17 years ago, Nicolás Roberto Pachelo (47) had his lucky streak: on July 12, 2007, Oral Court No. 6 of San Isidro convicted Carlos Carrascosa (79) for covering up the crime of his wife, the sociologist María Marta García Belsunce, which occurred on the afternoon of October 27, 2002. And just two years later, on June 18, 2009, the Buenos Aires Court of Cassation upped the ante and sentenced him to life
imprisonment
as the author of that homicide.
In 2011 things did not stop improving for Pachelo, the resident of the Carmel country that María Marta's entire family was fully targeting.
On November 4 of that year, the Oral Court No. 1 of San Isidro found guilty of "
cover-up
" a large part of the victim's most intimate environment, including her brother-in-law, Guillermo Bártoli (he died in November 2014) and two of his brothers, Horacio García Belsunce and Juan Hurtig.
What could go wrong for Pachelo?
He was a problematic guy.
His father had committed suicide by shooting himself in 1996 (when he was 20 years old) and in 2003 his mother did so, jumping from the 11th floor of the same building at Libertador 184 (the one that still appears as Nicolás' address).
In 2005,
a Capital court sentenced him to three years and three months for robbing friends' houses.
Nicolás Pachelo was arrested in 2018.
But still nothing seemed to pierce his armor and the Belsunce case was moving away from him at full speed.
All of that was there, and it was part of Pachelo's sinuous and dark profile.
But the truth is that 12 years ago the authorship of María Marta's crime seemed to be buried under 20 tons of concrete and rulings that favored it.
He did well with the judges and that, in large part, was thanks to the skill of his historic lawyer, Roberto Ribas, popularly known in court as "El Flaco" Ribas, who fought alongside Pachelo from minute one.
And he also did so in the oral trial for the crime of María Marta, a homicide for which he was first acquitted in December 2022 and was now convicted by the Buenos Aires Cassation.
Video
The murder of María Marta García Belsunce, the crime that shocked the country.
Beyond all this judicial data, who is Nicolás Roberto Pachelo, besides an Argentine born 47 years ago, on June 21, 1976, son of a racing driver who owns a tosquera?
The file against him for the crime of María Marta is responsible for describing it through the voices of his surroundings.
Nicolás,
a "cheto" always in trouble with the law
, a self-defined "businessman", with a difficult psychology and a tumultuous personal life.
Pachelo, robbing a country house in the southern area.
Pachelo came to Carmel because his father had founded the neighborhood.
They didn't want him there, María Marta was afraid of him and the partners had sent him to watch because he had a reputation as a thief.
He was even accused of kidnapping the Carrascosa-García Belsunce couple's black Labrador dog.
The lives of Nicholas
Roberto Pachelo (Nicolás' father) had a very good financial life.
Owner of a tosquera in Pilar, he gave his son a childhood as an upper-middle class kid.
Except for some teenage jobs as a dog walker, the most stable job Nicolás had was with his father in the tosquera.
"In his childhood, Nicolás played soccer with "Aíto" de la Rúa, with the son of "Coti" Nosiglia and with Nicanor Cetrá. It was a group of boys who were friends because their parents were friends," he said in his statement before Justice Inés Dávalos Cornejo, Pachelo's ex-wife and mother of his three children.
Inés Dávalos Cornejo, Pachelo's ex, leaving to testify at the Pilar prosecutor's office.
Photo: Martín Quintana
Detail:
Nicanor Cetrá, son of Luis Cetrá (owner of Radio Rivadavia), was one of Pachelo's victims.
In July 2003, Nicolás had been invited to dinner with his partner and it was then that he got a set of keys.
He then returned to the scene and took a television, a camcorder, several cameras and a cordless telephone.
This is one of the cases for which he ended up sentenced to three and a half years in a summary trial.
The sentence was handed down in 2005 by the Oral Criminal Court No. 5 of Capital.
"
No, take it with you
," "
no, you
," is how Inés Dávalos Cornejo remembers that Nicolás Pachelo told her how his parents (separated) wanted to get him off their back.
That coming and going also affected the couple.
Inés and Nicolás lived in the country Tortugas with the father's second partner and then they moved to the apartment of Nicolás's mother, Silvia Magdalena Ryan, in Capital Federal, on Libertador, in the Retiro neighborhood.
Pachelo's story with Carmel began between 1998 and 1999 when he moved there with Inés and his first son, Felipe.
His other two children, Cruz and Santos, were born in Carmel.
Nicolás did not do much, he liked gardening but he did not take care of it with the same dedication with which he faced the nursery of Florencio Varela's Unit 23 once he was imprisoned.
María Marta and Carlos Carrascosa.
They were in Carmel until shortly after the crime of María Marta.
Inés had never felt comfortable in that place where all the neighbors were much bigger.
Then they moved to "Pilar Joven" and from there - after Silvia Ryan's suicide - they ended up in the Avenida Libertador apartment.
The couple had as many addresses as temporary breakups.
Finally the couple divorced in 2010. "I realized that it was shady, that he had a lot of problems. I don't have much memory of what happened in Carmel, but I have memories of what happened in Capital due to robberies and thefts that he committed. ", Inés told Justice, who described Nicolás as "very liar", controlling:
"He is a guy who imposes fear, I felt afraid."
A compulsive gambler (more than one photograph was published in poker games), Pachelo lost his inheritance, it was taken away by his gambling addiction.
His ex describes him as violent but does not crucify him: "Nicolás is a liar, he is violent, he was a thief, he is dangerous - I reported him - he is very shady...
But I don't know if he is capable of killing María Marta"
, he declared, although in the same testimony he said that, after they separated, he threatened her and even called her to tell her how she was dressed, so that she knew that he was watching her.
"The bad boy of the neighborhood", "bad person", "fucked up", "someone who instilled fear", were some of the terms with which Carmel security employee Victor Hugo Contreras, one of those in charge of monitoring, described him. his steps and, paradoxically?, one of the guards who was also accused in the trial for the murder of María Marta.
View of the García Belsunce house in the El Carmel neighborhood.
Pachelo was a neighbor and lived there with his family.
The robberies in that neighborhood began in 2001, after the family business closed and Pachelo stopped receiving money from that business.
The "Pachelo thief" rumor was confirmed years later after García Belsunce's crime.
First with the 2005 conviction in the Federal Capital and more forcefully in April 2018 when he was arrested and
accused of eight robberies of houses in the Tortugas country, in Pilar.
A guy in trouble with the law.
Even in February 2019 he was sentenced to two years in suspended prison for selling designer drugs at VIP parties.
Pachelo was first imprisoned in Unit 9 of La Plata, belonging to the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service.
There he studied journalism.
He was then transferred to Gorina, near the city of La Plata, an open prison.
Now, with the sentence to life in prison, it seems that his luck has run out.
Starting today, an almost indefinite panorama of confinement and an almost certain move to a maximum security prison opens up.
EMJ