Mega Noticias consulted Joaquín Celedón Otero, founding partner of JCO Abogados, in his capacity as an expert in civil and succession law, in connection with a case of significant public exposure.

The question turned on a technically relevant point: how do you determine who inherits when a father and his children die in the same event, without being able to establish with certainty the order of the deaths?

In the interview he explained that, under Chilean law, only a person who is alive at the moment the estate opens can inherit. If it cannot be established that one of the children survived the father, the father’s estate does not pass to his descendants and is opened on intestacy under articles 989 and 990 of the Civil Code, favoring first the ascendants and, failing them, the siblings. If, on the other hand, it is established that the father died first, the children succeed him and, subsequently, the mother could succeed them in her own right.