List of Famous people who died at 72

Jaime Sabines Gutiérrez was a Mexican contemporary poet. Known as “the sniper of Literature” as he formed part of a group that transformed literature into reality, he wrote ten volumes of poetry, and his work has been translated into more than twelve languages. His writings chronicle the experience of everyday people in places such as the street, hospital, and playground. Sabines was also a politician.

Fernando Luiz Cumplido Mac Dowell da Costa was a Brazilian engineer and politician. He worked in several governments in Brazil, always defending the accomplishment of great interventions in the urbanism of Rio de Janeiro. He was one of the great critics of the transport system of Rio de Janeiro during the government of Sérgio Cabral.

Katina Paxinou was a Greek film and stage actress.

Zhang Hanzhi was a Chinese diplomat who was Mao Zedong's English teacher and U.S. President Richard Nixon's interpreter during his historic 1972 trip to China.

Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor, voice actor and film producer.

Ernest Ezra Mandel (Dutch: [manˈdɛl]; also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter;, was a Belgian Marxian economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium.

Yōko Sano was a Japanese writer and illustrator of children's books.

Samuel Clarke "Sandy" Pearlman was an American music producer, artist manager, music journalist and critic, professor, poet, songwriter, and record company executive. He was best known for founding, writing for, producing, or co-producing many LPs by Blue Öyster Cult, as well as producing important albums by The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, Space Team Electra, and Dream Syndicate; he was also the founding Vice President of eMusic.com. He was the Schulich Distinguished Professor Chair at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, and from August 2014 held a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship at the Coach House Institute (CHI) of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information as part of the CHI's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

Inês Etienne Romeu was a Brazilian political prisoner held in extrajudicial detention in a Brazilian torture camp in the early 1970s. Romeu has been described as the sole captive to survive the camp. In 2014, Colonel Paulo Malhães testimony to the National Truth Commission revealed that Colonel of the Army Cyro Guedes Etchegoyen was the person in charge of the House of Death. He was head of the Army Information Center (CIE) from 1971 to 1974. He was also in charge of a group Brazilian military sent to train Augusto Pinochet's military personnel. Colonel Etchegoyen was trained at US Army School of the Americas. Paulo Malhães, would later claim that the purpose of the center was to convince suspected political opponents to serve as double agents against regime opponents. The main technique used to turn suspects into double agents was torture, which would be backed up by blackmail and clandestine payments.

Daniel Vernet was a French journalist. He was the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, France's centre-left newspaper of record, from 1989 to 1991, and the author of several bools.