Six years after Chile’s military intelligence service illegally wiretapped him, a court has convicted the judge and general responsible, in what press freedom groups call the first ruling of its kind anywhere in the world. Mauricio Weibel speaks to Media Defence about the case.
Weibel’s reporting recovered around USD 4.5 billion for the Chilean treasury and led to the prosecution of 850 military personnel, including five commanders. It also cost him years of legal proceedings and surveillance. Yet, he says, he would do it all again.
Mauricio Weibel, a Chilean investigative journalist and contributor to the Centre for Investigative Journalism, spent years exposing fraud in Chile’s military weapons procurement and the embezzlement of defence funds. His reporting did more than trigger prosecutions. It fed a public debate that led Congress to repeal the Reserved Copper Law, which had allocated ten per cent of the sales of Codelco, Chile’s state-owned copper company, directly to the armed forces. Today, that repeal means roughly USD 2 billion a year goes into the national budget instead of funding weapons purchases.
“I would make the same choices again,” Weibel says, “essentially because the impact of the reporting was enormous.”
That impact came at a huge cost. After his corruption reporting began appearing in 2016, Weibel became aware that he was being watched. In August 2019, the newspaper La Tercera revealed that the Chilean Army Intelligence Directorate had illegally spied on, wiretapped and recorded him under an operation named Operation W, a reference to his surname. Weibel turned his own methods on his pursuers. Working with anonymous sources inside military intelligence, he identified the operation’s military and civilian participants and even recorded the agents following him, handing everything to the justice system. “The lesson was clear,” he says. “We had to respond to threats by doing even more journalism.”
What that investigation later established was the length officials had gone to conceal the operation. To obtain authorisation to tap Weibel’s phone, then-judge Juan Poblete and General Shafik Nazal, director of the Army Intelligence Directorate, registered the journalist’s number under the name of an undocumented Bolivian immigrant, whom they falsely accused of being a foreign agent. “My first reaction was indignation and astonishment,” Weibel recalls. Investigators initially assumed the army had misled the judge with false information. The court ruling established the opposite: it was Poblete himself who proposed falsifying the documents, out of concern that someone might warn Weibel of the surveillance. But someone did, regardless.
When the operation came to light, three successive Chilean Defence Ministers, Alberto Espina, Baldo Prokurica and Mario Desbordes, defended the conduct before Congress. Weibel says the episode revealed how institutions can shield those who misuse public office. “The actions of those Defence Ministers caused serious harm to democracy and freedom of the press,” he says, adding that he does not believe they grasped the seriousness of what they were defending.
For years, the case seemed at risk of collapsing entirely. The Supreme Court ordered Poblete’s release from pre-trial detention, a decision later shadowed by evidence that Poblete had lobbied for the appointment of the justice who went on to vote for his freedom, a conflict of interest that exposed deeper weaknesses in judicial independence. Weibel and his legal team, Karinna Fernández and Cristián Cruz, were prepared for the case to take decades. “We thought we would not obtain justice in Chile and that we would have to take the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” Weibel says. “We believed this legal process could demand twenty years of work from us. But we were prepared to do it.” Access to case documents was restricted in the early stages, and Poblete, a sitting judge, repeatedly refused to testify before the prosecutor’s office or even provide his address.
The case did not take as long as they feared. On 30 June 2026, the Seventh Criminal Court of Guarantees in Santiago sentenced Poblete and Nazal to five years in prison after both acknowledged their guilt, in what press freedom organisations are calling the first ruling anywhere in the world convicting a judge and a general for spying on a journalist. Each had already spent more than two years in pre-trial detention. The court treated the surveillance as a serious human rights violation and rejected the statute of limitations defence often used to shield state agents from accountability. An amicus curiae brief filed by Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression programme, which Weibel credits with demonstrating the case’s international significance to Chilean courts, argued that the case sits within a wider regional pattern of unlawful surveillance, communications interception and data collection directed at journalists.
“We always framed this case as a defence of press freedom,” Weibel says. Fernández, his lawyer, put it more starkly following the verdict, saying that when a journalist’s phone is tapped during an investigation, democracy itself is tapped. Support from Media Defence, and other press freedom organisations, was, in Weibel’s words, crucial both humanly and legally throughout the six years of proceedings.[CG1] Media Defence has been supporting Weibel’s legal casse since 2024 through our Emergency Defence programme.
The ruling’s reach, Weibel argues, extends well beyond Chile. As president of the Latin American and Caribbean Journalism Forum, he is working to promote the Model Law for the Protection of Journalists and Press Workers across the region, alongside safety training and academic debate on journalism and media resilience. To journalists elsewhere in Latin America facing state surveillance, he offers solidarity rather than closure. “They have our commitment and our support,” he says.
Asked what the end of the legal process means for him now, Weibel points past himself. “Beyond the personal dimension, the greatest joy is that this represents a significant step forward for journalists across Latin America and the Caribbean,” he says. It is, he adds, also a defeat for the politicians, military officials and members of the judiciary who tried to impose censorship on him.
