Chronicle of a case that put the Buenos Aires Police under suspicion. The three hypotheses about the whereabouts of "Kufa", as they called him at home. And his mother's worst presumption: "They killed him like a dog."
Gabriel Bermudez
08/07/2020 - 0:54
- Clarín.com
- Police
Cristina Castro (42) barely manages to fall asleep. Her life changed on April 30, when she had the last contact with her middle son, Facundo Astudillo Castro (22), detained at a police checkpoint and disappeared ever since. Cristina receives Clarín at her father's house, "Tata" César Castro, "Kufa's" grandfather, as everyone knows the young man. There are his two granddaughters and also his new friends: Yatel, Duke and Uma , the sniffer dogs who have been key in finding Facundo's clues.
Cristina is strong. " My strength is born of pain. I raised my children free, " he says. But her voice is broken when she remembers the first rake, on June 19, and came to the "Tata", who is 64 years old.
“That day I sat on that chair (it's plastic, white, and it belonged to Facundo's grandmother). There is my son (Alejandro) who won't let me lie. I started crying and said to my dad: ' They tied me up like a dog .' I had that certainty. "
The house is modest, like the neighborhood of this town, Pedro Luro. At the entrance, a few meters from a dirt street, there is a poster that raises a question that extends throughout the country: " Where is Facundo? " There are already a hundred days of intrigue, suspicious attitudes of the Buenos Aires Police, criticism of the prosecutor. But the question remains unanswered.
Cristina Castro, Facundo's mother, received Clarín this Thursday in Pedro Luro. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
Cristina wears a jogging suit and a black jacket. Underneath, an old Boca shirt appears, the team that Facundo is a fan of. They always got along to carry "Tata", a River fan, although lately grandpa had better arguments for those soccer jokes.
His life is now the cell phone, calls with lawyers Leandro Aparicio and Luciano Peretto, his work at the Shell service station in town and the latest news of the case.
"I don't want to imagine what happened, because if the whole world doesn't fall on me. Today I just need to find my son. They will have to give him back," he warns.
Facundo didn't say "mom" to him. He preferred "Witch" affectionately. " I do not want my son to be one more disappeared person of whom nothing is known for many years, " he says.
"Kufa" used to get involved in political discussions, but outside her home, because Cristina always said: " Politics and religion are forbidden at home ." Today he remembers: "I fought for just causes and many times I did not understand it. ' Young people are the future of the Nation, ' he said and included himself".
The woman emphasizes that "the Grandmothers and the Mothers (of Plaza de Mayo) were there from the first moment". They named her Taty Almeida and Estela de Carlotto. Facundo collaborated in a digital newspaper where they investigated the disappeared in Villarino. "They made a printed magazine: ' La Verdad de la Milanesa ' was called," adds Cristina.
"I am missing a part. I cannot enjoy or laugh because I am missing the skinny one. I am missing a leg of the table . It has to be here, not where its disappeared people left it," he says.
Due to the information of a seer, this Wednesday a place was reached where clothes, a backpack and bones were found on RN 3 and two kilometers from Buratovich. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
Cristina, despite everything, has a slight hope of finding him alive. "The first thing is to find him. Later I will see if I break and if I cry, if I continue. Always one step at a time. Now I just have to look for my son, " he says.
The beginning of the end
After two and a half years of living in Bahía Blanca with his girlfriend, Facundo returned to his home in Pedro Luro in February. Back to the family redoubt from which he had stayed somewhat away at that time, due to a relationship that Cristina considered "toxic", especially after a fight in which "both attacked each other."
March for the appearance of Facundo Astudillo Castro. It was done in Pedro Luro, on Thursday, July 30, three months after the disappearance. (Photo Pablo Presti)
She and especially Lautaro, her younger brother (she has another older brother named Alejandro), welcomed him with open arms in the humble home between 9 and 16, between the train station and the Bonacina neighborhood.
With that mandate “ if you don't study, you work ” well recorded since he left high school, he went out to find a job. He did it faster than those other times when he was a bricklayer or bagging onions in season. With Daniel, one of his best friends, he went to Turmalina, to wash glasses. And to give a hand to Juan Francisco, the owner of the place, with the tables, when the craft beer bar was full.
"Kufa", with one of his friends in his last job, the "Turmalina" bar.
His day happened to be work from 7 to 3 or more, then sleep until noon, a round of mates with friends, a visit to "Tata" César Castro (his grandfather) and back to the bar. This was his routine until the coronavirus pandemic arrived. The place closed, the exits were cut off and, confined in his house, the memories of Daiana, his ex, returned to Facundo's head. But it was his heart that prompted him to pack his backpack and try to return to Bahia. "I'm going to find some clothes that were left there," he told his mother.
