On December 29, 2021, in the midst of crushing heat, two men wandered aimlessly on the shore of the swampy creek. But that parsimony cracked when they saw a black plastic tank floating in the water. As it caught their attention, they grabbed it and opened it to see if they could find anything useful.
Inside they found Bettina’s body. She was naked, strangled, and dismembered.
Three months later, in March, following the statement of a protected witness, the Prosecutor’s Office learned that a friend of Bettina’s, nicknamed China, had commented in the neighborhood that she had witnessed the moment in which El Chopo tied her up.
According to the tax investigation, Bettina and China were prostitutes and Chopo was one of their clients. He ended up killing Bettina when he found out that she was stealing from him. The objects he had taken from her were a pipe and a bag of potatoes.
Thus, Chopo was imprisoned for 11 months. On February 9, 2023, his defender, Andrea Souto, and the Deputy Prosecutor for Gender Violence of 2° Turno, Franco López, agreed that he could continue waiting for the eventual oral trial under house arrest. At that hearing, López warned that he was close to completing the year of the accusation – which was in the middle of March 2022 – and that there he had to decide if he accused him of the crime to go to trial or if he requested the dismissal of him. . Until that date, he hadn’t figured it out. “The prosecution must analyze all the remaining evidence,” he said on that occasion.
A week later, he requested the dismissal of the person who had initially been accused of Bettina’s murder and whom her friend claimed to have seen killing her. In the request for dismissal, to which she agreed The ObserverLópez argued that when they carried out a semiological examination on China, it emerged from the conclusions that the expert’s gestures were “contradictory”, that her story was not true and that she lowered her eyes to avoid making “eye contact”.
But above all things, the argument to dismiss Chopo was that they could not locate China to testify in the trial and that the last time friends and family had seen her was in March 2022.
La China, like Bettina, practically lived on the street and were addicted to drugs.
At that time, the victim’s mother, represented by the Legal Clinic of the Faculty of Law, opposed the dismissal of the accused and asked the judge to have the case re-examined by another prosecutor. At that time, the representatives of the office led by Juan Raúl Williman met with the new prosecutor in the case, Schubert Velázquez, and conveyed to him the need to locate this witness.
Thus, Velázquez issued an order to the police to locate her, giving them a meager term – just a few days – to do so. Thus, after almost a year, they managed to find her. During all that time she had been wandering, from neighborhood to neighborhood, scared by what the defendant could do to her and her family, she told the Victims and Witnesses Unit of the Attorney General’s Office.
According to what the prosecutor recounted in a hearing whose record he agreed to The ObserverChina said that when Chopo was released from prison, he began to tell the neighbors that he would kill her if she testified in court. Pointedly, she said, “I’m going to kill everyone if this motherfucker talks.” She even went so far as to offer her money so she wouldn’t show up.
He denied that all this happened. “She passes by the door of my house every day, I never threatened her. I am innocent, if I had a guilty conscience or a dirty conscience… I never threatened her!” He said.
But Velázquez asked that now that she had been able to locate her, her statement should be taken as soon as possible – even though the trial had not yet started – to prevent her from disappearing again.
Although that measure was not enough for someone with such erratic behavior, and for this reason the prosecutor asked that she be arrested a few hours before to ensure her appearance. This measure is very rare and the judge in the case, Gonzalo Arsuaga, acknowledged that he had never been asked to do so before. He accepted it anyway.
He also asked the prosecutor that the Victims and Witnesses Unit take charge of containing her in those previous hours, given her weak emotional state. For this reason, the night before, they took her to a hotel where they checked on her that she was well, they assisted her and gave her food. Despite her efforts to contain her, when the time came for the appearance, the woman had fled.
Since she had no money and her condition was fragile, investigators theorized that she couldn’t have gone far. They found her again on a nearby street and she testified in court on March 23 of this year.
During the hearing, she was filled with fear, sources who were there said. Still, she loosened up a bit and she was able to answer the prosecution’s questions. She told what happened to her friend and how she saw it all through a crack. She said that Chopo had killed “four or five more,” but that it affected him when she killed her friend.
the reexamination
The Udelar Legal Clinic represents Bettina’s mother, but also the complainant of three men whom it accuses of having sexually abused her after leaving a nightclub.
consulted by The Observer The director of the office, Juan Raúl Williman, claimed the re-examination tool, which this week in the Cordón case was denied by Judge Blanca Rieiro. Williman appealed and it will be an Appeals court who will have the last decision.
“With the dismissal, this man was released, they owed him two years of undue preventive detention and all because a witness did not appear. We used the opposition to the dismissal, we obtained the re-examination and we met with the other prosecutor and asked him to appear. He appeared and with extreme help from the Victims Unit to support her, she declared. In this case, the guarantee that the judge gave to the victim’s relatives and another decision by the prosecutor had a decisive result,” she said.
