Héctor Gambini
04/25/2020 - 11:33
- Clarín.com
- Politics
All the prisoners want to go out, but they never all ask for it together, several times and at the same time. Yes now.
In the arguments there are no objections to an unjust conviction or a claim to another instance of appeal, nor the old trick of "the conviction is not final" to which, for example, former Vice President Boudou resorted, with a confirmed sentence in Cassation.
The only argument is the coronavirus. And everything enters the coronavirus.
In the Court of Criminal Execution Nº1 of Quilmes they carry the computations of 1,400 convicts from Buenos Aires. More than a thousand of them have already asked to be released. Most of them got a negative answer, but now there are 105 who have made the request a third time and are waiting for a response in prisons where a dangerous game has just begun: from politics they are urged to claim again and again, to insist until they do. get. They are restless because others are leaving and they are not, and they are all as potential victims of the coronavirus as those who left. It doesn't matter what they have done.
If the court refuses them, they go directly to the Provincial Chamber of Cassation with a writ of habeas corpus . On April 8, the Cassation judge Víctor Violini signed a collective habeas corpus and granted immediate house arrest to 2,300 prisoners at one time. The measure accelerated the cataract of requests and got the new claims to bypass the requirements that the executing court requires by law to go directly to the Chamber, where the green light of automatic freedom shines and with few controls.
"There are many prisoners who are effectively in risk groups but others allege an osteoarthritis problem in the knee or elbow for having been shot during an assault, years ago, and they use that to put themselves in the risk group. The medical reports to corroborate if they are indeed a risk group usually take a few days and the Ministry of Justice of the Province set up a channel to take care of completing the procedures, but no one answers there . Since April 7 we have been waiting for answers that do not reach us , ” a judge from the metropolitan area told Clarín .
The domino effect moves the demand from cell to cell, from pavilion to pavilion and from jail to jail.
Look also
Coronavirus in Argentina: the images of the violent riot in the Devoto prison
On Tuesday there were demonstrations in Unit 49 of Junín where the slogan "We do not want to die in jail" began , then repeated in each prison until Devoto's mutiny this Friday. The same day there was a revolt in the Melchor Romero prison, on the outskirts of La Plata.
The most serious episode occurred on Wednesday: a bloody riot in Florencio Varela, with eleven wounded and one dead man who ended up with a lead bullet to the head. As in Devoto and before in Melchor Romero, the roofs of the prison also won there and dramatic scenes were experienced .
The body of the prisoner Federico Rey, on the roof of Florencio Varela Penal Unit 23.
The situation was precariously restored when the Provincial Memory Commission arrived and the secretary Roberto Cipriano García not only yielded to all the inmates' claims. "He greeted the prisoners, he told them we are with you, dear comrades, and he encouraged them to the idea that everyone would be free from one moment to the next," said a source who participated in that negotiation.
In an audio later sent to relatives of detainees in the Province, Cipriano García calls the Melchor Romero mutineers "comrades proliberty" who shouted threats from the roof of the prison.
In Florencio Varela everything had exploded when an audio began to circulate in the cell phones where an alleged Health prison said that "there are already confirmed cases of coronaviruses and now they are all going to fall like flies."
Cell phones have been allowed in all prisons in the Province since last March 30, when Violini's same Cassation room - which he integrates alone - determined that having a telephone was a right of prisoners during the pandemic. The next day, one of those convicted of the attack on Carolina Píparo and the crime of her baby - at a bank leak in La Plata in 2010 - called her to threaten her.
Although Violini's decision had an immediate claim in the Ezeiza federal prison, where the prisoners also asked for unrestricted access to cell phones, the federal judge of Lomas de Zamora, Federico Villena, resolved it differently. Instead of giving inmates telephones, he asked the national Ministry of Justice to enable rooms with video call systems so that inmates could speak to their families in turn without needing to give each one a cell phone.
Violini is a La Plata judge who proclaims himself "justicialista" and looked for a possibility to be a candidate for mayor of the city, for which he did not finally get a quorum.
He has had a long dispute with Buenos Aires attorney Julio Conte Grand since he came out to denounce that the investigation against the Moyano for corruption in Independiente was "an armed cause".
Empowered to receive the immediate support of Kirchnerism, he said last July that "in the Province we do not want a Justice like Comodoro Py's", in tune with Cristina Kirchner and her theory of the political-judicial persecution of lawfare . Then he received the official blessing of Cristina , who the next day tweeted Violini's opinions, quoting him.
The judge - a former Buenos Aires police officer - had obtained his appointment in 2006 after asking the Magistracy to review his failed exam in which he had obtained 80 points out of 200, when he needed a minimum of 120. They granted him the review and raised his score , just when Violini cultivated his friendship with the then mayor of La Plata Julio Alak, later the national justice minister and today the justice minister in the Buenos Aires team of Axel Kicillof.
Negotiations between the judicial authorities and the inmates of the Melchor Romero prison this Tuesday, in La Plata (SPB).
