Julio Simón, an infamous torturer of the last civic-military dictatorship known as “Turco Julián,” died on Tuesday at the age of 84. He was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity in Unit #34 of the Federal Penitentiary Service, located in Campo de Mayo.

A Federal Police officer, Simón was one of the most vicious torturers at “El Olimpo” death camp in the Floresta neighborhood of Buenos Aires City. According to victims’ testimonies, Simón used to welcome the detained clad in a Nazi armband. 

Simón was also one of the first dictatorship torturers to be prosecuted after the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws that protected him were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005.

In 2006, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 1978 kidnapping, torture, and enforced disappearance of José Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, and the kidnapping of their eight-month-old daughter, Claudia, who was later illegally adopted by a military intelligence officer and his wife. Claudia’s identity was restored in February 2000, and she is now a board member of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. 

“The general criterion was to kill everyone,” the torturer stated in a TV interview back in 1995. He also said that he would do everything he did during the dictatorship all over again.

In December 2010, he and 11 other torturers were sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity committed in a network of three clandestine detention centers known as ABO (Club Atlético, Banco and El Olimpo).

In the years since, his lawyers had sought house arrest for him, but the Federal Court of Cassation finally rejected their request on March 11.

The Buenos Aires City branch of HIJOS, an organization that identifies the sons and daughters of those disappeared by the civic-military dictatorship, commented on the repressor’s death on their social media.

“Another genocidal maniac is now in the garbage bin of history. Julio Simón, ‘Turco Julián,’ is dead. A torturer and murderer of our mothers and fathers. A federal police repressor of the ABO circuit. Sentenced to life for crimes against humanity. He parted without ever telling us where the bodies are,” it wrote. 

“His family knows where and when he died. They can say goodbye and have a place where they can remember him. His victims’ families can’t,” the organization added. 

With information from C5N