Martina Jaureguy 
Convicted dictatorship criminal Juan Carlos Vázquez Sarmiento left attorneys, judges, and survivors in shock on Tuesday when, unprompted, he began urinating in a bucket and showed his genitals during a Zoom trial hearing.
Vázquez Sarmiento, a former Air Force officer, is being tried for the false imprisonment of three people in 1978. He is following the proceedings from the Ezeiza prison as he is currently serving a 15-year sentence for appropriating a child from a couple disappeared by the dictatorship and raising him with a new identity.
He also made headlines recently as he is one of the convicted repressors a group of ruling coalition La Libertad Avanza deputies visited in July, sparking a political scandal that is still developing.
The video shows Vázquez Sarmiento urinating in a bucket seconds after a survivor finished testifying. He then faced the camera and put his pants back on while pulling up his sweater.
Defense attorney Leonardo Miño interrupted the hearing to alert that there was “a problem with Vázquez Sarmiento.” One of the judges asked if he was feeling ill without noticing what had happened. The court’s secretary then cut the broadcast.
This incident is in line with other episodes involving Vázquez Sarmiento that human rights activists claim are moves to try and plead an insanity defense. Community news channel La Retaguardia reported that he recently claimed not to remember his birthday. Last week, however, he underwent a psychological examination ordered by Judge María Claudia Morgese to check whether he was fit to stand trial.
Results reported on Monday revealed he is apt. The examiners described him as having a “histrionic communication style with certain extravagant tendencies.”
The hearings for this trial, unlike others, are not being streamed by the official judiciary’s YouTube channel. La Retaguardia — in collaboration with FM Tránsito — are live-streaming them, as they do with several other ongoing trials.
The channel had to take down the livestream from their YouTube channel to avoid sanctions. They uploaded a censored version of the incident on Monday, as well as the full hearing on Tuesday.
Vázquez Sarmiento’s crimes
Vázquez Sarmiento was an air force intelligence corporal serving as chief of counterintelligence at RIBA, in Morón, Buenos Aires province. He was fugitive for almost 20 years until he was arrested in 2021, when police caught him leaving his wife’s house.
In 2002, the judiciary started investigating him under the suspicion that he had appropriated 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. In March 2023, Vázquez Sarmiento was convicted to 15 years in prison.
Vázquez Sarmiento is one of five former members of the Argentine Air Force that are currently standing trial for murdering, torturing, and kidnapping 133 victims during the country’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983). The trial covers crimes committed in 10 clandestine detention centers in the western outskirts of Buenos Aires. The most famous ones are Mansión Seré and the Buenos Aires Intelligence Regional (RIBA, by its Spanish initials).
The former Air Force officer is accused of carrying out the false imprisonment of 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.
Mariana Eva, who closely follows crimes against humanity trials, pointed out on an X post that “Vázquez Sarmiento passed the examinations last week” and that he “purposely” showed his genitals in court, “because he wanted to, and because he can do it.”
