Antares de la Luz (Ramon Castillo Gaete doomsday sect)

Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete trained in pedagogy at Chile's Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences and, per Wikipedia's sourced account, avoided the country's then-compulsory military service using a fraudulent medical certificate obtained through a relative. He worked as a musician, playing clarinet, zampona, and quena in the Andean folk group Amaru between 2003 and 2006. A 2006 trip to China with the group exposed him to Chinese alternative medicine and folk religious practice; he adopted the name "Antares de la Luz" ("Antares of the Light"), after the star Antares, as his religious identity.

Around 2009, Castillo left the musical group and founded a small religious circle, initially operating healing rituals under the name "Calypso" out of a shared apartment in Las Condes, Santiago. The group -- which never grew beyond twelve members -- relocated repeatedly over the following years, through Olmue, San Jose de Maipo, Concon, and finally a rural property near Mantagua and Colliguay (a rural sector of the Quilpue commune, Valparaiso region), where members performed animal sacrifices and consumed ayahuasca-derived hallucinogens as part of the group's practice. Castillo maintained sexual relationships with all of the women in the group, which he presented to members as a religious tradition rather than exploitation. The group's isolation, communal living, drug use, and total deference to Castillo's self-declared divine authority place it in this catalogue's doomsday-cult category alongside groups such as the Ant Hill Kids (Roch Theriault) and the Kenyan doomsday movements this catalogue documents elsewhere, though at a far smaller scale. The group's ayahuasca and hallucinogen use was incidental to Castillo's own control practices and shares no organisational lineage with, and no documented harms in common with, legally protected ayahuasca-sacrament churches such as Santo Daime or the UDV.

Group member Natalia Guerra Jequier gave birth to Castillo's son at a clinic in Vina del Mar in November 2012. Castillo removed the infant from the clinic without staff knowledge to prevent his birth being registered with Chile's Civil Registry, having declared the child the Antichrist and announced a plan to sacrifice him to avert the doomsday he and his followers expected on 21 December 2012 -- the date popularly associated that year with the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. Sources differ on the precise date of the killing: Wikipedia's sourced account places the birth on 21 November and the killing two days later, on 23 November 2012; a contemporaneous Newsweek report instead dates the killing to 12 November 2012. Both accounts describe the same act: the two-day-old infant was stripped, gagged with tape to prevent him screaming, bound to a wooden board, and -- after the group performed a religious chant -- thrown alive onto a lit bonfire, where he died within moments. Following the killing, Castillo told his followers the end of the world had been postponed by ten days, then, when nothing happened, rescheduled it again to 21 November 2017 and instructed the group to relocate to Ecuador to await it.

The postponements broke the group's cohesion. Several members lost faith in Castillo, left, and reported the killing to police. Chile's Investigations Police (PDI) opened a nationwide manhunt; in April 2013 four members, including Guerra, were arrested. Castillo had already fled to Peru, reportedly carrying roughly 15 million Chilean pesos raised from a follower's sale of land. Peruvian police and Interpol joined the search. On 1 May 2013, Castillo was found hanged in an abandoned house in Cusco, an apparent suicide; he was never tried.

Chilean courts subsequently adjudicated the case against the surviving members over several years. Natalia Guerra was convicted of parricide for her son's death and sentenced to five years' imprisonment in 2017; she remained a fugitive for two years before being captured by the PDI in July 2019 on a rural property in Isla de Maipo, and was released on conditional liberty in May 2021 after serving time at the San Joaquin penitentiary centre. Pablo Undurraga, described in Chilean press as Castillo's closest follower, was convicted as the author (autor) of qualified homicide and sentenced to five years' effective imprisonment; Chilean broadcaster T13's 2024 reporting states the court found he had not acted under conditions that would have exempted him from criminal responsibility. Five further members were sentenced to three years each. Chilean-language sources describe this as non-custodial: T13 reports libertad vigilada intensiva imposed on the five as encubridores (accessories after the fact), and Spanish Wikipedia states that of the twelve members only Guerra and Undurraga actually served prison time, with the rest serving their time on libertad condicional. Newsweek's English-language account instead describes the five as sentenced to three years in prison as accomplices; this profile follows the more specific Chilean-language sourcing and does not state that the five served prison time.

Separately, English-language Wikipedia's own account states that most members of the group were legally declared innocent of the killing by reason of insanity, on the basis that they genuinely believed Castillo to be a god, and describes Undurraga as himself eventually being acquitted on insanity grounds -- which conflicts with the more granular Chilean-press record of his five-year homicide conviction described above. This profile flags rather than silently resolves that discrepancy: the Chilean outlets (T13, citing the prosecution's own case summary, and Newsweek) give specific, internally consistent sentences and dates for Guerra, Undurraga, and the five accomplices, while the English Wikipedia stub's "Legacy" section is thinner and appears to describe an earlier or partial procedural stage rather than the final appellate outcome. Readers should treat the Chilean-press conviction record as the primary account used for this profile's scoring. Unlike the specific Undurraga sentence, no insanity-related finding for any group member is corroborated outside English Wikipedia's own Legacy section: T13, Newsweek, and the more heavily footnoted Spanish Wikipedia article do not mention any member being found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Chilean-press and Spanish-Wikipedia sourcing together account for eight of the twelve reported members: the founder (suicide, unconvicted), Guerra and Undurraga (convicted, served prison time), and the five sentenced non-custodially as accessories. This profile does not have public-source confirmation of the outcome for the remaining four, and does not assert any of them were exculpated by insanity; the insanity-acquittal claim should be treated as sourced only to English Wikipedia and not independently corroborated.

The case remains one of the most widely covered doomsday-cult killings in Chilean history and was the subject of a 2024 Netflix documentary series examining the group's members and aftermath. It is scored here as an Extreme-band case: a small, ayahuasca-facilitated, sexually and financially controlling doomsday group whose leader's self-deification and unfalsifiable, repeatedly rescheduled apocalypse doctrine culminated in the ritual killing of an infant, with multiple members convicted of homicide and parricide carrying effective custodial sentences. The modifier reflects that adjudicated criminal record while stopping short of the maximum modifier this catalogue reserves for cases where a movement's own founder was personally convicted of murder (see Ant Hill Kids): here the founder died by suicide before facing trial, and several ordinary members were found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.