"Aggravated homicide", "homicide in excess of self-defence", "self-defence". Thus, from highest to lowest, are the options that this Tuesday will have the Federal Oral Court No. 5 of San Martin when it comes to resolving the fates of the two policemen of the Halcón group, of the Buenos Aires Police, prosecuted for killing SIDE spy Pedro "El Lauchón" Viale (59).
Jaime Stiuso's right-hand man, Viale was shot dead in his home in La Reja, Moreno's party, 10 years ago, on July 9, 2013. It was during an early morning raid ordered by the Federal Justice in a case on which there were always suspicions that she was armed.
Marks on the wall of the shots during the raid in which they killed the "Lauchón" Viale. Photo Archive / Diego Waldmann
The hypothesis of the family's lawyers - the most interesting theory - is that the Bonaerense put together a file to be able to enter Viale to kill him. They maintain that all this responded to an internal one and was orchestrated to settle an old dispute between Stiuso and Commissioner Hugo Matzkin, then chief of the Provincial Police.
The most conspiratorial version of this hypothesis is that the police went with the express order to kill the "Lauchón". The lightest affirms that there was an indirect intention, that the operation was armed in such a way that there was no other possible end.
But little of that was said at the trial.
Viale was Stiuso's right-hand man and ended up with 11 bullets in his body.
The "spicy" witnesses proposed in that line by Santiago Blanco Bermúdez - representative of the widow - were not finally accepted by judges Nada Flores Vega, Hector Sagretti and Maria Claudia Morgese Marin. On the list was Stiuso himself, former governor Daniel Scioli, Matzkin and a large group of former SIDE spies.
Trying to keep a much lower profile, the court decided to stick to what happened that morning of July 9, 2013 and the role played by police officers Gustavo Ernesto Martínez (46) and Pedro Nelson Alegre (36). It should be clarified that only two of the 10 police officers involved in the operation came to trial because they were the ones that the ballistic experts pointed out as the material authors.
CLAIMA20151125_0055 Former SIDE agent Pedro "Lauchón" Viale.
Viale, an experienced spy who answered directly to Stiuso, ended up with 11 bullets in the body: one in the face, six in the chest, three in the left arm and one in the hip on the right side. He died in his own bathroom while his wife tried to take shelter in the matrimonial room.
In total, 10 police officers were prosecuted in the case, including commissioners José Armando Tsuruoka, Enrique Roberto Maldonado and Hugo Orlando Fasone, who led the operation. But in 2015 the House ruled them "lack of merit." That's why only Martinez and Alegre are on the bench.
Jaime Stiuso, former Director of Operations of the SIDE.
The oral trial that ends on Tuesday was quick and last week the pleadings stage was concluded. Lawyers for Viale's family asked for life imprisonment for both police officers for the crime of "aggravated homicide." Both the prosecution, in charge of Carlos Cerras and the complaint of the former SIDE – current Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) – opted for a more lenient figure: "homicide in excess of legitimate defense" that has a criminal scale equal to that of "culpable homicide", of 1 of 5 years.
In this case the prosecutor asked for 4 and a half months in prison for Martínez and three years and 8 months for Alegre. Both are effectively enforced (once the ruling is signed) but with what the police were imprisoned at the beginning of the investigation they would not return to prison. As for the defenses, they went directly for acquittal for self-defense.
The case
The trial for the crime of Pedro "El Lauchón" Viale began on March 21 in the courtroom of the Federal Oral Court No. 5 of San Martín and included a visual inspection in the house where everything happened, a place that the family has not inhabited for a decade.
That morning of a national holiday, the federal judge of Tres de Febrero Juan Manuel Culotta had ordered 18 raids in the framework of a drug trafficking case. Eavesdropping on a Buenos Aires policeman led to Viale, but in a rather confusing way. According to the official version, from that his house in La Reja, Moreno's party, entered the list of places to be raided and, his name, in the arrest warrants.
Culotta did not order that it be specifically the Halcón Group, that was decided by the Superintendence of Illicit Drug Investigations in charge of Commissioner Tsuruoka, a man of extreme confidence of the then head of the Bonaerense, Hugo Matzkin.
It is in this decision to send the specialized group at dawn and in the very origin of Culotta's cause, where the spy's family relies to maintain that everything, from minute one, was armed to assassinate him.
The short version: Viale was chosen by the leadership of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires to send a message to Stiuso, in revenge for the help that the SIDE gave to the Federal Police to arrest the narco Miguel Ángel "Mameluco" Villalba in August 2011, whom they wanted as their own prey. Perhaps that is why the complaint asked for the testimony in the trial of several heads of Dangerous Drugs of the Federal of that time.
Miguel Angel "Mameluco" Villalba, convicted of leading a drug gang in San Martin.
"It is so evident that it was a settling of accounts that even the AFI itself decided to assume the role of plaintiff in this process on the understanding that it was not a mere procedural error but that it was a direct attack on an agent," says the brief by which Blanco Bermúdez and his partner Julián Subías requested at the time the elevation to trial of part of the file.
In the end, the AFI did not align itself with the family.
Regardless of Tuesday's verdict, one thing is clear: it seems increasingly difficult to know exactly what happened the morning the "Lauchón" was killed.
MG
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