Lucas González was murdered by the police when he was 17 years old. It happened on a Wednesday in November 2021, in the middle of the morning, in the south of Buenos Aires. A soccer player for a club in the Barracas neighborhood, he was returning from getting into a friend’s car when another car began to chase them, passed them and intercepted them in the middle of the street. They were policemen, but they were in civilian clothes and their car did not have official license plates. Lucas and his three friends, all 19 years old, thought it was an assault and tried to escape. They collided in the attempt, and began to receive shots from the other car. Lucas received two bullets, one of them in the head. The police then called their headquarters to ask for reinforcements: they said that they had experienced a confrontation with four armed men. Then they planted a gun in the car.
A court has sentenced these three policemen to life imprisonment on Tuesday. The inspector Gabriel Alejandro Isassi, the senior officer Juan José López, and the officer Fabián Andrés Nieva have been found guilty of homicide with five aggravating factors: for having done it with treachery, firearms, having acted in a group and with premeditation, for being members of the security forces and, because according to the court, the crime was motivated by racial hatred. The ruling is historic. After four months of trial, the court has established jurisprudence by deciding that the institutional violence included racism as an aggravating factor.
“They thought they were going to get away with it because they acted with social class prejudices,” prosecutor Guillermo Pérez de la Fuente had pointed out in his final argument. The plaintiff lawyer, Gregorio Dalbón, had asked the court to take into account that the detained boys “were brown.” “They were chosen for that, not for anything else,” he said in his final argument, in which he also asked the court to think about what would have happened if, instead of being young people from a poor neighborhood, the case was about “An Audi with three kids with blue eyes.”
That November 17, 2021, Lucas was dying in the car while the police officers detained two of his friends. The third of them, Niven Huanca, had managed to flee, but was arrested in the afternoon when he went to report the incident to the police station in his neighborhood together with his mother. The three young men spent the night in a cell while his friend died in a hospital.
In the following two months, the three officers accused of murder and unlawful deprivation of liberty were arrested, and another dozen accused of concealment. The court that sentenced the three officers this Monday also sentenced another police officer, Sebastián Jorge Baidón, to eight years in prison for the “torture” against the young people. Six other policemen – including two commissioners in charge of the delegation – received sentences of between three and six years for having helped to tamper with evidence. Five were acquitted. After the sentence, the court requested that the role played by the Buenos Aires police chiefs be investigated.
“They stigmatized him, they discriminated against him, they saw them twice because they were dark [morenos]”, Lucas’s father, Héctor González, had told the agency telam. “They left a villa, from a deprived neighborhood such as Barracas, they left to train. They saw him, they chose him, they waited for him, they riddled him with bullets, they tortured him and they burned him with a cigarette, ”he said. “If until now there was no repentance, I think there will not be today. For my part, I will not forgive them, may God forgive them, ”lamented his mother, Cinthia.
The case shocked Argentina, where criticism of the easy trigger of the police authorities collide with one of the most popular slogans of the conservative political sectors: the requests for a “strong hand” against crime in the streets. Argentine police have a history of violence. According to the Coordinadora contra la Represión Policia e Institucional, an NGO that monitors police violence, nearly 9,000 people have been killed by the state’s repressive apparatus since Argentina returned to democracy in 1983. According to its relay last year, among the 436 recorded deaths in that year alone, 319 occurred in custody and 80 were trigger-happy murders.
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