Paraguay, investigated for the death of two Argentine girls in a military operation

The Argentine girls Lilian Mariana Villalba and María Carmen Villalba, eleven years old, died on September 2 in an operation by the Paraguayan Armed Forces against the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP).

“We have had a successful operation against the EPP.

After a confrontation, two members of this armed group have been killed ”, informed the president, Mario Abdo Benítez, when he announced the death of the minors in the camp that the guerrilla group had in a jungle area in the north of the country.

The family and human rights organizations reject the official version and denounce the destruction of evidence and the violation of investigation protocols.

Two months after the attack, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report reveals the existence of "serious irregularities" and demands, like the United Nations, an urgent and impartial investigation.

“The Paraguayan government must immediately allow Argentine forensic experts to carry out an autopsy and that they and the victims' families have full access to the collected evidence.

The longer the government delays, the more likely it is that possible evidence will disappear from the remains, ”says José Miguel Vivanco, director of HRW's Americas Division.

According to the family, Lilian and María are cousins ​​and lived with their grandmother in the Argentine province of Misiones (on the border with Paraguay and Brazil).

At the end of last year, they crossed into Paraguay to meet their parents for the first time, but could not return to the country due to the closing of borders due to the pandemic.

The relatives admit that the parents are members of the guerrilla group, but deny that the girls are.

For the government, instead, both were girl soldiers who were used as "human shields" by the adults in the camp.

The Paraguayan government attributes almost 70 murders to the EPP, half to civilians, since its creation in 2008.

Among the main irregularities detected by HRW is having buried the victims without performing an autopsy and having burned their clothes as alleged preventive measures against covid-19.

The Government did not indicate that the minors had symptoms of coronavirus.

Nor did he burn other clothing found in the camp and exhibited to the media, nor sheets, food packages and other seized objects, but at no time did he explain why they used a different protocol for the victims' clothing.

According to experts from the Independent Forensic Expert Group (IFEG), burning girls' clothing "represents the destruction of crucial evidence that violates the most basic and fundamental principles of forensic and criminal investigation."

The clothing could have helped to correctly determine the distance between the weapon and the victim, since having received shots at close range could have left marks of soot, fire and smoke on it, they point out in the report.

The Villalba cousins ​​were shot from the front, from the back and from the side.

One received seven gunshot wounds.

The other, two.

Their bodies were left face down on the ground.

"The position in which the bodies were left indicates that they were evidently fleeing" from the state forces that attacked the camp, said Cristian Ferreira, the Paraguayan forensic expert who examined the bodies at the scene.

The authorities have not released any images of the victims as they were found, which could help in the investigation.

# Paraguay🇵🇾

Head of @ONU_derechos, Jan Jarab, asked to investigate without delay the "very serious fact that ended the lives of two girls whom the #State had to protect", according to its obligation to guarantee the #rights of children and teenagers.

ℹ️https: //t.co/4qV0aCI8cN pic.twitter.com/Dxm5yctznJ

- UN Human Rights - South America (@UN_derechos) September 6, 2020

The official version maintains that the two victims were armed and one of them fired.

"The latest investigations that were carried out determined that one of the girls shot the members of the Joint Task Force with a 9-millimeter pistol," said prosecutor Federico Delfino, in charge of the investigation.

Delfino believes that both "were in the first two lines of fire and we presume that they were used to defend the leaders who when the Joint Task Force troops broke in were able to flee."

The prosecutor's hypothesis is based on the fact that one of them tested positive in the paraffin test carried out to identify gunshot residues in their hands.

IFEG experts emphasize that this test is unreliable and that other substances can give a positive result, such as beans, lentils, urine, tobacco, nail polish, soap and even tap water.

The Paraguayan government insisted for days that the age of the victims ranged between 15 and 16 years, higher than that stated on their Argentine identity documents.

To end the controversy, authorities exhumed the bodies and genetic analysis confirmed that they were both eleven years old.

As the weeks go by, more and more organizations cast doubt on the official investigation and ask for another impartial and transparent one. The Argentine Foreign Ministry issued a statement to demand that the Paraguayan Administration "clarify and identify those responsible for the death of two Argentine citizens." The United Nations, through its representative in South America for Human Rights, Jan Jarab, denounced that "this is a very serious event that ended the lives of two girls whom the State had to protect." Jarab assured that his office received "disturbing information" about the attempts to manipulate evidence of what happened, and considered it "crucial that international human rights standards are taken into account during the investigation."