The machinist of the tragedy of Once and the brakes, a fake news that returns: what interests are behind?

Maria Belén Etchenique

09/25/2020 - 18:51

• Clarín.com

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In 2020 the verb is confessed: "The driver

that he canceled the braking system."

In 2018 the verb was admitted: "The driver

that he overruled the braking system."

In 2017, the sentence was shorter: "The driver

" or "The driver did not apply the brake," as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said that same year in an interview with journalist Chiche Gelblung.

In that interview she also simplified: "If you don't stop and crash, uh, well ...".

The subject of Cristina Fernández's statement was Marcos Córdoba, who was driving the plate 16 train of the Sarmiento line on the morning of February 22, 2012. The subject he alluded to was the tragedy of Once, one of the most serious railway incidents in Argentine history.

For the current vice president, Córdoba was solely responsible for the crash in which 51 people died, including a pregnant woman.

The State, no.

Marcos Córdoba, during the oral trial in the AMIA room of the Comodoro Py courts.

Photo: Alfredo Martínez

The

embodied in Marcos Córdoba is old and reappears from time to time, even though the tragedy of Once was investigated and tried in two separate cases.

In the first trial, the culprits ended up in prison with a firm sentence.

The Supreme Court of Justice on

and, in doing so, there are no more instances of review.

No higher judicial body can modify the punishment imposed on those responsible.

Among them is the machinist Marcos Córdoba.

But he's not the only one.

The culprits also include the president of the private company -TBA- that had the concession of the service, Sergio Claudio Cirigliano, and the former Secretary of Transportation of the Nation, Juan Pablo Schiavi.

His predecessor in office, Ricardo Jaime, too.

For the tragedy of Once, Jaime first received a sentence of seven years in prison, but in a second instance the Chamber of Cassation unified his sentence for other crimes he had committed - among them he admitted to having received bribes - and assigned him eight years in prison .

This Thursday the Court sent its file again to the Chamber of Cassation, in search of a double compliant: two equal sentences.

Both the driver, the president of TBA and the two former transportation secretaries remain in prison.

Of the total of those responsible, seven are in jail, nine have house arrest and four, parole.

Relatives of victims of the Once tragedy, at the entrance to the Comodoro Py courts, awaiting the sentence in the Once II case.

Photo: Andres D'Elia

Former Planning Minister Julio De Vido is another of those convicted, but his situation has not yet been addressed by the Supreme Court.

In the first case - Eleven I - another process was ordered to investigate his role in the shock of the Sarmiento formation against the platform of Station Once.

When it all happened,

In the second trial, called Once II, De Vido received a sentence of five years and eight months in prison for fraudulent administration to the detriment of the public administration.

.

De Vido was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison in October 2018. He was not in the room, his last words before the reading of the sentence were by videoconference Photo: Luciano Thieberger

Jaime, Schiavi and the president of the TBA concessionaire, Cirigliano, were also convicted of fraud against the State.

But the three were also joined by another responsibility:

that caused injuries - some very serious - in 789 people and the death of 51, including a woman with a six-month pregnancy.

The Justice considered that this crime also falls to the machinist Córdoba.

In the oral trial it was proven that

and breached the concession contract, causing damage to the State's assets.

The company was able to do so

, such as Jaime first and Schiavi later, who were obliged to control the rail transport system.

For Justice, the tragedy of Once was foreseeable in the eyes of the businessmen and officials: they knew of the precarious condition in which the wagons were and were aware of the alerts that had been made by the National Commission for the Regulation of Transport and the General Audit of the Nation.

For eight years, the survivors and victims have been meeting on platform two of the station.

At 8:33 in the morning a siren sounds, it was the time of impact.

Photo: Rolando Andrade Stracuzzi

In the case of the engine driver Córdoba, the judges considered that the crash occurred because he

.

The system relied on a large mushroom-shaped button, which was installed in the cockpit, above the gear knob.

When the train was running, the conductor had to press it constantly.

If the driver fainted, had a heart attack, or suffered any other problem that prevented him from driving, the train would stop dead.

"It sounded good in the manuals, but the machinists

by simply moving a third lever," wrote journalist Graciela Mochkofsky in her book

.

"So they could release their hand from the push button with the train running and use it to smoke a cigarette, to scratch themselves, to let it rest."

It was a sloppy and popular practice.

The Once railway tragedy caused 51 deaths and more than 700 injured.

Stock Photo

When every year the statements about Marcos Córdoba appear, sometimes as a confession, others as an admitted question, others in the form of a lie - he did not stop - they refer in a unique way to that deactivated system.

Gregorio Dalbón and Maximiliano Rusconi;

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, on one occasion, in the interview with Chiche Gelblung.