Violini now participates in the Dialogue Table with prisoners along with Cipriano García and officials from the provincial Ministry of Justice. It is a key piece in the mechanism for liberation: to his one-person cassation room is precisely where the massive requests for freedom go, which should go to the Criminal Execution judges but land directly there in the form of habeas corpus .
It is not a coincidental circumstance but a State policy of the Axel Kicillof government.
On December 27 last, the Buenosairean Court summoned a plenary of penal judges where the court marked them with absolute clarity: there would be no preventive prisons carried out in prison except for very specific exceptional cases.
The president of the Court, Eduardo De Lázzari, former Duhalde's security secretary, ejected from his post after the crime of José Luis Cabezas, spoke, invoking recommendations of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. When the judges raised his concern about “the media onslaught” they would suffer if they did not send the detainees to prison, De Lázarri reminded them that he himself had dismissed more than half of the 2019 impeachment requests for “lack of fundamentals ”. The signal was given.
The day before that presentation, De Lázzari and his colleagues from the Court presented the entire content of the new line drop to Governor Kicillof and Minister Alak, in an official meeting, with a photo and everything.
The only thing the coronavirus did was expand and speed up this process.
Cipriano García explains them clearly to the relatives of the prisoners, in an audio of more than 7 minutes that he sent them this week and to which Clarín agreed .
“The objective of the Memory Commission is to work for the release of as many detainees as possible. For that we have different strategies. On the one hand, the presentation of hundreds of writings, 120, 150 requests are being presented every day. On the other hand, we are also appealing to collective, strategic litigation. There is political will from the provincial government to decompress the prison system and that is very important for what needs to be done about the Judiciary so that they release more people. ”
The strategy is, clearly, to pressure the Execution judges and skip them by presenting habeas corpus before Judge Violini. García himself says it: "At the meeting (which was held this week with prisoners) was the Cassation judge Violini where he just stated that they were thinking of expanding that Cassation ruling to free more people."
The riot in the Corrientes prison ended with a deceased prisoner and 14 wounded, including two prison guards.
And he adds: “This of course is not enough, that it is little and that more needs to be done, but it is the first time that the prisoner curve begins to descend in the Province of Buenos Aires, 20 years old, to this part. Since it is not enough for the people who are detained, we know that many of them unfairly, with armed causes, with arbitrary or unjust sentences, with judges who neither read the causes nor take into account the real health problems. ”
Quique Petrullo, a lobbyist who was part of "the judge's gang", César Melazo, entered the revocation of releases released by Violini . He is at home, although he is not a risk group for coronavirus. The pandemic's excuse achieved what no sensible review of its cause could have.
What happens in these hours is that the political officials are telling the prisoners that they are not leaving because of the judges, and the judges are saying that the politicians promise massive freedoms without taking charge. And that when they enable a line like in Justice no one answers.
Horror cases loom in the midst of the riot . A rapist was released and went to live in a house that is steps from his victim, in Bernal. And another rapist - formally considered a risk group because he is over 60 years old - went to serve his home prison in the same house where his granddaughter lives. The girl he raped.
Who is now, of the two, at real risk?
The situation is darkening and there is written evidence. On April 15, just a week after Judge Violini signed his decision on immediate and massive freedom, Execution Judge Julia Márquez wrote to the president of the Buenos Aires Court to express his "concern about the type of procedure that is being applying to the process of the causes ”.
The judge denounced that "higher courts" release prisoners "without verifying compliance with any of the requirements required by current regulations."
And he gave an example: a man with a firm sentence for aggravated injuries to his partner, in a case of gender violence, was released in a few hours without verifying where he would go to live and without being in any risk group for coronavirus.
Are you now living with the ex-partner you beat? In front? On the way back? No one knows very well. When it was decided to release him, the opinion of the defender or the prosecutor was not requested, as required by the rules. He just went home.
The judge never got a response from the president of the De Lazzari Court, but she did get the support and solidarity of fifteen criminal judges from the south of the conurbano.
Mutiny in Devoto's prison (Lucia Merle).
One of them told Clarín what happens with the control of the electronic anklets: “There is not for everyone and many just get out of jail, directly. Those who have anklets, if they remove them, an alarm goes off at the monitoring company and they give a part of the "opening report" by calling 911. An operator takes it as if it were a common complaint. When they go to look for the prisoner, if they go to look for him, it would be a miracle that he is in the same address that he had declared. ”
The trap of "why he leaves and I do not leave if the coronavirus can also kill me" takes the situation within the prisons to the limit.
That the "contagion" of the spirit of the mutiny reached Devoto, the only prison in Buenos Aires, was a matter of hours. There is this Saturday a review of the damage and the commitment to open a dialogue to review releases with the promise not to transfer prisoners in retaliation for the rebellion.
It doesn't seem like everything was going to end there. The pump activated in the Province is already running. And it has a short wick.