The trial against the former governor of Tucumán,
José Alperovich
, will resume next Monday and will continue with witnesses from the prosecution and the complaint who will seek to describe the context in which the victim found himself during the periods in which he worked alongside Alperovich. .
The young woman who denounced the man from Tucumán was
the daughter of a cousin of the then senator
and the granddaughter of a close friend of his.
That's why she came to work as his assistant while he was a national senator.
"His family warned him that 'politics was difficult' before starting to work. But the guarantee of trust, they said, was José, who was someone in the family.
That bond allowed him to exploit that closeness
," his online lawyers confided. with the accusation.
The trial, carried out by the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) No. 29 under Judge Juan Ramos Padilla, held its second hearing yesterday with the testimony of
five witnesses,
family members of the victim, who recounted the ordeal that the victim was going through. young, whose
identity is preserved to protect it.
Next week, family and friends will continue to testify, although it is not defined who they are because the majority are in Tucumán and must organize the logistics of the summons.
It is expected that after a long round of witnesses from the environment, experts and psychologists who accompanied the young woman during the process prior to the complaint will testify.
And then people from Alperovich's campaign team and the National Senate, witnesses of different situations linked to the abuses.
Alperovich at the first hearing of the trial: he arrived at the court accompanied by his daughter.
Alperovich did not attend his own trial and decided to watch it by video call, with the permission of the court.
According to Télam,
he drank mate and smoked while listening to the witnesses.
Specifically, they accuse him of
three acts of sexual abuse
- two attempted - and six of aggravated sexual violence.
The reported attacks occurred between 2017 and 2018 in the City of Buenos Aires and the province of Tucumán.
The victim is currently pregnant and 33 years old.
According to her, the abuse occurred when she was 27 years old.
To preserve her pregnancy and postpartum process,
she is authorized not to attend the hearings, although she can do so via zoom whenever she wishes.
Alperovich at the first hearing of the trial.
The young woman's grandmother, an aunt, a "cousin sister", a friend and a cousin's husband were the ones who testified this Thursday.
Their names are not released so as not to identify the alleged victim.
The stories coincided and made reference to the physical deterioration that the young woman suffered while working with the former senator.
The link between them began thanks to a friendship between the Tucumán politician and the victim's grandfather.
The wife was the first witness:
"She was a very active girl, very efficient and creative," she described her granddaughter.
At the same time, an aunt indicated that she was transforming during that period: “She lost a lot of weight.
She is very tall and weighed 50 kilos, which is a pathological weight.
Her nails were falling out, her hair was falling out, she was shaking.
She had panic attack symptoms.”
Communiqué from Ni Una Menos Tucumán to demand that Alperovich be summoned for investigation.
They all agreed that they did not know about the abuse because the young woman dared to report it when she resigned.
"I could not believe it.
My husband was like a father to him… he was another son.
(...) I couldn't believe that she had forgotten that she (...)
she was the granddaughter of that man that she treated like a father,"
the young woman's grandmother analyzed regarding the bond that her husband had. she with the former senator.
And she recognized the courage and help she needed to report and face the trial: “Today I admire her because
her bravery was impressive.
She prepared herself, she was with a psychologist.”
Pablo Rovatti is the lawyer who accompanies the young complainant during the trial.
She decided to testify during the first day, without Alperovich's presence in the room, and without the public.
In dialogue with
Clarín
Rovatti explained: "On the one hand it is important because they told and narrated what the process of recounting what had happened was like. The majority said that they tried not to go into too much detail, so as not to make him repeat what he had suffered. But "Despite that, there were details that were shocking. For example,
strategies used by the victim to prevent Alperovich from groping her in the car."
This point made reference to a testimony that described scenes, confided by the victim, in which she pretended to have her menstrual period to escape the abuse.
"It is ridiculous to believe that this could be an invented story,
sustained for six years and told with that level of detail, to think that a person would suddenly invent and want to get Alperovich dirty," analyzes Rovatti.
Alperovich's defense strategy is to discredit the victim's story and divert the accusation by attributing it to an "operation against him to bury him politically."
His story points to
victimization
due to an electoral strategy, but the testimonies of this day refute that version, as does the victim's precise and sustained story.
Along those lines, Adrián Sosa, one of the Tucumán's lawyers, considered that there were "several inconsistencies on the part of the complainant."
“We hope that the process goes as it should, that the witnesses are met, that the judge listens to the witnesses and the presentations of the experts,” he considered.
The accusing party is in the hands of the head of the Prosecutor General's Office No. 27 before the TOC, Sandro Abraldes;
The defense is headed by Augusto Nicolás Garrido and Adrián Sosa, and the complaint is led by Pablo Rovatti and Carolina Cymerman, from the Legal Assistance and Sponsorship Program for Victims of Crime of the Office of the General Defender of the Nation.
The next one will take place on Monday at 10, at the Paraguay judicial headquarters 1536.
The complaint
The accusation against Alperovich made
at the end of 2019,
the abuses and attacks judged occurred
between December 14, 2017 and March 26, 2018
, in the towns of San Miguel de Tucumán and Yerba Buena;
and in an apartment in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Puerto Madero.
The National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor's Office 10 of the Federal Capital intervened in the investigation of the case, temporarily headed by prosecutor Santiago Vismara, and the Specialized Prosecutor's Unit for Violence against Women (UFEM), directed by Mariela Labozzetta.
In May 2022, the Prosecutor's Office had considered that "in all cases, mediating intimidation for his commission", the former senator
"abused a relationship of dependency, power and authority."
S.C.