/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/U4KZVLQTRJWRWO2T3LSDOGBM3Y.jpg)
Argentine Fernando Báez Sosa, 18, was beaten to death by a group of rugby players.
Five of those accused of this crime, perpetrated three years ago at the exit of a nightclub on the coast, were sentenced this Monday to life imprisonment.
The judges gave them the maximum sentence for considering them co-authors of the crime.
The other three defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison for being considered secondary participants in his death.
The sentence of the Oral Criminal Court 1 of Dolores was received standing by the eight defendants.
Maximo Thomsen, 23 years old;
Ciro Pertossi, 22;
Luciano Pertossi, 21;
Enzo Comelli, 22;
and Matías Benicelli, 23, were sentenced to life for the crime of doubly aggravated homicide for premeditation and treachery.
Blas Cinalli, 21;
Ayrton Viollaz, 23;
and Lucas Pertossi, 23, to 15 years as secondary participants in the same crime.
Most of the convicts had in common their membership of the Náutico Arsenal de Zárate rugby club.
Upon hearing the ruling, Thomsen fainted, while two of the life sentences broke down in tears.
Rosalía Zárate, Thomsen's mother, asked for a doctor and shouted that they let her be with her son and that they take the journalists out of the room.
The judges briefly interrupted the reading of the verdict and resumed it shortly after without Thomsen's presence.
Here we are Fer, 3 years later.
3 years of struggle, anguish, doubts, fears.
Life for 5 of your 8 assassins.
The heart hurts, because you don't come back, it hurts because they took everything from you.
Life is lost forever, so is freedom.#JusticiaPorFernando pic.twitter.com/O0X8RoJ04k
— Justice for Fernando Báez Sosa.
(@JusticiaPorFer_) February 6, 2023
“Here we are Fer, 3 years later.
3 years of struggle, anguish, doubts, fears.
Life for 5 of your 8 assassins.
The heart hurts, because you don't come back, it hurts because they took everything from you.
Life is lost forever, so is freedom," the victim's family wrote on Twitter after hearing the sentence.
Her words are accompanied by a photo of Báez Sosa with his mother, Graciela.
Fernando Báez Sosa was the only child of the Paraguayans Silvino Báez and Graciela Sosa.
In January 2020, he went on vacation with his girlfriend and his friends to Villa Gesell, one of the most popular cities on the Buenos Aires coast among young people.
He had been there for a week when on the night of the 17th they went to dance at the Le Brique nightclub.
Inside there, the first clash with the rugbiers occurred, which caused them to be expelled from the premises after four in the morning on the 18th.
Back on the street, Báez Sosa moved a few meters away from his friends and when the rugby players recognized him, they attacked him from behind and began to hit him until he fell to the ground.
They continued to beat him even when he was not moving and lay unconscious, kicking him in the head and face, disfiguring him and causing internal bleeding that led to his death.
While some beat him, others prevented the victim's friends from trying to help him.
The beating, which occurred in one of the most central streets of Villa Gesell in the middle of the summer season, was witnessed by dozens of witnesses and recorded in recordings that went viral and were exposed as evidence during the trial.
The chats between the defendants in the hours after the crime were also leaked to the press, where they came to boast about what happened.
"We fight and win, we go to the center to reward," wrote one of them.
As they begin to realize that Báez Sosa is dead, they begin to look for an alibi that quickly falls apart.
"He's a black shit, we're going to kill him," one of them harangued during the attack, according to one of the 87 testimonies heard by the court, that of Luciano Bonamaison.
Although the death of Báez Sosa was not judged as a racial crime, the body that watches over discrimination, Inadi, stressed in a statement that it was "a clear racist attack."
A paradigmatic case
The verdict came after three years of waiting that have been especially slow in recent weeks.
During all this time, the country has watched in a loop, on open television and on the main news portals, how Fernando Báez Sosa was beaten to death by the defendants.
The fire has been fueled in recent weeks: the final stage of the trial, in which the defendants and their families spoke for the first time, began in early January with a public broadcast that hundreds of thousands of people followed on the Youtube channel of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Province of Buenos Aires.
This Monday, more than 95,000 people connected to the judicial channel to listen live to the sentence.
The judge in charge of the investigation, David Mancinelli,
AME2133.
DOLORES (ARGENTINA), 02/06/2023.- Relatives and friends of Fernando Báez Sosa, assassinated in 2020, react upon hearing the ruling this Monday in Dolores.JUAN IGNACIO RONCORONI (EFE)
Outside the Dolores court and also at the gates of the Le Brique nightclub, in Villa Gesell, the life sentence was greeted with applause and hugs among those who had gathered there in support of the Báez Sosa family.
“Thomsen passed out?
That's how they beat Fernando, passed out," ironized the plaintiff lawyer, Fernando Burlando, as he left the courtroom.
Burlando, a celebrity and celebrity lawyer, offered to work on the case for free and his presence ended up drawing media attention.
On January 27, when the hearings ended and the court confirmed that it would hand down its sentence on Monday, the lawyer launched a poll on Twitter in which he asked his followers what the sentence should be "according to the evidence presented."
He received more than 267,000 votes amid accusations of wanting to put pressure on the judges.
The thirst for justice invaded the streets and the networks.
"If it is not perpetual, it is not justice", was a slogan that was sung at the doors of the court and that has decorated many walls and even business doors in the Argentine capital.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS America newsletter and receive all the latest news in the region.
