La Libertad Avanza (LLA) Deputy Lourdes Arrieta opened a political Pandora’s box in a series of X posts published minutes before midnight on Saturday. Screenshots of three WhatsApp group chats — featuring a pink background emblazoned with “May God bless you and keep you always” — purportedly show logistical details of the visit made by a group of LLA deputies, including Arrieta herself, to dictatorship-era repressors convicted for crimes against humanity in the Ezeiza federal prison back in July.
“Like President Javier Milei said, it’s time for the truth to be revealed about who authorized the visit to repressors and what the true reason behind it was,” Arrieta said.
Screenshots published by Arrieta allegedly show that Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and the Federal Penitentiary Service Director Fernando Martínez enabled the deputies’ prison access. “Deputy Beltrán Benedit spoke with Patricia Bullrich so that those who want to join in our visit to political prisoners currently detained in [the prisons in] Campo de Mayo, Ezeiza and Marcos Paz can enter without any problems,” a contact saved as Father Javier Ravasi said in March. Javier Olivera Ravasi is a known promoter of freeing dictatorship-era repressors.
The chats purportedly show that Olivera Ravasi and LLA Deputy Beltrán Benedit organized several visits to the prison. In screenshots of more recent chats, Deputy Alida Ferreyra apparently confirms she and Benedit carried out a similar visit in March and “word didn’t get out” at the time.
The Herald reached out to Benedit and Ferreyra for comment and verification of Arrieta’s screenshots but did not receive an immediate response.
The screenshots also show that many LLA deputies were aware of the visit — a key point of contention following the uproar surrounding the visit, since Arrieta herself claimed some were unaware of who they were visiting. Arrieta also contended that there were prior meetings in which they discussed bills to give repressors the benefit of house arrest or even freedom.
According to the screenshots, Olivera Ravasi created a group chat in February to organize an “undisclosed meeting” to discuss the bills with several LLA deputies, lawyers and former judge Eduardo Riggi.
Olivera Ravasi had already been singled out as the main organizer of the prison visit, and was expelled from the diocese in which he was residing after the scandal broke out. He is the son of a former military officer serving three life sentences in house arrest in San Juan for forcibly disappearing people, kidnapping, murder, torture, robbery, and rape.
The chats also mention Judge Agustina Díaz Cordero, vice president of the Council of Magistrates (the body that evaluates judges) allegedly being present at one of their meetings.
While the deputies’ visit to prison took place on July 11, the news broke a week later. On August 6, a leaked picture showed deputies posing alongside the former military members convicted for human rights violations, with Arrieta in the center — she had claimed days earlier that she and fellow lawmaker Rocío Bonacci were tricked, having been told that they were just going to see the prison living conditions and that they had left earlier. Bonacci does not appear in the picture.
Arrieta is currently in the eye of the storm. In recent weeks she has attempted to separate herself from the visit, asked for the chamber and the judiciary to investigate the incident, and accused Benedit and other deputies of framing her. On Wednesday, she was heard screaming at fellow LLA deputies during a bloc meeting in Congress, and ended up reporting one of them (Nicolás Mayoraz) for gender-based violence.
In her posts, she points to other LLA members who she claimed were in the group chats and had reacted to messages sent there and “played dumb” afterward. However, the screenshots shared by Arrieta seem to indicate that she, too, knew what the meetings, group chats and prison visits were for. They also show that Arrieta deleted several of the messages she sent to those group chats before taking the screenshots.
In her posts, Arrieta added that giving benefits to repressors “is not part of President Javier Milei’s agenda” and showed that, in the chats, deputies Alida Ferreyra and Guillermo Montenegro said the Executive Branch was not allowing them to publish a press release about the July 11 visit to the Ezeiza prison. They were also asked to delete all pictures taken that day.
In the messages, Benedit complained that the Executive Branch “is afraid to let us publish a release” and called them “stupid.”
“Clearly, these deputies have a different agenda, and don’t hesitate in calling the president weak for not wanting to impose their agenda,” Arrieta said. “So, whose orders are they responding to? If they admit the Executive Branch stopped them, who is their political leader?”