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In photos: Facundo Astudillo has been missing for almost 100 days
On the night of April 29 he had dinner with his friends from the bar, he did not return home and the next morning he traveled the 20 blocks to the entrance of the town to start walking and hitchhiking on National Route 3. It was not something strange for him Although, in times of the “old normality” he would not have had to wait for Hilario Ascasubi to pass, 15 kilometers from Pedro Luro, to get him to be lifted.
A woman took him to the entrance of Mayor Buratovich where, at around ten o'clock in the morning, agents Mario Sosa and Jana Curuhinca intercepted him and charged him for violating the quarantine. After almost three hours, in which they checked his address in Luro, according to the police, they let him go.
Two months later, Facundo would appear in a photo in a local media. He is seen from behind, in front of Major Buratovich's patrol car 23,360 and with his hands forward. Police officer Sosa escorts him and on the front of the car is his Wilson backpack. The image was complete, but as in "Back to the Future" , the young man's figure had long since begun to fade ...
Federal police custody to protect the perimeter where a backpack and clothing were found. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
It was common for Facundo to spend a long time without having contact with his family, especially in those 30 months of courtship. That is why at home it was not surprising that he had not contacted again since April 30. Especially when in the last call, around 1:30 p.m. that Thursday, he had argued with his mother who asked him to go back to Luro. The talk was cut off abruptly and Cristina was left with the idea that she had gotten angry with her .
"He was aware of social networks, always with his phone sending messages," recall his friends, who began to be surprised by his prolonged absence from Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, in which he was always active. The restlessness, fueled by a communication from the girlfriend who denied having seen him in Bahia, activated the maternal instinct. Cristina insisted on calling him and due to the lack of answers from her middle son, she went to the police.
Facundo's path
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The complaint
On June 5 they received their complaint at the town police station. Then it was turned over to the prosecutor's office located in Médanos, head of the Villarino district, where its owner, Ariel García Dimas, opened a file for "whereabouts investigation." Thus began the long judicial journey that still seeks to answer the question that, since the middle of that month, has grown in loudness: Where is Facundo ?
On June 15, his closest friendship group created the profile "Buscamos a Facu" on Facebook , with a selfie in front of Turmalina and the basic information to help find "Kufa". The first to go looking for him were his former colleagues from "Jóvenes con Memoria", the program in which he participated until 2016 when the new municipal government of Villarino deactivated him.
Since then, the talks with younger boys to whom Facundo spoke about the disappeared and the commitment to Human Rights had ended . The murals with the slogans of Memory, Truth and Justice were being repainted little by little and the batucada that sounded from the train station and was heard on both sides of the track, disintegrated.
Search for Facundo Astudillo Castro in Bahía Blanca.
That question about Facundo's whereabouts began to cease to be rhetorical and became a battle cry as of June 19. When Cristina and Peretto, her son's volleyball partner, went to the first raking carried out by the Police on RN 3. It began at the entrance to Mayor Buratovich, where they were first surprised by the police deployment. Five patrol cars were blocking the entrance to the town , they said.
Then, the place where the operation was mounted. It was in a different place than what agents Sosa and Curuhinca had described as the point where they had intercepted Facundo with the patrol. The doubts grew when they learned, at that moment, two weeks after the complaint, that a third police officer claimed to have seen Facundo on April 30. And that was in that procedure.
Members of the Argentine Federal Police (PFA), firefighters from Punta Alta and a dog trainer looking for traces of Facundo.
It was agent Siomara Ayelén Flores, who declared that she had picked up Facundo around 12:30 in her Chevrolet Corsa Classic and took him about 25 kilometers to the access to Teniente Origone. " Do not say anything to my mother, " he said the young man said, getting out of the car. “I wanted to talk to her because she was the last one I had seen my son, but an officer who was next door wouldn't leave her alone. ' Come on, come on ', I would tell him every time I got close to him, ”said Cristina.
The incredulity of the woman and her lawyer grew as the raking with dogs advanced through RN 3 and reached Lieutenant Origone. At that moment, a new surprise. A fourth policeman, Alberto González , confirmed that on April 30 he came to a call from a neighbor who alerted about a young man who was walking on the side of the road. It was and that young man was Facundo.
Raking on the RN 3 and the Salitral de la Vidriera, on the edge of the roundabout with the RN 22 and the railroad tracks.
