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Carlos Robledo Puch: Argentina's 'Angel of Death'

Jun 5
3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

The photographs are the first thing people remember about Carlos Robledo Puch: blond curls, pale eyes, a soft, almost cherubic face. He looked like a choirboy. He killed eleven people before he turned twenty. The gap between the face and the crimes is exactly why Argentina has never quite been able to look away from him.

More than fifty years after his arrest, he is still behind bars — the longest-serving prisoner in the country's history, and one of its most hated men.

The boy with the angel's face

Born in Buenos Aires in 1952, Robledo Puch grew up in a seemingly ordinary household; his father had worked as a technician, his mother had emigrated from Germany after the war. There was nothing in the boy's appearance to warn anyone. He drifted into crime as a teenager, drawn first to burglaries and robberies and then, with startling speed, to murder. The press would later reach for a whole thesaurus of names — the Angel, the Black Angel, the babyfaced devil — but it was the contrast itself, the violence behind the innocent face, that gripped the country.

Carlos Robledo Puch crime poster with mugshots and case files, titled Argentina’s Angel of Death, on a dark sepia background.

A spree, not a slow burn

His killing was compressed into barely a year, across 1971 and 1972, mostly in the northern reaches of Greater Buenos Aires, and for much of it he worked alongside an accomplice named Jorge Ibáñez. It began in March 1971 with a robbery at a bowling alley, where, as they fled, Robledo Puch shot a watchman and the owner as they slept. Less than two months later, robbing a car-parts shop, he killed a man and wounded the man's wife — and, in a detail that complicates any simple reading of him, reportedly stopped Ibáñez from raping the wounded woman.

The killings mounted with a chilling lack of pattern or hesitation: night watchmen, shopkeepers, and, in June 1971, two women who were abducted, assaulted by Ibáñez and then executed by Robledo Puch on the side of a road. Robbery was the pretext; the violence went far beyond it.

The accomplice who died

In August 1971, Ibáñez died in a car crash while Robledo Puch was at the wheel. Robledo walked away unhurt. Suspicions lingered for years that the 'accident' was really another of his killings — Ibáñez's own family came to believe it — though nothing was ever proven. By several accounts the death shook him, and his spree slowed in the months before it ended for good.

Caught at twenty

Robledo Puch was arrested on 4 February 1972, aged twenty. The case became a national event, the angelic face splashed across every front page in the country. After lengthy proceedings he was convicted of eleven murders, an attempted murder, a long list of robberies, two kidnappings and several sexual offences, and sentenced to life imprisonment with an additional, open-ended measure of detention reserved for those deemed permanently dangerous.

Half a century inside

He has been locked up ever since, much of it at the high-security prison of Sierra Chica. Decade after decade passed, and Robledo Puch became less a man than a fixture — the prisoner who had been inside longer than anyone else in Argentine history. He was reportedly offered the chance of parole around the year 2000 and chose not to pursue it, and his own requests over the years — including, at times, to be freed or even executed — have come to nothing in a country with no death penalty. Journalists who have managed to reach him describe a man still vain about his looks and still without visible remorse.

His story keeps resurfacing in books and on screen, most prominently in Luis Ortega's acclaimed 2018 film 'El Ángel', which premiered at Cannes and leaned hard into the unsettling beauty of its subject. That fascination is understandable, but it can crowd out the obvious. Eleven people — workers, watchmen, shopkeepers, ordinary Argentines — were killed by a teenager who looked like he could do no harm. The face was the disguise, and the people behind the headlines are what the case is really about.