Radio Bío Bío will file a cassation appeal before the Corte Suprema (Chile's Supreme Court) after the First Chamber of the Corte de Apelaciones de Valdivia (Valdivia Court of Appeals), in the Región de Los Ríos, upheld a ruling against it for arbitrary discrimination. The broadcaster made the announcement on Wednesday.
According to BioBioChile, the case concerns a report by its Investigations department titled "The 'machi' of the sacrifices: the dark story behind a ritual that ended with two people dead". The piece reported on the deaths of two people, one of them a 15-year-old girl, linked to the actions of Millaray Huichalaf, and on the criminal investigation that followed.
Huichalaf filed the lawsuit in December 2025 before the Juzgado de Letras y Garantía de Río Bueno (the local trial court of Río Bueno), a comuna (municipality) in the same region, invoking the Ley Zamudio, Chile's law against arbitrary discrimination. She argued that the articles called into question "without any anthropological basis" her status as a machi, the spiritual authority of the Mapuche Huilliche people, and that the label "the machi of the sacrifices" stigmatized her.
In July 2026, Judge Claudio Thomas ruled in her favor, according to La Prensa Austral. He ordered the removal from digital platforms of the phrase "the machi of the sacrifices", the use of the word machi in quotation marks and the caption "Una Mujer Perdida" ("A Lost Woman"). He also imposed a fine of 10 UTM (unidades tributarias mensuales, a Chilean inflation-indexed monthly tax unit) plus court costs.
The judge further required the station to state at the bottom of the articles that the ruling forced it to modify them, and to indicate the fine paid. He ordered training of at least 80 minutes for 90% of the station's journalists, including freelance and part-time staff.
The Valdivia court upheld that ruling unanimously. It was signed by Justice María Inés Lausen, acting Justice Germán Olmedo and associate attorney-judge Lorenzo Rehl.
Bío Bío maintains that neither court questioned the accuracy of the facts. According to the outlet, the conviction rests solely on the headline and on the use of quotation marks in four of the 33 times the machi is named. The station adds that some of the Huilliche communities of Río Bueno do not recognize Huichalaf as a spiritual authority.
Alejandro Espinoza, the broadcaster's lawyer, described the ruling as an attack on the freedom to inform guaranteed by Article 19, number 12, of the Constitution. "If the criterion adopted by the ruling is consolidated, it would end the freedom of a media outlet to have an editorial line, political criticism, humor or opinion on controversial issues," he said.
Constitutional law scholar Sebastián Zárate, a specialist in freedom of expression, told La Prensa Austral that the court set aside the "actual malice" standard and imposed a sanction without proving an intent to demean. In his view, this disregards the standards of the Inter-American Human Rights System.
The Corte Suprema must now rule on the cassation appeal. The sources do not report a date for filing the appeal or for its review.
