Netflix’s High End: The Watch Theft Ring Traces a Chilean Scandal to a Suitcase of Rolexes

At a routine customs check in Santiago’s airport, a woman coming home from abroad was found carrying Rolex and Patek Philippe watches, diamond and emerald rings and Cartier necklaces. Under questioning she admitted they were stolen. High End: The Watch Theft Ring, a Chilean true-crime documentary arriving on Netflix, is about what that suitcase set off: in the platform’s words, those closest to the case reveal how a suitcase full of watches and jewellery unearthed a crime ring and sparked a scandal.

The film is directed by Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos and produced by Fábula, the Chilean company run by brothers Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín. Its original title is Alta gama: El caso relojes. Netflix says it rests on testimony from people involved in the case and their relatives, journalists, archive material from the courts and interviews with prosecutors. Two voices stand out: Estrella Dinamarca, the Santiago jeweller prosecutors placed at the centre of the buying network, who goes over the rise and fall of her watch and jewellery business, and Marco Antonio López, the antiques dealer and self-styled spiritual guide known in Chile as Parived.

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In the trailer, López says: “I don’t feel guilty.” He also complains that “they have made a fetish of me” and that people “are talking about a person I don’t know.” Those lines will land differently depending on where the viewer sits. In Chile, the case turned into a celebrity story largely because López was married to the television host Tonka Tomicic, who appears in the trailer and was never charged. Outside Chile the names mean little, and the documentary has to work on its premise: a market for luxury goods stolen in other countries, supplied through shop counters in central Santiago.

How the Caso Relojes worked

The investigation began on 21 March 2017 with that airport stop. The woman told investigators she belonged to a network of lanzas, the Chilean word for professional thieves, who stole high-end watches and jewellery in the United States and Europe; the pieces were then sold to jewellers in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. The goods travelled in the luggage of the thieves or of couriers, and sometimes by parcel. Once in Chile they were sold to jewellers well below market price and resold only to trusted clients, with no record of the sale.

For four years the case stayed quiet. It became public in August 2021, when the investigative outlet Ciper Chile reported on it, and turned into a national story in January 2023, when police raided more than 30 homes, among them the house in Vitacura that López shared with Tomicic. Prosecutor Eduardo Baeza described Dinamarca, who runs two shops in central Santiago, as someone who bought “very high-value watches and jewellery stolen abroad by international thieves,” and said that a network inside Chile then bought, sold and brokered those goods.

The case also reached inside the police. Prosecutors established that detectives from the PDI, Chile’s investigative police, leaked parts of the inquiry to jewellers under investigation, which allowed some of them to leave the country. Two former officers were convicted of bribery and disclosure of secrets. Netflix describes a case that drew in thieves, jewellers, businessmen and figures from Chilean high society, and the police leak gives the film one more thread to pull: some of the people paid to police the market were helping it get away.

What the plea deal settled, and what it did not

López turned himself in in February 2023. In March 2025 he accepted guilt in an abbreviated trial for receiving stolen goods and for tax offences tied to clandestine trade, and was sentenced to 341 days of supervised release and a fine of 12 million pesos. The court did not establish that he took part in the network that stole watches abroad, and his lawyer, Mario Vargas, maintained that his client was innocent. Baeza read the outcome differently: “It was established that there are Chileans who steal watches abroad, smuggle them into the country and sell them in an illegal market. Part of that market was Mr Marco López.”

Tomicic was never charged. Prosecutors examined 76 cheques drawn on her account between 2017 and 2020, worth about 550 million pesos, and in March 2025 decided not to bring charges against her. By then the couple had divorced after more than 20 years of marriage, and she had stepped away from television once the accusations surfaced. Netflix’s press material does not say whether she gives an interview in the film.

Valenzuela’s second Santiago theft

Valenzuela has worked this ground before. Robar a Rodin, released internationally as Stealing Rodin, his first feature documentary, reconstructed the 2005 theft of Rodin’s sculpture Torso de Adèle, on loan from the Musée Rodin in Paris, from Santiago’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes days after the exhibition opened. That film followed Luis Onfray, the art student who took it, and his reasons, and Chilean critics described a mix of police intrigue and comedy of errors. More recently, Cocaína negra turned to Eugenio Berríos, the chemist who worked for the Pinochet-era secret police, the DINA.

The new film moves from a single object to a trade, and Valenzuela frames it in broader terms than one scandal. “High End is about the emptiness of accumulation, that obsession with gold and what it represents,” he said in Netflix’s announcement. “In the film, that ambition drives characters from every social stratum; some are punished and others come out unscathed depending on where they come from.” He adds that the documentary reflects the current state of Chilean society and of the world.

That second sentence is the most specific promise the film makes, and the case record gives it something to stand on. The lanzas took the risk at the airport. A dealer took a plea deal. Two police officers were convicted. In the public reporting, the clients at the end of the chain, the people who bought a discounted watch with no receipt from a jeweller they trusted, are rarely named. The premise suggests the documentary is less interested in the thefts themselves, which happened far from Chile, than in the people at the receiving end who made each theft worth a long-haul flight.

That is the question High End: The Watch Theft Ring raises and no verdict could settle. If a stolen Rolex only has value because someone in Santiago will buy it quietly, who in that chain paid for the crime? The court answered for one dealer. The market Baeza described was never the defendant.

Release date and where to watch

High End: The Watch Theft Ring premieres worldwide on Netflix on 5 November 2026. It is a Spanish-language feature documentary, listed in Spanish-speaking markets as Alta gama: El caso relojes.

Is High End: The Watch Theft Ring a true story? Yes. It is a documentary about the Caso Relojes, a real criminal investigation in Chile into luxury watches and jewellery stolen abroad and resold in Santiago, which began in 2017.

Who appears in it? Netflix names jeweller Estrella Dinamarca among the interviewees, and the trailer features Marco Antonio López, known as Parived, and television host Tonka Tomicic. Relatives of people involved, journalists and prosecutors also take part.

Is it a series or a film? A single feature-length documentary, not a docuseries.

Who directed it? Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos, the director of Robar a Rodin, for the Chilean production company Fábula.

Where can I watch it? On Netflix, in every market where the service operates.

Tags: Netflix, documentary, Cristóbal Valenzuela, Estrella Dinamarca, High End: The Watch Theft Ring, Parived

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