Two men will begin to be tried from this Wednesday for the femicide of Anahí Benítez, the 16-year-old adolescent who was detained, drugged, raped and strangled in 2017 in the Santa Catalina de Lomas de Zamora Reservean act for which one of them had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the first debate annulled at the end of 2021, and the victim’s mother hopes that both are sentenced and that they provide information about the participation in the act of other people, they reported. judicial sources.
The hearing will begin at 8 o’clock before the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 7 of Lomas de Zamora and will have on the bench the accused to Marcos Esteban Bazan (39)who had been released in October of last year, since Marcelo Sergio Villalba (46)who in June 2020 stopped being tried at the second hearing because it was concluded that he was a “psychotic” who was not in a condition to be at trial and is currently detained.
Both will arrive at the trial accused as co-authors of the femicide, so if found guilty they will receive a life sentence.
“I would like the defendants to speak because I am sure that six days of kidnapping, rape and torture were not carried out by just two people, that they say the names of all those who participated”Silvia, the victim’s mother, told Télam, constituted as an individual victim with the lawyers Guillermo Bernard Krizan and Fernando Herrera.
The trial prosecutor will be Marisa Monti, while Bazán will be represented by Manuel Garrido, director of the Innocence Project Argentina, and Villalba by the official defender Roberto Fernández.
“It strikes me that Bazán has had the money to pay five lawyers and I don’t have to pay any, that he has the support of human rights organizations and no one supports me, he is accused of femicide and was sentenced , that is, it is not that there is no evidence”Silvia said.
Marcos Bazán’s lawyer asks the judges for “rationality” and awaits the acquittal of the accused
Lawyer Manuel Garrido, director of Innocence Project Argentina and defender of Marcos Bazán, one of the two defendants who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the femicide of Anahí Benítez, whose ruling was annulled in 2021, asked that the judges have “rationality” in this second oral debate and that he hopes he will be acquitted.
“Justice must act rationally, it is what the Law says, we hope that, within this framework, Bazán will be free of guilt and charge,” the lawyer told Télam.
Garrido assured that in addition to the witnesses who already testified in the first debate, other experts related to the search for people with dogs were added.
“We also request a visual inspection at Bazán’s house, which we hope will be accepted by the Court,” added the lawyer.
Finally, Garrido insisted that with the evidence that there is his defendant he must be acquitted.
Anahí’s mother stated that she “never” believed that defendant because she participated in the trial and knows “the evidence there is, no matter how much they deny it.”
“I heard them, I saw them and I read them. I have a report that they took three fifty-centimeter-long hairs from Bazán’s house that were the same as my daughter’s, morphologically identical to my daughter’s, and two of the three envelopes They arrived empty and the third one that was analyzed did not have DNA,” Silvia criticized and added: “There are a lot of things that were done wrong, the investigation failed, the chain of custody, the truth is that I am very tired.”
In addition, the woman insisted that she wants Villalba to “speak” because, even if he doesn’t, he will be sentenced to “life imprisonment” because of the DNA and she would “do him a huge favor.”
“Six years have passed to have a trial and I don’t know if what I want is going to be achieved, at this point I blame both those who did it and those who failed to investigate properly. There were three prosecutors and I am not satisfied at all with what was done, neither in the search nor in the subsequent investigation,” he said.
Anahí (16) was last seen on July 29, 2017 when she left her home in Parque Barón, in Lomas de Zamora, to take a walk and on August 4 her body was found naked, with cut injuries and blows to the head, buried in the Santa Catalina Nature Reserve.
The autopsy determined that she was strangled, that they had supplied her with drugs and that, in those conditions, she had been abused.
For the femicide, Bazán was sentenced to the maximum sentence in June 2020 but in December 2021 the same Chamber I of the Buenos Aires Criminal Cassation Court annulled that ruling and ordered that a new oral trial be held in which, in addition, it must be Villalba court.
Judges Daniel Carral and Ricardo Maidana annulled the TOC 7 sentence that had found Bazán guilty of the crimes of “illegal deprivation of aggravated liberty and triple aggravated homicide for treachery, criminis causa and for mediating gender violence” (femicide), and as a “necessary participant” in a “sexual abuse aggravated by carnal access”.
“I find the infringement of the guarantee of judicial impartiality proven, manifested in the particular bias of the judges when examining the evidence and motivating the guilty verdict of the defendant, as well as in the intervention they had during the taking of evidence, deviating of the role that they had to fulfill as disinterested third parties in the framework of an adequate criminal process,” Carral highlighted in that resolution.
After the Cassation ruling, his defense requested the release of the accused since the new oral trial was not going to take place soon and, in addition, he stated that there were no procedural risks on the part of the accused, who has a fixed address and does not have other criminal record.
However, in July 2022 the TOC 7, by majority, had rejected a moderation of pretrial detention, for which it insisted on the higher instance that it was validated in October of last year.
“It cannot be overlooked that the pretrial detention that has been in custody for more than five years without there being a trial that has been issued regarding the guilt of the accused, responds to circumstances exclusively attributed to State deficits, those that gave reason for the annulment. of the jurisdictional pronouncement decided by this Chamber”, the same judges who had annulled the sentence explained in the ruling that ordered his release.