He asked for the documentation and the boy gave him his driver's license, which González photographed. After seizing his backpack, he said that he let him continue and saw him get into a gray Renault Duster Oroch truck. Almost 50 days after that moment, he remembered the exact address that the young man gave him as a destination in Bahía Blanca: Emilio Rosas 492, the house of his ex-girlfriend.
"Madam, you have nothing to do here. You have to go to Route 3 and 22," Cristina would later recall that Commissioner Marcos Navarrete, Villarino's boss, told her when he asked to enter Origone and search there. Four days later, she would verify that in her statement González said that Facundo walked away. By then, suspicions about the police were already haunting the woman.
After the Bonaerense was displaced from the search, federal forces arrived.
Police abuse
Those were times when bad memories came back to his mind. From when the police harassed Facundo and the neighborhood boys in the square where they played ball. "They enjoyed slapping and kicking him in the ass," the woman graphed. " You are a jet like your brother, " he recalled his son telling him about what one of the agents had assured him. He told him that he had beaten and broke the motorcycle when he was violently loading it on a patrol car.
They were also moments in which some phrases that Facundo told her in his last call at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, began to sound differently to Cristina. " You cannot imagine where I am " and " You will never see me again " , with which he closed that talk, before a noise closed the dialogue. "As if she had thrown the phone on the floor or it had been taken away," the mother graphed.
Cristina and "Tata" Castro, her father, Facundo's grandfather, in the mark that was made in Pedro Luro three months after the disappearance. (Photo Pablo Presti)
The next sign of life from that device would add two more doses of mystery to the case. " Friend, I'm without signal or battery, I'll call you in a little while ," says the text message that reached Juan Francisco's phone on the evening of April 30. It was the first SMS he received in his life from Facundo, who never called him " friend ", always called him " fat ." He answered it the same and the next day he asked him where he was. He had no further answers.
The first rakes were done in the open field, then the search focused on specific points, such as the Buratovich and Origone police stations.
A week after that first rake, Cristina and Peretto, along with the criminal attorney Aparicio, went to the federal Justice of Bahia. There they raised the " inconsistencies and irregularities " that they warned in the judicial investigation, which they described as "delegate" by Dimas García in the suspected Buenos Aires and asked the separation of that force from the investigation.
A visit that Cristina received the next day would end up reaffirming her doubts. Three people from Pedro Luro who were traveling to Bahía Blanca on April 30 told him that they had seen two police officers put Facundo into a black and white Force van. It happened passing Buratovich, before the “big curve”, almost at the same time that González claimed to have met the boy, but about 25 kilometers earlier. They added that their statement was not received at the Pedro Luro police station.
With this new element, the federal prosecutor of Bahía Blanca Santiago Ulpiano Martínez decided to open an investigation to determine if Facundo's disappearance could be forced. For almost two weeks that instruction was parallel to that of the provincial Justice, already in the hands of the prosecutor Rodolfo De Lucía, of the Functional Unit of Judicial Instruction 20 of Bahía Blanca.
Cristina, this Thursday, in the talk with Clarín and waiting for news in the cause. "I want it back," he begs. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
According to Facundo's mother, the prosecutor was only present in one of the operations that were carried out . It was on July 14, when she arrived at the judicial headquarters and he had gone to tour the federal forces operation by helicopter.
Based on imprecise but "profuse" statements, that prosecution continued as the main hypothesis that the boy had reached his destination. “On his own”, according to UFIJ 20, the Police raked in the eastern area of Bahía Blanca at the impulse of circulars that located Facundo there, near the Napal neighborhood, where he had lived until February and selling consortium bags on the street. More than a hundred agents, mobiles and drones added spectacularity to the move.
At that point, early July, the viralization of the case exceeded the zonal scale and led to the arrival of Sergio Berni in the area. Along with the official, but in the background, an Internal Affairs commission arrived and interviewed the officials involved in the case. "The police are working well, but if the boy's mother wants her out, that's how it will be," promised the Minister of Security, who assured Cristina that Facundo would appear.
La Bonaerense, outside
De Lucía, who also had no objections to the police work, made Berni's announcement come true and the Bonaerense was removed from the investigation, in the middle of the street. At the same time, Martínez ordered the raid of the second most important police station in the Villarino Department, the Mayor Buratovich substation. The decision triggered the declaration of incompetence of the provincial Justice and as of July 9, as requested by the family, Facundo's disappearance would be investigated only by federal jurisdiction.
