A repressor of the last civic-military dictatorship, which taught Ethics and Citizenship Training during democracy in public schools in Rosario, he will begin to be tried on Monday in the city of Santa Fe, along with five former police officers accused of homicides and human rights violations, judicial spokesmen reported on Saturday.
Is about Hector Meliton Martinez, alias “Nolo”who during the dictatorship served in the Intelligence Detachment 122 of the Argentine Armybut that in this case he will be tried for crimes committed before the coup of March 24, 1976.
The Federal Oral Court of Santa Fe, composed of José María Escobar Cello, Luciano Lauria and Germán Sutter Schneider, It will also judge former federal police officers Víctor Stahlberg, Ricardo Antonio Olivera, Rodolfo Gómez Trintinaglia and Elbio Eduardo Picollo, and former Santa Fe police officer Lucindo Delio Benencia..
The repressors are accused of aggravated unlawful deprivation of liberty and aggravated torture which had three people as victims, the aggravated illegitimate deprivation of liberty committed against one person and the aggravated homicide of two others.
The trial will air an operation carried out by a Federal Police task force held on February 27, 1976, which led to the homicide of two PRT-ERP militants, Carlos Cattáneo and Fernando Lucio López, and the torture suffered by Eusebio Cabral, Carlos Courault and María Inés Gutiérrez.
At the time of issuing the indictment, the federal judge of Santa Fe, Reinaldo Rodríguez, also blamed Melitón Martínez for his “alleged necessary participation in the illegitimate deprivation of liberty and subsequent torture suffered” by Alberto Horacio Martinezanother PRT militant, in January 1976.
Melitón Martínez, a retired former colonel, is in prison after having been sentenced by the same Court, although with another composition, to 12 years in prison for the “illegal deprivation of liberty aggravated by the use of violence and threats” and “aggravated torture” of three politically persecuted persons: Alba Sánchez, Daniel García and Andrea Graciela Trinchieri.
That sentence, from May 2019, corresponded to the kidnapping and martyrdom of these militants, between December 1977 and May 1978, in a clandestine center known by the repressors as “El Borgia”which operated to the fifth house of San José del Rincón.
Melitón Martínez was arrested in September 2015 by order of federal judge number 3 of Rosario, Carlos Vera Barros, and appeared in the Conadep files as “Nolo” and Captain Martínez.
About the first nickname, which served to recognize him, Alba Sánchez said during that trial that they called him that way because of his short stature: “Don’t step on him,” he graphed.
Martínez identified himself before Judge Vera Barros as “retired soldier” and “professor and graduate in political science”, graduated from the National University of Rosario.
In this sense, the Santa Fe Teachers’ Association (Amsafé) indicated that the case of Melitón Martínez represented “a repressor in the public school” and noted, in October 2015, that his arrest had been requested ten years earlier.
“But not only in this the national and provincial forces were delayed, but also the ministerial bodies. Héctor Melitón Martínez was, until the day of his arrest, a teacher of Ethics and Citizenship Training in public secondary schools in the city of Rosario, in a twisted turn of history“, added at that time the teachers’ union.
The first trial against Melitón Martínez originated in testimonial statements of the so-called “brusque cause“, of 2009, and also had a conviction for the repressors Eduardo “Curro” Ramos (20 years old), Ricardo Ferreyra (15), Juan Calixto Perizzotti (10), María Eva Aebi (7), Víctor Hugo Cabrera (6) and Eduardo Córdoba (4).
Prosecutor Martín Suárez Faisal, who will represent the Public Ministry in the trial that will begin on Monday, stated in the previous trial against Martínez that he was “one of the task group leaders“.
“It has been proven that he served in Intelligence Detachment 122 from December 23, 1975 with the position of Chief of Operations until March 14, 1977when he became head of the second Execution section in the same Detachment”.
“The role of intelligence was set goalsso that the task groups kidnapped and tortured in clandestine centers and thus obtain as much information as possible, which was later passed on to the intelligence agents,” Suárez Faisal said in his statement.
