A year after the crime of Fabián Gutiérrez, they still have not been able to open the victim's phone to analyze his latest calls.
Lucia Salinas
07/02/2021 6:02 AM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 07/02/2021 19:26
He had been Cristina Kirchner's private secretary.
He had an
inexplicable fortune
for his income level.
He had declared as
repentant
in the most resonant case of corruption against the governments of his former bosses Nestor and Cristina.
He was looking for a quiet life away from noise in El Calafate, Santa Cruz, where his family was, but until then he was followed by atrocious death.
It had been
a moving target for
several months
.
The last hours of Fabián Gutiérrez's life were marked by blows to different parts of the body, knife cuts and a strangulation that even today, a year after the murder, it is not known exactly
how or with what occurred.
During those four hours in which he was held captive in his own home, Cristina Kirchner's former secretary suffered all kinds of torture, until he was finally assassinated.
Although the three young men accused of killing him have already been arrested and prosecuted in the case, his murder continues with several questions still unanswered.
And a remarkable amount of
loose ends
and pieces that are part of the context of his murder but that do not fit anywhere: an indecipherable cell phone, a van a few meters from the crime scene that later disappears, the concrete possibility of a fourth murderer that is not yet identified and a number of strange situations and still without explanations.
The three accused young men await the start date of the trial in prison.
They are separated, in cells measuring two meters thirty by three fifty and without access to courtyards or common spaces.
They receive few visits.
Facundo Zaeta (20 years old) began to study Law.
His parents live near the El Calafate police station where he is detained (Second Branch) and they regularly bring him food and warm clothes.
Facundo Gómez (21) and Pedro Monzón (19) are imprisoned at the First Police Station.
Gómez was a father while in prison.
Monzón, who was the first to speak and to indicate where the victim's body was, spends his days alone and without speaking to anyone.
Gutiérrez's closest family - all residents of El Calafate - will face a trial for
money laundering
.
A year later, in addition to the cross accusations between the detainees who no longer speak to each other, the photo in the file shows several entrances to a labyrinth of mysteries without going through.
And there are at least
seven
well-marked
loose ends
.
1. The “hidden” treasure
The level of violence practiced on Gutiérrez's body ended in his death, but it seems clear that the long session of previous torture was intended for the victim
to give them information about something
.
Whether they got it or not, and whether they passed it on to someone, only the killers know.
Or one of them.
That plan that was intended to be made of a treasure was reflected in a notebook. In it was written the news of an accusation against Gutiérrez linked to the cause of the bribery notebooks. It was an indictment of Judge Claudio Bonadio, where he pointed out that the money he had and the assets that made up the patrimony of the former secretary of Cristina Kirchner, were the
product of corruption
. The notebook had paragraphs taken from a note from the newspaper
Ámbito Financiero
whose title spoke of its processing.
What that notebook exposed is something that in Comodoro Py the justice had pointed out: Gutiérrez was a millionaire and could not justify a patrimony that in assets amounted to 900 million pesos.
His fortune "ended up condemning him in various ways,"
sources in the case
told
Clarín
.
Fabián Gutiérrez was a cadet at the Caja de Servicios Sociales, a social work in Santa Cruz where his mother was a civil servant.
It was in 1994. The following year it was already part of Nestor Kirchner's kidney.
Gutiérrez had gone to work with the Kirchners owning an old car.
When it came out, it had
36 buildings, 35 cars, and 3 boats
.
"They sought impunity in the crime of robbery, given that the victim would have recognized them at some point when he managed to free himself when he was tortured inside the house,"
said the judge when he prosecuted the defendants for double aggravated homicide.
Everything was confirmed by the Appeals judge, who said that the injuries caused to the victim
"are not the accidental or occasional result of the robbery, as the defense pretends to make it appear
.
"
Gutiérrez's assets took on another relevance in the case.
The justice in Santa Cruz considered that there was
"a plan developed among the defendants to carry out a robbery aimed at seizing
a sum of money in dollars that Fabián Gutiérrez allegedly had at his home
,
"
which was already being processed for money laundering and , in parallel, investigated in the case of the bribery notebooks.
Above: In 1995 Fabián began working with Néstor Kirchner and over the years he became one of the family's trusted men.
Gutiérrez was prosecuted along with a dozen businessmen.
/ Mario Sayes and Opi Santa Cruz.
The premeditated plan
"was going to take shape when the conditions were given to act on insurance,"
says the prosecution.
