age was eighty-one. The list runs the length of the country and includes Alfonso Barrientos, registrar and archivist of Los Andes, aged ninety-six. Their offices do not close; interim holders cover them while the competitions for their successors are run.
In a message to staff, Miranda tried to steady them, inviting them to keep working calmly and responsibly and promising, on his side, a shared effort in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. There is an arithmetic underneath the reassurance. As the only remaining titleholder, Miranda will receive the earnings of three registries, and if the old courthouse rumour about the sums is accurate, that could mean something close to three hundred million pesos a month for as long as the Civil Service, headed by Pedro Lea-Plaza, has not opened the competition to replace Maldonado and the former registrar Kamel Saquel. The institution already holds all the position profiles. Whether the new system arrives quickly now depends on when it says yes.