The murder of a trans woman at a checkpoint: military documents do not support the defense of the accused soldier

In the military documents he appears as Carlos Julio Giraldo Díaz, but his name was Juliana.

She died at a military checkpoint between the towns of Miranda and Corinto, in the tense department of Cauca.

She was not part of an armed group, she did not carry weapons, she did not attack anyone.

On the morning of September 24, 2020, a Thursday like any other, the car Francisco Larrañaga was driving was shot.

Juliana, who was in the passenger seat, died.

The investigation into the death of this transsexual woman has been on the shelves of various courts ever since.

The defendant is the soldier Cristian Saavedra, who was close to finishing the 12 months of his military service and who pulled the trigger.

Saavedra, detained since September 2021, says he is innocent.

At first, he alleged that the vehicle sought to evade military control, and shot at the tire.

The bullet would have hit the asphalt, he says, and, when it ricocheted, went through the metal of the car to reach Juliana.

His most recent argument is another: that Juliana was already dead when they arrived at the checkpoint.

This is what his defender José Luis Villafañe will defend at the hearing to start the trial, scheduled for this Monday.

But the Army itself has assumed that the death of Juliana, or Carlos Julio as the military calls him in internal documents on many occasions, was the result of a military operation.

That is to say, that she died from the checkpoint.

They do not note that she had been dead before the shot.

On the contrary, according to an official document from the Military Forces that comes from a leak of more than 516,000 documents obtained by Guacamaya Leaks, to which EL PÁIS had access thanks to the French organization Forbidden Stories, from the beginning the military understood that the cause of death was the shot, and they have not indicated any other hypothesis.

This is the technical file of the case, a format used by various military instances to follow up on some deaths that are of special relevance.

One of the reasons is that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has issued a warning about the case.

That happened with Juliana.

The technical file refers to the event as "Death of Carlos Julio Giraldo Díaz, recognized by the name JULIANA".

The format appears in various emails;

The most recent is the one sent on April 28, 2022 by Navy Lieutenant José Luis Solarte, head of the area for the protection of special groups of the Ministry's Human Rights Directorate, to Nancy Yanet Cárdenas, who worked in the Human Rights Directorate. Human Rights and IHL.

The file contains the version of the person in charge of the checkpoint, Sergeant Hernando Oyola.

The non-commissioned officer explains that Saavedra "reacts with his staff weapon towards the vehicle's tires", that it then "stops as a result of a projectile impact on one of the tires", that the driver immediately gets out and "shouts that his partner who was in the co-pilot's position was dead" and that the death of a civilian named Carlos Julio Giraldo Díaz recognized under the name "JULIANA" is accredited.

The format also recalls that that same day the Cauca Specific Command issued a press release stating that when the soldiers "were carrying out military control work in the area, a woman was killed by a shot by a member of the Force. ”.

No other document in the massive leak refers to another version of events.

Saavedra finished his military service a month and a week after Juliana's death.

He never received disciplinary sanctions.

His case advanced in the ordinary and military criminal courts.

The Sectional Council of the Judiciary decided that he owed the ordinary, where he is in criminal trial.

There a judge must determine not only if the shot was the cause of Juliana's death, as the military understands, but if he is responsible for the crime of homicide of a protected person, which is the accusation of the Prosecutor's Office.

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