Buenos Aires Herald 
Five former members of the Argentine air force will stand trial for murdering, torturing and kidnapping 133 victims during the country’s last military dictatorship. One of the defendants is Juan Carlos Vázquez Sarmiento, who was among the group of convicted repressors La Libertad Avanza deputies visited in prison in July.
The trial, which starts on Tuesday, will cover crimes committed in 10 clandestine detention centers in the western outskirts of Buenos Aires. The most famous cases are Mansión Seré and the Buenos Aires Intelligence Regional (RIBA, by its Spanish initials).
Two joint cases will be addressed in the trial: one investigating former air force officers Juan Carlos Herrera, José Juan Zyska, Ernesto Rafael Lynch, and Julio César Leston for false imprisonment and torture of 127 victims, as well as three murders. The other covers three charges of false imprisonment against Vázquez Sarmiento.
The trial will take place at the San Martín Federal Oral Court 5.
The government is currently in turmoil after it emerged that six deputies from the ruling La Libertad Avanza coalition visited dictatorship-era murderers, torturers and kidnappers, including Vázquez Sarmiento, in July. The deputies, as well as several others from the ruling coalition, are now being accused of discussing bills that seek to have charges dropped against repressors, with a view to freeing those who are in pre-trial detention.
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Who is Juan Carlos Vázquez Sarmiento
During Argentina’s last military dictatorship, Vázquez Sarmiento was an air force intelligence corporal serving as chief of counterintelligence at RIBA, in Morón city. He was arrested in 2021, when police caught him leaving his wife’s house. He had been on the run since 2002, when the judiciary started investigating him for appropriating a baby.
The infant was the son of María Graciela Tauro and Jorge Rochistein, a couple that was kidnapped and taken to Mansión Seré in May, 1977. They remain disappeared. After the baby was born, Vázquez Sarmiento took the newborn home and raised him as his own under a false identity.
That child, now 46-year-old Ezequiel Rochistein Tauro, eventually discovered his true identity in 2010 thanks to the search efforts of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. He was the 102nd child to be found.
Vázquez Sarmiento was convicted to 15 years of prison in March 2023 for the appropriation of Rochistein Tauro, and will now face trial for the kidnapping of the couple Patricia Roisinblit and José Manuel Pérez Rojo, as well as their business partner Gustavo Pontnau in October 1978. They all remain disappeared.
Witness testimonies state that Vázquez Sarmiento led the operation in which they were kidnapped along with Pérez and Roisinblit’s baby daughter Mariana Eva. He later returned the baby to her father’s family. Roisinblit was pregnant when she was kidnapped, and the former air force corporal is said to have taken part in the appropriation of the child, Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit, who is currently a human rights activist with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