Gregorio Dalbón

is a lawyer who in early 2000 was known on television programs for representing traffic victims.

In Eleven's trial, he joined as representative of complaint 1. The survivors and relatives of victims of the tragedy were grouped into three complaints.

On impact, the second car accordion with the first.

That happened because the formation was not safe.

Photo: Gerardo Dell'Oro

At the beginning of the case, Dalbón was critical of the officials of the transportation area and the owners of TBA.

​

In the middle, in a meeting of Judge Claudio Bonadio with the victims to ask them to unify their legal representation to simplify the procedures, Dalbón

.

First, he rebuked the judge and then he answered wrongly to court employees who told him which door to exit from, according to Mochkofsky reconstructed in his book.

According to the story, Bonadío asked him to lower his tone.

Dalbón refused.

And Bonadio ordered that they put him in prison.

Mochkofsky wrote: "When a firefighter from the Federal Police, assigned to the courts, had him arrested, Dalbón ran away, turned into a fugitive, through the same corridors of the courts that he frequented as a lawyer."

Ricardo Jaime in the foreground, designer beard and tan;

behind him, the relatives of victims of the tragedy.

December 2015. Photo: Pedro Lazaro Fernández

The profile of

is high but not so high: he is the lawyer of Julio De Vido and Juan Pablo Schiavi.

Eleven days ago she wrote an opinion column for the site Infobae entitled "The truth and the tragedy of Once."

Nowhere in the publication is it specified who he represents.

De Vido, Schiavi, or any other former public official are mentioned.

The date of publication of Rusconi's opinion column coincides with that that same day Marcos Córdoba, and by extension the tragedy of Once, became a trend on social networks.

In that case, the sentences were hollow, with no arguments, but they were replicated long enough to position the topic.

The confession was about the "dead man system" overruled.

Something that the machinist

front of the Court, of survivors and relatives of victims during the oral trial.

From state terrorism to Once, through AMIA and Cromañón, the victims' families led the demands for justice.

Photo: Rolando Andrade

In no case was it explained that those responsible for the tragedy of Once had already been investigated, tried and convicted.

Nor was it clarified that the judges found Córdoba responsible for his actions but had differentiated that, in his case,

.

Nor did they say that

, less than that assigned to businessmen and state officials.

No one reported that the magistrates gave the greatest weight of responsibility to Ricardo Jaime, Julio De Vido, Juan Pablo Schiavi and Sergio Claudio Cirigliano.

No one said that there are

, nor that in May federal judge Marcelo Martínez De Giorgi considered it proven that the experts lied during the first trial of the tragedy -Once I- to harm Marcos Córdoba.

Of that, nothing.

Complaints on portals and networks, which appear and reappear, disregard facts.

For Justice, the tragedy of Eleven occurred due to

and a sum of factors: appalling operating conditions of the service, absence of controls by the National Transportation Secretariat, the negligent driving of the driver, the excess of passengers, driver's cabs without speedometers, poor braking characteristics, a service plagued with delays and cancellations, trips with open doors, rusted carriages;

and the list goes on.

Viralization

On September 14, 2020, the driver was again a topic because there was a leak.

A report, made within a request for parole, was

.

Marcos Córdoba is imprisoned in the Marcos Paz Penitentiary Complex.

His sentence expires on December 31, 2021. As of late November, he can be

, although it is speculated that he could access that benefit next week.

Córdoba had requested it based on the time he has been detained and his good conduct.

To assess whether or not he was granted conditional release, the execution prosecutor Guillermina García Padín requested

that included the intervention of the Interdisciplinary Criminal Execution Team, with the permission of the judge.

Within this procedure, a psychologist and a social worker interviewed Córdoba in jail.

Marcos Córdoba, the machinist, being rescued from the driver's cab, on the morning of February 22, 2012. File photo

"The function of the team members is to verify if Córdoba complied with the prison regulations, if it had sanctions or not, if it studies, if it is prepared to reinsert itself in the future," Valeria Corbacho, the machinist's lawyer, told

when the Accusations towards his client grew on social networks.

Corbacho has been Córdoba's lawyer from the beginning, a few weeks after the tragedy occurred.

She defended former president Fernando De la Rúa in the oral trial for the alleged bribes in the Senate and the police andÅsors of the last military dictatorship.

"If there is something that

the members of the team

do is ask him about the fact for which he was investigated, investigated, tried and convicted. This is prohibited. This team has an action protocol that stipulates what the rules are," he complained .

In that conversation, he raised his suspicions about the type of questions that the psychologist and the social worker had asked and added: "There are open causes and

."

Gregorio Dalbón.

Lawyer for a part of the relatives of the victims of the Once tragedy.