And he adds that
"the main objective could not be achieved
.
"
That is, the murderers would not have found the money - although they said they took 90,000 pesos or dollars, that sum never appeared - but it is not clear if Gutiérrez managed to pass any information on the hidden "treasure" and, in that case, if someone other than the killers
went looking for him somewhere
.
2. The "dumb" phone
That July 2, after the crime, Gutiérrez was called tirelessly.
His mother was the first to detect that
something was wrong
.
Fabian did not respond.
His cell phone - an
iPhone
with a red casing - was thrown in a field and then found by the police of the province of Santa Cruz and became a mystery: after a year, it was never known
what was in that cell phone, with whom he had spoken the last time, to whom he wrote, nothing
.
His phone became a "mute" one.
Fabián Gutiérrez's cell phone submitted to the Gendarmerie in Buenos Aires.
The specialized area of the National Gendarmerie informed the Justice, last November, that it could not recover
a single data
from the iPhone of the former private secretary of Cristina Kirchner. The request for expertise on the device had two moments. The first occurred when they barely found the phone and were still trying to find Gutiérrez's whereabouts. This first task was carried out by the Police of the province of Santa Cruz. Hours later there were already three detainees in the case and the body had been found half buried in the house that one of the suspects rented.
The second moment was when an attempt was made to analyze its content.
"Fabián Gutiérrez's cell phone could not be opened, his information could not be recovered
,
"
the judge in the case, Carlos Narvarte
, confirmed to
Clarín
.
Now the device will be sent to the United States to be appraised and to try to access the information stored in the digital cloud.
“Perhaps it would allow us to find a plot behind the case that we do not know yet, other links that could have to do with this, the days before the murder, movements.
It is an important test
, "acknowledged a senior source in the case.
Fabián Gutiérrez was found dead on July 4.
NOW CALAFATE
Against this background, Zaeta's defense, led by lawyer Carlos Telleldín, maintains that
"Gutiérrez's phone could not be opened because it
was destroyed
, as was proposed three months ago and was confirmed by the Gendarmerie commander
.
"
From the beginning, the lawyers of the main defendant opposed the intervention of the provincial police, and now they have called for
the removal of that force
in the case.
3. An unspecified murder weapon
The murderers' plan began on Thursday, July 2 at 7:30 p.m., and the homicide would have been committed before 11
p.m.
The torture and beatings, before the murder, lasted for about
four hours
.
For the scene that earned him the accusation of aggravated homicide, Facundo Zaeta used
"his own hands and other elements to torture him
.
"
The elements used by the accused were, on the one hand, a
"sharp stab"
with which
"he would have intentionally caused five cuts in the neck area
.
"
And the strangulation occurred
"with a tie or with an element of similar characteristics
.
"
Now, Judge Narvarte asked for more expertise
"to know if we are talking about a rope, a noose or other material, so that during the trial that will be clarified,"
sources in the case explained to
Clarín
.
4. The mystery of the fourth murderer
The body appeared on July 4, half-buried in a cabin rented by Facundo Gómez, one of those accused and detained for the crime.
That scene opened a new line of investigation: the possible cover-up.
Were there more people there that morning, trying to bury the corpse in the frozen earth, hard as a rock?
Could only two of those guys do it?
The other said that he left before reaching the place where they left the body.
Pedro Monzón was the one who said that the body was in the cabin, and that they had left it in a bathroom.
But when the police arrived, following his data, they found him
half-buried
.
If the young man gave the precise data of the place where the body was, why would he lie by changing one location (the garden of the house) for another (the bathroom)?
The judge investigates the possible cover-up of the crime, thinking that someone could come after them and
move the body
.
"Those responsible for the homicide already know who they are, but we do not rule out that someone has collaborated in that stage in which they sought to bury the body," the judge told
Clarín
.
According to the Justice, the former secretary received blows to the arms, hands, torso, head and face, various lacerations of different lengths, a fracture of the proximal phalanx of the left thumb and a total of five stab wounds in the neck area.
PHOTO: NOW CALAFATE
5. The alleged figurehead
A concessionaire in El Calafate became another link in the cause.
The owner is Martín Gómez (father of the defendant Facundo Gómez) who is in front of a high-end truck business.
The place was raided and documentation, such as sales books and tax information, was seized in order to know movements of money, to whom they were sold, how these operations were carried out, the sums of money involved.
Customers of the concessionaire were called as witnesses.
