10/25/2020 3:59 PM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 10/25/2020 3:59 PM
This Tuesday will be the 18th anniversary of one of the most shocking crimes in Argentine police history: that of the sociologist María Marta García Belsunce (50), committed in the country Carmel, of Pilar, which is unpunished.
The widower Carlos Carrascosa hopes that the Supreme Court of Justice will confirm the acquittal that freed him from jail in 2016 and that in the third trial pending in the case, where his former neighbor Nicolás Pachelo will be tried,
"the whole truth" will emerge. .
Carrascosa (75) gave an interview to
Télam
from his home in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where he also talked about the book he just published about his life and his days in prison.
It is 18 years since the murder of your wife, are you still hopeful that you will find out who the murderer was and do justice?
Of course yes, I'm still hopeful. Being able to fulfill what you projected in life is what happens to give you a reason to live. And if I didn't have that hope, I'm not saying that my life is ending, but having a goal is the essence of living. And there I am, wanting to find my wife's killer.
María Marta García Belsunce was 50 years old.
How did you come up with the idea of "Diary of an Innocent", the book you wrote while in prison and now released for sale?
The book was born a bit to occupy my free time, because in jail there is a lot of free time. It was a bit of a selfish idea, because it is like doing a therapy that one needs and it ended up being an autobiography. In principle, it was to tell my experience in prison. I was waiting for them to bring me the whole cause to read it and deepen it and, as they took time, I began to make an autobiography, from when I was born until I got to jail. Then the 38 bodies that the file had at that time came to me and there I began to read it and write about the case. But fundamentally, it is based on how my previous life was and how I lived my entire experience in prison being innocent. Later, I added my experience of what it was like to learn to be free again.
What do you expect the Supreme Court of Justice to do with the last appeal they made to your acquittal?
Of course I hope they reject that appeal and it is positive for me because I need to die innocent and it is the last little step left. I understand the delay because with all this pandemic I understand that the ministers of the Court only meet for causes of national relevance. I hope they can get together soon to solve my problem. I already count for my acquittal, issued in 2016, with the double consent of Cassation and the Buenos Aires Court, so of course I have hope.
What do you hope will happen in the trial in which your former neighbor Nicolás Pachelo and two former country Carmel security employees will be tried for the murder of his wife? Is there evidence?
One of my goals, when I got out of jail, was to have the investigation reopened and it happened. If Justice determined that these people go to trial, I have all my hope that they can prove what until now could not be proven. I know that it is very difficult, 18 years have passed since María's death and we know that every minute that she moves away from that day is a loss for the investigation. But there is always the hope that the whole truth will come out of that trial.
Nicolás Pachelo will be tried for the crime of María Marta García Belsunce.
PHOTO JULIO SANDERS
An unpunished case
18 years after the murder, the courts have not yet defined the definitive acquittal of Carlos Carrascosa, nor have they been able to initiate the third trial to find out whether Nicolás Pachelo and two former guards were responsible for the crime.
In a year traversed by the coronavirus pandemic, the García Belsunce case was not immune to the delay suffered by thousands of judicial files.
On the one hand, the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 4 of San Isidro had to hold the third oral debate on the case between August 3 and October 14 of this year, which has as alleged co-authors of the homicide the former neighbor Pachelo (44) - imprisoned in the Florencio Varela prison for a series of robberies in a country house in Pilar - and the two former security employees Norberto Glennon (55) and José Ramón Alejandro Ortiz (43).
The hypothesis that prosecutors Andrés Quintana and Matías López Vidal will try to demonstrate in this debate, which due to the pandemic still has no start date, is that on October 27, 2002, María Marta was shot to death when she surprised thieves inside her home.
The curious thing is that this line of investigation - the one that the García Belsunce family always maintained - comes to trial when Carrascosa's acquittal is not yet completely final due to a final appeal that is in the hands of the Supreme Court of Justice.
Carrascosa's judicial ups and downs in the case went from one extreme to the other: in the 2007 trial he was convicted of concealment, in 2009 the Court of Cassation convicted him of the murder, and after seven years of appeals the national court ordered a comprehensive review of the cause and in 2016 a new ruling detected serious irregularities in the process, acquitted him and recovered his freedom.
But that acquittal of the widower was appealed by the Buenos Aires General Attorney, so in 2018 the case fell again in the Supreme Court and
is currently under the analysis of Minister Ricardo Lorenzetti
, after the file has already passed through his colleagues Juan Carlos Maqueda, Elena Highton de Nolasco and Horacio Rosatti, according to
judicial sources
confirmed to
Télam
.
The only judicial novelty of the year in one of the many parts in which the García Belsunce file is fragmented, is that in May it was learned that the TOC 1 of San Isidro dismissed the two brothers of María Marta, Horacio García Belsunce (h) (71) and John Hurtig (55), and the neighbor Sergio Binello (67), who in 2011 had been convicted of covering up the crime, declaring
the prescription due to the passage of time
.
John Hurtig and Horacio García Belsunce (h), along with Irene Hurtig and María Laura García Belsunce in the Luis Majul TV program, in 2003. Photo DyN
On this eighteenth anniversary, a literary release by one of the key protagonists of history and a series by one of the streaming giants will try to once again capture the public's interest in one of the most resounding crimes in Argentine criminal history.
"
Diary of an innocent: a love, a cause, a life
" is the title of the autobiographical book that Carrascosa wrote during his years in prison in Unit 41 of Campana and now released by Ediciones B in printed version or by eBook.
Anecdotes "tumberas", his own vision about the case and his love story with María Marta are reflected in 240 pages where Carrascosa himself says, among other phrases: "
Three times I was imprisoned for a crime that I did not commit
", "Justice he sentenced me without evidence "and" I went to jail as a bourgeois and left as an express. "
Series by Netflix
"
Carmel: Who Killed María Marta?
" Is the docuseries that Netflix will premiere on November 5 about the case and promises to be a success.
Produced by Haddock Films, the same one that won an Oscar for the film "
El Secreto de sus Ojos
", the series will have four chapters of 47 minutes each in which unpublished material from the investigation and multiple interviews with the protagonists of the case will be presented. , like Carrascosa himself, Irene Hurtig, John Hurtig, Horacio García Belsunce (h) and even the prosecutor Molina Pico, who had not spoken publicly about the case since the 2007 trial.
In 2016 Carlos Carrascosa was acquitted for the crime of María Marta Garcia Belsunce.
Photo Jorge Sánchez.
On the 10th of this month, another event reminded the García Belsunce case when the businessman Jorge Neuss (72) also killed his wife Silvia Saravia with a shot in the head and in a bathroom of a house in another country in Pilar -Martindale- (69), who coincidentally had been a partner and friend of María Marta in her sociology degree, and later committed suicide by shooting herself to the temple.
That case seems to be already closed as a femicide by the same Justice that made mistakes at the beginning of the investigation in Carmel and that, 18 years later, could not yet clarify who and for what reason María Marta was murdered on October 27, 2002.
That day, the sociologist was cornered in the bathroom of her house and they fired six shots in the head, five of which penetrated the skull and, the sixth, the "bullet-pituto" that was thrown into the toilet, sowed doubts , motivated the autopsy and changed the story of an accident in the bathtub for a murder that still goes unpunished today.
EMJ
Look also
Netflix presented the trailer for the series about the crime of María Marta García Belsunce
Horacio García Belsunce, dismissed: "We endured 18 years, now it's our turn"