Former provincial governor José Alperovich, one of the most influential and richest politicians in northern Argentina, was detained from the Buenos Aires courts and headed to a federal prison. A judge sentenced him this Tuesday to 16 years and six months in prison for raping his second niece and disqualified him from holding public office for life. The judge found Alperovich, 69, guilty of repeated sexual abuse against the woman he had hired as a personal assistant when he was a senator and ordered his preventive detention. Until now, the former governor had remained free and had only a ban on leaving the country.
Judge Juan Ramos Padilla handed down the sentence requested by the prosecution, who had asked to end the impunity of the man who governed the province of Tucumán for twelve years under Peronism, between 2003 and 2015. “Alperovich did not want her to work with him. . He wanted her for bed. The concept is primitive. He rules the feudal lord. You can’t argue with the big boss. He does what he wants,” said prosecutor Sandro Abraldes in his final argument. “This trial is a trial on the impunity of power. She was in a submission scenario. In a situation of captivity,” Abraldes added.
Alperovich always maintained his innocence and accused the victim of lying to destroy his political career. “This is an invented, armed trial, where I am clearly going to explain to you that there was an economic and political motive, of that I have no doubt,” the former governor defended himself a week ago. This Tuesday he had the opportunity to say his last words in front of the judge, but he declined to do so. Hours later he heard the guilty verdict surrounded by his four children, who accompanied him throughout the trial.
“It was a very important message against impunity,” declared the spokesperson for the complainant, Milagro Mariona, after learning of the ruling.
According to the complaint, the first sexual abuse took place in Alperovich’s home in Buenos Aires at the end of 2017, shortly after the victim started working as an assistant to the then senator. The situation worsened as the months went by and in Tucumán territory, during the first quarter of 2018.
It took more than a year for the victim to break her silence about the hell she had gone through. “I didn’t want him to kiss me. She did the same. I didn’t want him to touch me. She did the same. I didn’t want him to penetrate me. “I did it the same way,” said the public letter with which she denounced her uncle for sexual abuse at the end of 2019.
The public complaint forced Alperovich to step aside as senator and brought to light situations of harassment that several women had suffered with him. They occurred in the years in which he felt untouchable because he did and undid as he pleased in Tucumán.
His power began to decline starting in 2019. Four former high-ranking officials in his government were convicted that year for covering up the femicide of Paulina Lebbos, which occurred in 2006, when Alperovich had been governor for three years. Months later, the letter from his second niece opened a crack in the impunity that this Tuesday ended up demolishing him.
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