Judge Narvarte seeks to determine if Gómez acted as Gutiérrez's front man, because his agency went from selling old used cars to selling high-end zero kilometer vans.
Gutiérrez's own friends state in the file that the victim was dedicating himself
"to the car business."
The case seeks to trace
eleven RAM trucks
that passed through the agency under suspicion, along with other high-end vehicles that have sales
of over $ 600,000
.
The operations would have been carried out in cash and that "treasure" could possibly be what the young men who murdered Fabian were looking for.
Above: The crime scene has two co-authors: Gómez Chávez and Monzón.
They both wanted to hold Zaeta responsible for everything.
Gutiérrez was found dead in the home of one of his alleged murderers in Calafate.
Photo: Now Calafate
6. The "spy" van
Another truck became a piece of the overall puzzle.
It is a high-end vehicle that was parked outside Fabián Gutiérrez's house between nine at night and two in the morning: just the moment when the victim was tortured and the murder was committed.
No one so far could determine why that vehicle was located there, or who were the three people inside that seemed to be waiting for something.
This vehicle disappeared after the killers left Gutiérrez's house with the victim's body in the box.
There they loaded
a chest
that they found in the house and that it is not known what it contained.
Fabián Gutiérrez became "repentant" in the cause of the Notebooks, although he never made significant contributions.
PHOTO: TELAM
7. A strange journey to the middle of nowhere
After participating in the crime of Fabián Gutiérrez, Facundo Gómez, the son of the owner of the concessionaire who grew up suddenly, drove towards the road that leaves El Calafate and then turned north, on his way to the town of El Chalten.
There he stopped, in the middle of nowhere, for two hours.
And then he returned to El Calafate.
A geolocation study of Gómez's cell phone was ordered, which locates him in that place - a desolate place called Charles Fuhr, 35 kilometers from the city - after one in the morning.
It was the middle of winter.
Snow and the Patagonian steppe were the only things around.
While Gómez was there, he received four calls from Monzón
(1.08, 1.10, 1.15 and 2.18)
, he communicated with other numbers and returned to El Calafate, where the next morning there would be no talk of anything other than the sudden disappearance of Gutiérrez .
What happened in that place?
Why did he stay there for two hours?
Did you hide something?
Did you go looking for something the victim had hidden there?
Did you go to meet someone to tell them what had just happened or to pass on the data obtained from Gutiérrez while he was being tortured?
These are questions that the judge in the case is still seeking to answer.
A year later, the crime of the former secretary of Cristina Kirchner has three perpetrators of the murder who have yet to go to trial, but a hidden plot with too many open questions.
The vice president never said a word about the murder of her closest collaborator.
And yesterday, on the eve of the first anniversary of his death, he only posted a tweet to talk about another anniversary: that of his government's computer distribution plan.
Assassination of
Fabián Gutiérrez
1st of July
At approximately 6 pm
Fabián Gutiérrez
, who was living with his sister, moved to the house
on Santiago Perkic Street
.
July 2nd
At dusk
In his Amarok truck, he
picks
up
Zaeta
from his house.
7.30pm
They stop to shop at a supermarket.
Gutiérrez
returns home in the company of
Zaeta
.
Gomez
closes the dealership and asks
Monzón
to load a rope.
They drive in
Gómez's VW Trend
to Gutiérrez's house area.
They go down 9 de Julio Street, where they leave the car.
After a call from
Zaeta, they
walked to
Gutiérrez's
house
.
They enter the house through a mosquito net that
Zaeta
breaks
.
They torture
Gutiérrez,
who had already been
abducted, to
get information from him about where he keeps the money.
They kill him by hanging him.
They wrap the victim in a rug.
It is loaded by the bed of the victim's Amarok truck.
They leave
Gómez
where his car was, and he is going home.
Gómez and Zaeta
continue their journey.
They turn right at the corner of Cristina Kirchner's house.
They pass through the cemetery and arrive at the cabin where
Fabián Gutiérrez is
buried
.
They go to
Zaeta's
house
, passing
La Tablita
grill
and
Bar Mako on the way
.
July 4th
Around
2:00 AM
Zaeta and Monzón
return to
Gutiérrez's
house
to clean up the crime scene.
4.00 am approximately
They walk (Los Dos Pinos soccer fields) and ask for a remise that takes them to their respective homes.
The police find
Gutiérrez's
body
half-buried on the ground of the cabin.
HG