Daniel Santoro
08/12/2020 - 14:16
- Clarín.com
- Politics
Always dressed in impeccable suits, funny, controversial, a horse riding fanatic, and with a Glock pistol in his suitcase since he had been threatened with death, Jorge Urso was the judge who despite being appointed by the Menem government ended up prosecuting and dictating the preventive detention in 2011 of former president Carlos Menem in the case for the illegal sale of weapons to Ecuador and Croatia . He had been included by former Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo in his famous "napkin" in which former Interior Minister Carlos Corach would have listed Comodoro Py's judges who allegedly responded politically to Menemism.
Divorced from María Alvarez Andrich and father of four children, he received his law degree from the Catholic University in 1983, while working in the courts. Before being a judge, he was Director of Legal Affairs in the Buenos Aires Municipality in 1992, during the administration of Carlos Grosso. When he was appointed a judge, he was linked to the former PJ deputy and former Secretary of Security Miguel Angel Toma. He was appointed a federal judge in 1993 - at that time there was no Judicial Council - and resigned in 2006 . Urso retired that year, in the middle of a process in the Commission of Accusation of the Council of the Magistracy that lent itself to approving an opinion of the ultra-Kirchnerist deputy Carlos Kunkel to summon him to declare accused of poor performance of his duties.
According to him years later, his withdrawal was due to pressure from the Kirchner government that he received since at the end of 2004 he ordered the prosecution and preventive detention of the piquetero K Luis D'Elía for taking over the 24th police station in La Boca . This former K official just received confirmation of his sentence from the Court last week. In 2013, the then judge Sergio Torres issued the dismissal of Urso and his partner in the framework of a case for alleged illicit enrichment.
Jorge Urso in the courts of Comodoro PY.
In 1996, after Clarín revealed the trafficking of 6,500 tons of arms and ammunition to Ecuador and Croatia a year earlier, Urso interrogated and prosecuted Menem's former defense minister, Oscar Camilión . He did so after being ordered by the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber with which he had had several short circuits and despite an unexpected visit from Corach . After his resignation in 2006, he told a group of acquaintances that before ordering the investigation of Camilión, one morning two patrolmen of the Federal Police blocked the street of Judge Tedín de Palermo, where the apartment in which he lived was located, and then entered the Minister of the Interior asked him not to prosecute Camilión because "national security issues" and other issues were at stake. He listened to him cavalierly but the next day he issued the measure against the minister.
Urso did the same, according to what he narrated in that gathering, when Horacio Verbistky visited him in his office to ask him not to call the then head of the Army, General Martín Balza, to investigate, also in the cause of arms. "I remember he asked for my laptop and wrote a hypothetical Page 12 title against me if I did, " he recalled. A few days later, Urso processed Balza. While this was happening, the Menemism tried, unsuccessfully, to displace the prosecutor Carlos Stornelli from the arms case with whom, in the end, Urso established a respectful relationship, despite the fact that they had started badly in 1995.
Although he signed controversial resolutions in other corruption cases, in 2001, Urso looked at Menem after questioning him in his office and told him: "Doctor, from this moment on, you will be detained." Then he ordered the prosecution and sent Menem to preventive home detention in the case for the illegal sale of weapons to Ecuador and Croatia that this journalist investigated in 1995 based on a complaint from the lawyer Ricardo Monner Sans. The former president served six months in prison in Eduardo Gostanián's villa in the Buenos Aires town of Don Torcuato and was later released by the Menemist “automatic majority” of the Court. In 2013, the former president was finally sentenced to seven and a half years in prison by an oral court, but appealed to the National Chamber of Criminal Cassation saying that "the reasonable period" of judicial investigation had passed. The last word on Menem now has the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation.
Urso also had a few months the cause for the destination of the 650 million dollars of the funds from Santa Cruz . One of those who passed through his office in Comodoro Py was Eduardo Cafaro, who was first an advisor to the Santa Cruz bank and then a director of the Central Bank when Kirchner became president in 2003. Cafaro testified as a witness and confirmed that he was a financial advisor to that province. At that time, an alleged shortage of fifty-two million dollars was being investigated and the absence of a documented surrender of the dividends of that money first deposited in the United States and later in Switzerland. Later, due to competition issues and political pressure , the cause of the Santa Cruz funds ended in a Santa Cruz judge who closed it.
Menem's arrest in 2001.
In his last interview, Urso said this year that the pressure from the government of Mauricio Macri denounced by the judge of Cassation, Ana María Figueroa, “looking at them in the light of twenty years ago is romantic . Today it is not played so hard. "In dialogue with radio Rivadavia, he acknowledged:" Everyone receives pressure in the courts. The issue is the one that resists them and does not resist them . "" If you can't stand the political pressure, grab the pen, go home and go to sleep, "he ironized.
During his career, he had to investigate from a complaint by Alfredo Yabrán against Cavallo when they fought for control of airports and private mail to one of the many causes against María Julia Alsogaray. When he received this type of not so romantic pressure, he could not be nervous and answered the phone saying: "The masked man does not give up."