Martina Jaureguy Convicted dictatorship-era criminal Juan Carlos Vázquez Sarmiento died on Tuesday. He was 77.
The former Air Force intelligence corporal was serving time in prison for appropriating a disappeared couple’s son — whom he later raised as his own — and was scheduled to stand trial for kidnapping three others.
Vázquez Sarmiento made headlines on two separate occasions last year. In July, he was one of several human rights abusers whom the ruling La Libertad Avanza coalition visted in prison. Then in September, he left attorneys, judges, and survivors in shock when, unprompted, he exposed his genitals and began urinating in a bucket during a Zoom trial hearing.
News of his death was made public on Wednesday. A website called Prisionero en Argentina (Prisoner in Argentina), where junta-era criminals and their attorneys often post columns defending the military’s conduct during the dictatorship, shared that Vázquez Sarmiento had died via a post from Claudio Kussman — a retired Buenos Aires Province police chief who is on trial for crimes against humanity.
According to Kussman, Vázquez Sarmiento died in “agony” in a hospital in the Buenos Aires province district of Ezeiza, close to the prison that houses him. The former police chief noted that, in addition to “his calamitous health condition” and “advanced dementia,” Sarmiento had recently spent time in different hospitals after suffering a fall that Kussman blamed on “oversight from the penitentiary guards.”
“[This] further compromised his already weak health condition,” he wrote.
Vázquez Sarmiento served as chief of counterintelligence at the Buenos Aires Intelligence Regional (RIBA, by its Spanish initials) during the dictatorship. He was a fugitive for almost 20 years until he was caught in 2021 and later sentenced in 2023 to 15 years in prison for his crimes. At the time of his death, he was facing a separate trial for carrying out the false imprisonment of the couple Patricia Roisinblit and José Manuel Pérez Rojo, along with their business partner Gustavo Pontnau in October 1978. Each remains disappeared.
Patricia and José Manuel’s daughter, Mariana Eva Pérez, was also kidnapped but later returned to her family. Patricia was pregnant at the time of her capture, and the baby was appropriated by a military family. The child, Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit, restored his identity decades later.
Mariana Eva and Guillermo both took to X on Tuesday to write about Vázquez Sarmiento’s death.
“He passed away without repenting, without giving any information about my parents. It’s unfair,” Guillermo wrote. “I wish he had lived until 100 years old, paying for all the evil he did.”