07/09/2020 - 14:16
Clarín.com
Politics
The Government made official this Monday the appointment of the former head of the Federal Penitentiary Service,
Víctor Hortel
, as an official of the National Council for the Coordination of Social Policies of the Presidency, the area in charge of Victoria Tolosa Paz.
Although it was published this Monday in the Official Gazette,
Hortel was appointed "as of January 25", for 180 business days
, as national director of Coordination and Normative Projection of Social Policies, under the orders of Tolosa Paz, with whom he wove a close link from the militancy in La Plata.
From her area in the Presidency, the leader carries out the program "Argentina against Hunger" and decided to add Hortel as "advisor on strictly technical issues," according to official sources.
"Victor did not want to go to any other position with exposure," they assured.
In fact, this is how Tolosa Paz and Hortel deepened their relationship: in 2017 the lawyer collaborated with the then councilor of La Plata and with a group of residents of Villa Esperanza in a case against a cooperative for alleged contamination, in which Justice ruled in his favor and arranged to administer drinking water to the area.
Likewise, it is a radical change for Hortel, who in his time as head of the SPF, between 2011 and 2013, during the Presidency of Cristina Kirchner, was the axis of controversy for promoting Vatayón Militante, the group that recruited within the prisons prisoners and organized temporary outings to cultural events without judicial endorsement.
Among the beneficiaries of that program were -among many others- prisoners for femicide, such as former Callejeros drummer Eduardo Vázquez, convicted of the crime of Wanda Taddei;
and Pablo Díaz, who confessed to having abused and murdered Soledad Bargna;
but Hortel remained in office.
Clarín's
investigation
, which even revealed images of Hortel
disguised as Spider-Man
sharing acts with the prisoners, did not remove the support of the Cristina Kirchner government.
Nor when it emerged that an artisanal boat began to be built in a Puerto Rawson shipyard - at a cost of close to a million dollars - with the aim that
prisoners from Rawson's Unit 6 went out to fish
at sea and then processed the product in a plant on the prison grounds.
Hortel only left his post in 2013, when 13 prisoners from the Federal Penitentiary Complex I of Ezeiza escaped, and he denounced that SPF personnel who resisted the transformation process had issued him a "bill" pass.
Víctor Hortel, behind the then Minister of Justice of the Nation, Julio Alak, at the conference in which his departure was announced.
Photo Luciano Thieberger
After leaving the Federal Penitentiary Service, Hortel lowered his profile and, already during Mauricio Macri's tenure in the national government, he resumed his work as a lawyer in the private sphere.
"With the government of Cambiemos increased punitivism and mass incarcerations," he questioned in one of his sporadic media appearances.
Although he was appointed from January, until May 2020 Hortel was formally in charge of the defense of businessman K Lázaro Báez.
He also defended the leader of the La Plata Uocra Juan Pablo “Pata” Medina and Humberto Monteros, former general secretary of that union in Bahía Blanca.
However, last year, as revealed by Infobae, he had suffered a stroke that kept him away from the courts.
With the change in management, before Alberto Fernández appointed former judge María Laura Garrigós de Rébori as intervener, Hortel sounded with possibilities of returning to office, after the departure of Emiliano Blanco, amid suspicions of espionage.
But the President leaned towards Garrigós: "It is the best appointment that the President could have made. He has to do a job in a complicated context," Hortel praised her at the time, making it clear that she did not run for the position.
PDL