Two policemen who were accused of participating in the state terror plan of the last military dictatorship by deliberately covering up the finding of the body of a death flight victim were acquitted on Monday by La Plata Federal Judge Alejo Ramos Padilla. The plaintiff rejected the decision, describing it as a “juridical abhorrence.”

The trial, which began on July 7, investigated former deputy police chief Moisés D’Elía and Julio César Morazzo, who worked as an officer at a local station. They were accused of a cover-up and breaching the duties as public officials for failing to inform judicial authorities of the finding and identification of Rosa Novillo Corvalán’s body in 1976. 

They were under suspicion for having carried out actions linked to crimes against humanity, which does not have a statute of limitations in Argentina. Prosecutor Ana Oberlín had requested a three year sentence for each of them.

Corvalán’s body washed ashore at the coastline of Punta Indio, Buenos Aires province, on December 6, 1976. Morazzo and D’Elía were in charge of carrying out the corresponding procedures to such finding. Under their instructions, the body was buried as a Jane Doe at the Magdalena cemetery four days later and remained as such for two decades, despite the existence of a report that identified her.

An analysis of her fingerprints conducted by a specialized police department correctly concluded that the body belonged to Corvalán two months after she was buried as a Jane Doe. The analysis had been conducted using fingerprints from her hands, which had been severed from her body before she was buried. However, the policemen never linked the report to the body that lay buried in the cemetery, nameless.

“The laboratory identified the fingerprints and sent the report to the police station in February, 1976,” Pablo Llonto, the Novillo Corvalán family’s lawyer, told the Herald. “It makes no sense for the judge to now say that they were not responsible. It’s not their roles that are important, but what they did.”

Her family believed Corvalán to be disappeared until she was identified by the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF, by its Spanish initials) in 1998 after the group found the report stating Corvalán’s identity. Four armed forces members were convicted to life imprisonment in 2022 for the crimes committed against Corvalán and three other death flight victims.

“They should have notified the family once she was identified, they should have gone to the cemetery to inform that she was not a Jane Doe but Rosa Novillo Corvalán, and have the death certificate modified,” Llonto said. “It’s clear that they did this to cover up the appearance of bodies in Punta Indio, Magdalena and Verónica.”

Llonto said that Judge Ramos Padilla should resign his position after the ruling, adding that the acquittal contradicted his past as lawyer of the late Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo Chicha Mariani. “Him doing this is like a slap to the memory of Chicha, who fought so hard for perpetrators to be made responsible, no matter their role.”

The case

Corvalán’s is just one of the dozens of cases of death flight victims appearing in the Buenos Aires province coastline during the dictatorship.

According to the autopsy undertaken at the time, she was killed by a shot to the head around ten days before her body was found. However, Llonto highlighted that the police never investigated her death as a potential homicide.

The judicial reconstruction of Corvalán’s last days indicates that she was kidnapped in April, 1976, in the northern Buenos Aires suburbs and was held at the clandestine detention center known as “El Campito” inside the military compound Campo de Mayo. There, she endured torture until, at one point, the military killed her. Her body was thrown from a plane in one of the many death flights that departed from Campo de Mayo.

Corvalán was one to two months pregnant at the time of her kidnapping. Her partner Guillermo Pucheta was also kidnapped in April, 1976, and remains disappeared.

Given Corvalán was found dead around eight months after her kidnapping, she is believed to have given birth in captivity between November and December 1976. The child should now be 48 years old and is being searched by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.