Virginia Messi
08/14/2020 - 15:40
- Clarín.com
- Police
The procedural steps have already been completed: the suspects were arrested and investigated and the federal prosecutor Fernando Domínguez has already requested their prosecutions, with preventive detention. Now it only remains for the federal judge of San Isidro Sandra Arroyo Salgado to define whether he accepts the position of the prosecutor in one of the most scandalous cases in recent years. And this would happen in the next few hours.
Based on a four-year investigation conducted by prosecutor Domínguez, last Friday, July 24, the judge ordered about 30 raids. The most shocking were in the San Isidro court building and were centered on the activities of the prosecutor Claudio Scapolan and two of his secretaries.
That day, Scapolan's two secretaries - and a dozen middle and high-ranking police officers - were accused of at least six serious acts: the theft of half a ton of cocaine from an operation known as "White Lions"; the collection of bribes from minor drug traffickers in exchange for not arresting them or not setting up causes; the systematic looting in the raids and even the extortion of relatives of a trafficker as heavy as Claudio "Piturro" Andrada.
Scapolan (currently on leave) was not arrested because he has jurisdiction. And in his resolution for the next few days, Arroyo Salgado will not take it into account. The reason: after requesting a postponement of the investigation to read the case, Scapolan recused Arroyo Salgado, thus, his statement was frozen.
Raids in San Isidro for a cause involving the prosecutor Scapolan and several Buenos Aires police.
By not being investigated yet, Scapolan avoided, among other things, that his procedural situation could be defined. As Clarin learned , the judge would only set an inquiry date when deciding on her challenge, which, it is estimated, she would reject.
Beyond Scapolan there are other suspects who were not investigated because they are still at large. Among them are two lawyers, accused of acting together with the police in the bribery collection system, especially drug traffickers in exchange for benefiting or not arresting them.
In total, there are three lawyers involved in the investigation . But one of them, Matías Pedersoli, decided last Thursday to turn himself in and testify as an accused collaborator. Sources in the case explained that he tried to define responsibilities by pointing out his boss - another of the fugitive lawyers - as responsible for any maneuver. In his statement, he corroborated some details of the accusation. That was enough to get him released.
Pedersoli would have answered questions about the "Bustamante" case, one of which the prosecutor Domínguez analyzed. It is about a Boulogne cocaine kitchen, raided in October 2014. The operation, full of irregularities, was annulled by the Federal Oral Court No. 5 of San Martín.
The case and the cause have a high impact in the judicial sphere.
"Under a facade of prevention and prosecution of crime, the aforementioned illicit association used State resources to pursue drug traffickers outside their own criminal enterprise to finally arrest them - thus eliminating competition - and obtain narcotic material from them that they then returned to the original market ", said the judges in their ruling, dated October 27, 2016, and to which Clarin had access .
The chambermaids added: "It was not a simple accumulation of irregularities in the preventive action but, as already indicated, of the illicit behaviors planned and systematically executed by public officials that did not have the purpose of complying with their legal obligations and functional but to serve the drug trafficking that they developed through the use of the resources that the State put at their disposal precisely to combat it. "
In Creole: the police, together with the prosecutor Claudio Scapolan, armed operations to "mexican" the drug to the narcos and commercialize it themselves. In this particular case, there would be indications that they kept 40 kilos of cocaine.
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