The lawsuit that he directed requested 22 years in prison for Marcos Córdoba.

Photo: Archive

Days later, he presented a letter to the Justice to request measures because he considers that Gregorio Dalbón

by publishing extracts from the report of the Interdisciplinary Criminal Execution Team on social networks.

On September 14, when part of the report went viral, the confirmation of the Supreme Court was still missing, which arrived this Thursday.

In any case, the conviction of Julio De Vido has been under study for a year and a half in the Chamber of Cassation, which has not yet confirmed or revoked it.

There is an open instance.

The responsibility belongs to the other

"Eleven's defenses from the first day tried to collect all the blame for the tragedy in a voluntary or distraction maneuver by the driver," Leonardo Menghini told

.

During the trial Menghini represented eleven relatives of victims.

He is also a member of that category: he is the uncle of Lucas Menghini Rey, who died in the crash but his body was found two days later inside a cabin in the fourth car.

The formation of the tragedy - plate 16 - was

, trains that had been previously disassembled to assemble new Frankenstein to run on the tracks.

The slogan was to stretch as it was.

During February 2012, plate 16 operated for only three days.

On the 3rd of that month it had registered a technical failure and went out of service for a periodic review that ended on the 21st, when it returned to circulation.

It was the last day of the Carnival holiday.

The next day, February 22,

, 20, a musician and father of a four-year-old girl, waited at the San Antonio de Padua station, in the western part of Buenos Aires.

When the sky formation led by another driver -Marcos Córdoba would only take service two stations later- stopped its march on the platform, Lucas ran, dodging other passengers and jumped inside, through the glassless window of a cabin, between wagon three and four.

His sister Lara recognized him when reviewing with his father, Pablo Menghini, security camera footage of the Sarmiento line.

By then Lucas had been

for

.

After the warning, two days after the crash, the rescue team looked where they had not looked and saw it.

The relatives and survivors of the Once tragedy achieved something unprecedented in Argentina, that for the first time there were final sentences in crimes of corruption.

Photo: EFE / Javier Gallardo

It didn't take officials long to move the load.

On February 25, the then Minister of National Security, Nilda Garré, released a statement that said: "It was identified that Menghini's body was found inside the driver's cabin of the motorman of the fourth car, a

" .

A similar maneuver had previously starred Juan Pablo Schiavi.

On the afternoon of February 22, in the Ministry of Economy, in a press conference room he said: "The first two cars and all of us who ever use the railroad know that there is a very Argentine culture of this, of going to the end of the train to get off first and arrive earlier and pass before and not queue, and not wait for the bus, or get off the subway faster ... Those first two cars were crowded with people. They had much more load than what habitually, which produced that the accident took a level of tragedy ".

It had been the passengers and their behavior.

He did not mention that cancellations and delays for

had generated on February 22, and so many other times, crowds waiting at stations.

But he did say something else: "If this had happened yesterday, which was a holiday, surely that car would have impacted and it would have been a much lesser thing and not as serious as it was today."

Leonargo Menghini, Lucas's uncle, is a lawyer who carried out the trial that obtained the conviction of public officials, businessmen and the motorman.

Photo: Andres D'Elia

"The deaths are not only a consequence of the impact", says Leonardo Menghini Rey and prepares to list: "They are the consequence of a bumper that was static and functioned as a wall, when it should be pneumatic and cushion the blow; of the difference in heights between cars; of the corroded structure; that plate 16 was stopped to be scrapped, but due to problems in all the Sarmiento formations they had to move it, when

".

And he adds: "In all this there is the greater responsibility of the TBA directors and the officials who did not control and allow such atrocity."

For Leonardo Menghini, there are no coincidences regarding the moments in which these fake news centered on the machinist emerge.

"It is proven that

."

It hit at 20 kilometers per hour and at the beginning of the platform it had entered 26 kilometers per hour.

It was also confirmed by the GPS.

Wanting to confuse that Córdoba uninstalled the train's braking system, when it comes to the dead man system, is a strategy to

and exert pressure on Cassation that has to resolve on the Julio De Vido issue. "

On October 21 there will be a hearing in the Eleven II case.

The relatives of the victims will ask that De Vido also be convicted of aggravated negligent damage, the crime for which Jaime, Schiavi, Cirigliano and Córdoba were already convicted and which translates into being responsible for having caused injuries to hundreds of passengers and the death of 51 people, including Tatiana Lezana, six months pregnant.

Look also

Tragedy of Eleven: "It was proven that it was the result of corruption", highlighted the relatives of the victims

Tragedy of Eleven: the Court confirmed the conviction of former Secretary of Transportation Juan Pablo Schiavi