Natalia Iocco
07/29/2021 6:02 AM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 7/29/2021 6:02 AM
The shirt was black and the letters white.
He did not use capital letters and the stamp was not too large.
It was, in a garment, the synthesis of pain:
"je suis desénfanté"
, it said on the chest of Jean Michel Bouvier,
Cassandre Bouvier's
father
.
It means something like
"I am deshijado"
, an expression of the French that
gave name to the indescribable.
Cassandre was
29 years old
, French and historian.
A decade ago he had come to Buenos Aires for studies.
She met
Houria Moumni (24)
, they became friends.
Together they traveled to Salta to visit northern Argentina.
On July 29, 2011, a tourist from Corrientes
found them dead at the Mirador de San Lorenzo
, on a hill about 12 kilometers from the center of Salta.
They had been victims of sexual abuse and later
murdered
.
According to the records, they had entered that nature reserve on July 15 at around 6 p.m., two weeks earlier.
The investigation was plagued by violence, malpractice, and commotion in the province, in the country and also in France.
Jean Michel Bouvier met with the then president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and asked for her help to advance the investigation.
A year later, it celebrated the modification of the Penal Code by incorporating the figure of femicide as an aggravating factor in
gender crimes
.
The victims were found dead in the La Quebrada de San Lorenzo nature reserve.
File photo / Guillermo Rodríguez Adami.
They found Cassandre first, then Houria.
There were only two bodies in a remote place, with
no witnesses or indications of how they had gotten there
.
Just genetic material with no suspects to test against.
The Salta Police began a
brutal persecution
.
They arrested people for their criminal records or simply for living near the place of the discovery.
They beat them,
tortured them and tried to force them to confess
, in a hurry because a few days ago they had denounced the disappearance of María Cash and had (and did not have) evidence of her whereabouts.
The eyes of the country were on the province.
It was thanks to Houria's cell phone since
Gustavo Lasi
(34) tried to use it with his chip, that they reached him.
He had killed them - it was verified - with his father's carbine, he had stolen their camera to give it to his girlfriend and they found their
genetic material in the girls' bodies
.
He robbed them, raped them, and then killed them.
Gustavo Lasi, sentenced to life for the double femicide of French tourists.
According to the record, he indicated two accomplices: Santos Clemente Vera (41) and Daniel Vilte Laxi (34).
Lasi tried unsuccessfully to
confess to the rape to evade the charge for femicide
and not be sentenced to life.
He said - over and over again - that Vera and Vilte Laxi had fired.
They questioned contradictions and changes in his statement.
In 2014, the trial was held against the three defendants.
Gustavo Lasi was
sentenced to 30 years
.
Vera and Vilte Laxi were acquitted
.
That decision separated the families: Jean Michel Bouvier expressed his support for them and accused the investigators of
blaming an innocent man
.
He asked, many times, that they receive compensation for the time they had been detained.
The prosecution and the rest of the victims' relatives, including Cassandre's mother and sister, appealed to the Court of Appeal, as did the criminal prosecutor of Salta.
Santos Vera had been acquitted for the double femicide of the tourists but was later sentenced to life.
On February 3, 2016, Santos Vera learned that he
would return to jail
: since then he has been imprisoned in the Villa Las Rosas prison.
Chamber III of the Court of Appeal ordered to sentence Gustavo Lasi to
life imprisonment
as
"material and criminally responsible co-perpetrator of the crimes of robbery due to the use of a firearm, sexual abuse with carnal access aggravated by the participation of two or more people and the use of weapons (two facts) and homicide 'criminis causae'
(two facts), all in real competition "
.
In other words, it aggravated his sentence.
They upheld the acquittal of Daniel Octavio Eduardo Vilte Laxi
"by application of the benefit of the doubt"
and sentenced Santos Clemente Vera to
life
for the same crimes as Lasi, all in the same combo.
Did they convict an innocent man?
Both Vera's lawyer, José "Cacho" Vargas, and the organization
Innocence Project
, denounced irregularities in the investigation and in the procedure carried out by the Court of Appeal.
Cassandre Bouvier and Houria Moumni.
"The criminal procedural code of Salta is clear: the court could have rejected the acquittal but it should have ordered
a new trial
, which is what we want. But it did not do it, they did not even listen to it. I have no words for criticize that ruling because it goes against everything that the code indicates, "he questioned.
Among the rumors that circulated in the province spoke of sons of power, the participation of the Police in abuses and cover-up maneuvers to protect powerful members of the Salta elite.
The truth is that the rush to close the case and convict those responsible in order to
evade international criticism
"hampered the transparency of the process," the parties warned.
According to Nicolás Ortiz, a lawyer for a part of the unified family in the lawsuit, told
Clarín
: "The position of the Houria family, the mother and Cassandre's brothers is to close the case. They and we are convinced that the three defendants are responsible and, if there is someone else involved, we also want an investigation ".
In total, Vera has been in detention for 8 and a half years, and is now awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court of Justice in the hope that her sentence will be revoked.
The complaint appeal was filed on August 1, 2017. The Attorney General of the Nation, Eduardo Casal, issued his opinion on June 16, 2020 and was circulated again by the members of the court.
Three of the five judges have already seen it.
Manuel Garrido
is the director of the
Innocence Project Argentina
, an organization that sponsors
people convicted of crimes they did not commit
.
"The irregularities of the ruling and the investigation were many. It was never clear in the file or what day the crime was committed. Furthermore, and this is the most serious, the genetic material used to base the conviction of Vera
is not conclusive
", Garrido detailed.
According to him, he has conflicting results: "One expert says that there is a trace of DNA that corresponds to Vera's paternal lineage. But in France, the conclusion of the experts, says that there is not enough material to confirm it. In addition, it identifies three other profiles that they do not correspond to any of the defendants. The worst thing is that when Vera's defense asks for the samples to make their expertises,
the court's response is that they are not there
, that they were lost. Now it seems that they found them in a safe but not they deliver them, they did not allow a cross-test to be made. "
The letter that Jean Michel Bouvier wrote to President Alberto Fernández to request that the investigation into the crime of Cassandre Bouvier and Houria Moumni continue.
Juan Michel Bouvier wrote a letter to President Alberto Fernández.
Due to the pandemic, he could not travel for this new anniversary.
"Since that July 30, 2011 - the sinister date on which I learned of his murder - I have been condemned, in perpetuity, to suffering, tears, hopelessness, depression ..."
, begins the text sent on 2 of June.
There he asks the Argentine Government to continue the investigation to resolve the questions
arising
from the case:
"Refusing to resume the investigations to learn the whole truth would, on the one hand, insult the memory of the two victims and despise their families; another would mean offending international justice, "he
said.
He also asked:
"I await with impatience the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. This court cannot validate the deficiencies and weaknesses of the police and judicial procedures of the Province of Salta. To legitimize them would constitute a denial of justice. It would be like distilling the poison of resentment in the hearts of women around the world and mainly Argentine women
.
"
MG
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