Police officer Luis Chocobar greets the then president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, on February 1, 2018. PRESIDENCY OF ARGENTINA
The Argentine Justice has sentenced this Friday to two and a half years in suspended prison and five years of disqualification from office to the Argentine policeman Luis Chocobar, who has become the symbol of the security policy of the macrismo.
On December 8, 2017, 18-year-old Juan Pablo Kukoc assaulted and stabbed an American tourist with an accomplice on the streets of the popular Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca.
Alerted by the neighbors, Chocobar pursued them.
During the escape, he shot Kukoc in the back, who died shortly after from his injuries.
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The Oral Juvenile Court 2 found Chocobar guilty of the crime of aggravated homicide in the line of duty.
As it is a sentence of less than three years, Chocobar will not enter jail.
Even so, he will also not be able to act as a police officer again until his disqualification expires.
"I am calm for the people who support me," Chocobar has limited himself to saying to the media that were waiting for him outside the courts.
Kukoc's accomplice in the assault on the American tourist has been sentenced to nine years in prison.
The ruling is far from the life imprisonment requested by the family, which denounced that Kukoc was the victim of an extrajudicial execution, but it also leaves Chocobar's defense dissatisfied, who was seeking acquittal and has advanced that he will appeal the sentence before a higher court.
Chocobar has left the court in the company of the former Macrista Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich, who has reiterated her support. “I consider this sentence to be unfair because it was said that everything he had done was right and in the last step he was wrong. The judges have to see the whole. There was a person wounded with nine stab wounds and a policeman came out to defend that citizen and confronted the criminal. He could have pretended to be distracted and went home, because he was in civilian clothes, but he acted as a policeman. What they do is paralyze all the policemen like this one ”, declared Bullrich. “With Chocobar's two-year sentence suspended, they have just tied the hands of the police and effectively banned the use of firearms by the security forces.A terrible precedent that leaves the victims and society unprotected against crime ”, agreed the opposition deputy Luis Petri.
They convicted Luis Chocobar, a policeman who did his job: defend a victim from an assault and attempted murder.
This sentence condemns the whole of society: what police will want to act knowing that they will end up on trial?
Unfortunately, the story was stronger than the truth.
pic.twitter.com/nktK2lLfYM
- Patricia Bullrich (@PatoBullrich) May 28, 2021
On the contrary, Argentine organizations for the defense of human rights such as the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), criticized the sentence for considering that it consolidates “erroneous messages about the use of lethal force and generates scenarios of impunity for future acts of violence. police abuse ”. “When the police assassinate with a lethal weapon a person who was not a threat to his life or that of third parties, what the inter-American human rights system considers an extrajudicial execution takes place. These practices are prohibited and those responsible must be punished ”, the organization has tweeted.
Former President Mauricio Macri received Chocobar as a hero in the Casa Rosada during his government.
As a result of this case, Macri relaxed the protocol for the use of firearms by allowing the police officers to fire without calling out or receiving a previous attack.
The heavy-handed policy did not continue with Macri's successor, Alberto Fernández.
The new minister, Sabina Frederic, from CELS, quickly repealed the protocol approved in 2018.
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