Facundo's mother and a PFA agent, in the area where garments and skeletal remains were found, which would be from animals. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
Martínez advanced in several directions, but with two premises: to exhaust the provincial hypothesis that Facundo arrived in Bahía Blanca and to bet that multiple scientific and technological reports that he requested (communications analysis, satellite movements of patrol cars, hijacking of guard books, among others) will help clarify the case. A short path, questioned by the complaint that considered it useless, and a longer one, which would shed light on whether there was forced disappearance , where waiting for results is desperate.
In the middle of both goals, the prosecutor summoned all federal forces and added 250 troops, plus search teams by air, land and water, to face the rakes between Bahía Blanca and Pedro Luro. Two seven-day runs yielded no results. In the middle, the dubious appearance of a witness with a reserved identity who raises the hypothesis that, perhaps, Facundo has stayed on the road, in an attempt to avoid another police interception.
The move, which the private and institutional complaints (Provincial Memory Commission) attributed to the policemen Sosa and Flores and blamed the prosecutor for supporting it, prompted Martínez to be challenged. They denounced obstacles in accessing the results of the case and a strong questioning of the investigation strategy. For the federal judge 2 of Bahía Blanca, Gabriela Marrón, the proposal did not go beyond a mere divergence and kept the prosecutor.
However, on the same day it was ratified, Martínez seemed to give another speed to the longer road by revealing that he had requested "urgent reports" from the Buenos Aires Ministry of Security on lists of police and mobiles assigned to Villarino on April 30. By then, Marcos Herrero, a renowned trainer of sniffer dogs , had already begun to carve the technical and emotional commitment of Cristina.
Night falls on RN 3 and Facundo's mother leaves with her lawyer from the sector where clothes and a backpack were found, near Mayor Buratovich. (Photos Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
"He and his dogs are going to bring me to Facundo. I trust dogs more than people," the mother had said, in front of the federal prosecutor's office, when she went to ask that the Rio Negro dog trainer be accepted as a party expert. days later, Yatel, one of his dogs, marked Facundo's "odoriferous essence" on the two kidnapped mobiles. In the one in the April 30 photo, but more in another of Lieutenant Origone, black and white, as in the one they had introduced to Facundo, according to the three witnesses.
"In that (the black and white mobile), the dog went crazy," said Herrero, describing how the German sheepdog got on and off the mobile and found stains compatible with blood, after breaking the cover of a seat. The finding was added to the material already found in both vehicles and in the private car of Agent Flores, in order to compare it with Cristina's DNA.
A suggestive finding
The last day of the frenzied July in the case would throw another blunt element, when the same dog extracted a bag of waste from a deposit in the funds of the Lieutenant Origone police station, after barking about ten times. Inside, split in the middle, there was an amulet that Cristina recognized as a gift from her mother to her three children. It was a wooden watermelon, with a San Antonio cow and an "I love you", in English, inside.
The gift from Facundo Astudillo Castro's grandmother that a sniffer dog found after a rake.
That finding, together with an advance in the analysis of the telephone communications of the policemen involved and other undisclosed elements, led the private complaint to request on Tuesday the 4th the arrest of the four officers of Major Buratovich and Lieutenant Origone, as members of a " illicit association". In the maneuver, they linked eleven more people, between police officers and civilians from Bahía Blanca, Villarino and the area.
This involves an official from the municipality of Villarino, who signs a patent reader's report on Route 3 sent to the federal prosecutor's office. It is dated July 14 and does not include the ownership of the vehicle in which the witnesses who claim to see Facundo getting into a patrol car were riding. According to the complaint, this information did appear in a report the day before, signed by another municipal official. In addition, the second report incorporates for the first time the car of the witness questioned by Facundo's mother, added to the case on July 14.
While waiting for the response to the arrest requests and further test measures, a new piece of information took Cristina out of her job at the Shell service station from the access to Pedro Luro, where she never stopped going to "charge batteries", he said to Clarín .
Cristina asks for her son at the side of the road, the last place where some witnesses saw Facundo alive. (Emmanuel Fernández / Sent)
A seer took her on August 5 to the Road of the Fairs, which leads to Mayor Buratovich. On the trail, next to a canal, they found a semi-buried backpack, clothing and animal remains. The site is about a hundred meters from the section of Route 3 where witnesses claim to have seen Facundo when they put him on a patrol car. A diver, according to Cristina, is similar to the one his son used.
A hundred days passed and Facundo does not appear. The case already has a national impact, even President Alberto Fernández and Governor Axel Kicillof contacted the young man's mother. But disappointment with political promises is becoming a daily regret. Meanwhile, the hope of finding Facundo alive is gradually erased.
GL - EMJ
