Virginia Messi
08/21/2020 - 13:11
- Clarín.com
- Police
René Domingo Guzman (42)he was a full-service buchón for the DDI of Illicit Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime of Quilmes. On July 8, 2017, he was shot in front of his house in Villa Fiorito (Lomas de Zamora). The official version says that they attacked him in the middle of a traffic discussion. He bled to death.
Diego Xavier Guastini (45) laundered money from large drug gangs in his cave in the city of Buenos Aires (Florida at 500), he was an informant for the SIDE (later renamed AFI) and also for the Buenos Aires Police, particularly the DDI brigade Antinarcotics of Quilmes, the town where he lived and where he was murdered. On the morning of October 29, 2019, a hitman intercepted his car a few meters from the Municipality and shot him before Guastini reached for the Glock 40 caliber that he was wearing on his waist.
During the first days of the quarantine due to the coronavirus, around the end of March, "Witness X" (a drug trafficker who came to live under the Protection Program of the Ministry of Justice) was transferred from the Marcos Paz prison to his home . He was seriously ill and was allowed to die among his loved ones. According to the death certificate, toxoplasmosis and being a carrier of HIV did not give him a chance. As a result of the key data that Fernando Domínguez had provided to the federal prosecutor of San Isidro on corrupt police and judicial officials, his parents still have custody of the State.
The three stories, the three deaths, have a point in common: the operation known as "Leones Blancos", in which 500 kilos of cocaine that had just come out of a farm in Moreno were seized. The drugs had been loaded into a van that was stopped by the police on the Buen Ayre highway.
The prosecutor Claudio Scapolan, investigated in San Isidro.
"Leones Blancos" -or the case "Anacona", as it appears in the Justice due to the surname of one of the accused- was on December 28, 2013 and in principle it was installed as a police and judicial success. However, everything changed when in 2016 the Federal Oral Court No. 5 of San Martín annulled the proceedings due to the serious irregularities detected during the trial.
The judges sent to investigate those who had acted then. That investigation fell into the hands of the prosecutor Domínguez, who discovered a network of armed causes and, in the particular case of "White Lions", the theft of another half a ton of cocaine. The drug that was in the truck and did not appear in the kidnapping report.
The half a ton stolen, witnesses and regrets said, had two destinations. Part of it was taken to Santa Clara de Mar for distribution on the Atlantic Coast and part of it was taken through the Port of Buenos Aires to Europe, via Brazil.
Raids in San Isidro for a cause involving the prosecutor Claudio Scapolan and several Buenos Aires policemen.
And so, what had been born as a success became an investigation that last Monday ended with the prosecution by Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado of two judicial officials, 10 police officers and a lawyer. In the case, it still remains to investigate the San Isidro Prosecutor Claudio Scapolan (protected by his jurisdiction) and find important fugitives.
Undoubtedly the heaviest fugitive is the Buenos Aires lieutenant Adrián Baeta - also known by his nickname "Palermo" - a man as closely related to Mexican drugs as he is to the string of deaths from what could already be called "The Curse of White Lions ".
Victim 1: The Driver
The first to be assassinated, René Guzman, was the one who, under the directives of the Quilmes policemen, drove the Chevrolet S-10 truck in which, in the middle of the operation, the 500 Mexican kilos were loaded onto the drug traffickers. Guzmán was not a police officer but his friend, Lieutenant Adrián Baeta, used him as if he were one. He was part of the group, with or without a uniform.
Guzmán - along with two other mailboxes who acted as witnesses for the minutes - took the drug first to a player owned by Baeta, in Quilmes, and then to a house in Santa Clara del Mar, owned by a friend of "Palermo."
Participant in all this course was Carlos Maidana, a former exonerated noncommissioned officer who also worked for Baeta as an informant, unemployed labor force and false witness. He told Justice all the details of the Mexican "Leones Blancos". In his story, he mentioned Guzmán and a third police "collaborator" named Cristian Seu.
Hugo Díaz was last seen when he left his car in a garage in Lavalle at 600
"They sent me to look for a boy who worked with them (a civilian) named René Guzmán. He came to look for me with a Chevrolet S-10 pickup [...], we maintained radio contact with the police and they told me where they were going so that I got close because I was going to be the witness of the supposed arrest, "declared Maidana. He detailed the route of the stolen drugs and also the problems he had with Baeta's post- Mexican gang when they asked him to kill Seu "because he's going to talk and he's going to bury us all."
"I had several encounters with Guzmán, who came to my house to threaten me. I went to speak with Baeta to ask him why so many threats and he told me to stay calm, that as long as I didn't say anything nothing was going to happen to me and my family ", declared Maidana before the prosecutor Domínguez.
Victim 2: The Double Agent
The second shot, Diego Guastini, is the very center of the whole story: he declared as repentant before the Narcocriminality Prosecutor's Office (PROCUNAR) in different drug cases and in one of those statements he said that it was he who had handed him over to the Quilmes the shipment of "White Lions".
The drug belonged to one of his best clients, the Loza brothers, whom Guastini washed money for. Coincidence or not, according to a repentant in "White Lions", on the day of the operation Edwin Loza, who was accompanying the drug, was allowed to escape in a gray Chevrolet Corsa.
Guastini always showed a lot of cold blood when declaring but apparently he only got nervous once, when he explained that his contact in Quilmes was Adrián Baeta. He said verbatim: "One person who is a police officer of the Province of Buenos Aires, with whom I have and have had a relationship with having helped him with information in some cases is Adrián Baeta, nicknamed 'Palermo'".
The Audi A4 in which the financier Diego Xavier Guastini (45) was mobilized, assassinated meters from the Municipality of Quilmes.
He named him on October 18, 2019. Ten days later he was killed. The first to arrive at the side of his car, with his body still warm, was Adrián Baeta, who turned off the two Iphone cell phones of the victim, thus sealing the information on them. The cause for this hitman crime is in charge of the Quilmes prosecutor Martín Conde, who in almost a year does not seem to have advanced a meter.
Guastini is a central character. For the federal prosecutor of San Isidro, Fernando Domínguez not only handed over "White Lions" but at least part of the 500 kilos stolen went to his hands. Guastini had contacts in the port to get them out of the country and, according to the Scapolan case, telephones in his environment were close at the time of the cocaine theft.
Victim 3: Witness X
As for "Witness X", it was he who at the beginning of the case, in 2016, provided a clue that four years later ended up exploding in one of the biggest judicial scandals of recent times.
The businessman Damián Carlos Stefanini (45).
"I have the idea but I cannot say that part of the stolen drug was taken to Mar del Plata and another part was sent to Brazil and from Brazil to Europe. Guastini was in charge of marketing part of that stolen drug in the Panamericana procedure. and Buen Ayre. He is a close friend of officer Baeta, "he declared, with reservation of identity.
The 2016 declaration was confirmed over the years. And in the case of "Witness X" his credibility is no small matter. In another of his statements, he argued that Guastini was behind the disappearances of financiers Damian Stefanini (October 17, 2014) and Hugo Díaz (March 9, 2015). He was related to both of them. Nothing was heard from any of them.
The "Witness X" gave some details of both cases and promised that when he was finally released he would say what happened to Stefanini and Díaz. But he did not speak. By the time he was transferred home from jail, he was already dying. He died shortly after. The information was taken to the grave. And he was not the only one in this case.
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