Two new trials for crimes against humanity are currently underway. Four former policemen are being tried for sexual abuse and other crimes in Santa Fe, while the former owner of a long-distance bus company is facing a second trial in Salta for the illegal detention and torture of 17 of his employees. All crimes were committed in 1977.

The Santa Fe investigation is known as the “Requena case.” Former Federal Police officer Ricardo Carrouché and ex Santa Fe police members Germán Raúl Chartier, Wenceslao Claudio Bertolino and Eduardo Alberto Ramos Campagnolo are being tried for a series of crimes against six victims.

The officers are charged with illegal search, kidnapping, robbery, and “dishonest abuse.”. “Dishonest abuse” is a legal term referencing sexual abuse without penetration, which is aggravated when the offender is in a position of power in relation to the victim. In Argentina’s Criminal Code, however, it is included under the term “sexual abuse.”

The prosecution claims that a group of policemen, which included the three Santa Fe Police defendants and others that could not be identified, conducted searches in several Santa Fe homes in May, 1977, while armed and dressed as civilians. During that operation, they illegally detained six political activists.

Two of the three former Santa Fe Police officers have been convicted in other trials for crimes against humanity. Ramos is considered to be one of the most ruthless repressors of the military dictatorship in Santa Fe and has already been sentenced four times. He has been convicted of murder, kidnapping, torture, sexual abuse, and rape and is currently serving a life sentence. Chartier was sentenced to 16 years in 2021 for the aggravated kidnapping of people persecuted for political reasons.

Salta trial

A second trial began Tuesday in Salta. Marcos Levin, the former owner of long-distance bus company La Veloz del Norte, his former human resources director José Antonio Grueso and ex chief of police Víctor Hugo Almirón, are being tried for allegedly kidnapping and torturing 17 company employees in January, 1977.

The employees were union members  protesting against mistreatment in the workplace and calling for higher salaries before the kidnapping. Twenty-two workers were illegally detained for supposedly defrauding the company and taken to the police station where Almirón worked, where they were tortured. Most of them were fired after being freed a few days later. However, some them remained detained there or in a local prison, in some cases for even a few months.

The defendants had already been tried and sentenced for these crimes, but the Federal Appeals Court acquitted them in 2016 on the grounds that they were not crimes against humanity. In October, 2022, Argentina’s Supreme Court ordered the acquittal be annulled after reviewing the sentences, following a request from the prosecution.

Levin was sentenced to 12 years in prison in the first trial, the first businessman to be convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Almirón and fellow former policeman Víctor Hugo Bocos had been sentenced to 12 and 8 years, respectively.

—With information from Télam.