By Carlos Loría, journalistic editor
This Sunday, October 9, the newspaper El País He decided place on its front page a notice titled “Vázquez authorized passports for Germans who forged identity and were required for child abuse”, recalling a case in which two individuals of German nationality had entered the country with false documents, but in the journalistic writing and the headline some aspects were underlined in individual above others.
This note is floated right in the middle of the mega scandal of Alexander Astesianwho was the custodian of President Luis Lacalle Pou and his family for at least two decades, despite the fact that he had a long list of inquiries and investigationsas well as prosecutions with prison for various crimes.
Astesiano has been charged with prison for forming a criminal organization that operated under the government’s nose: his nerve center and operations (and meetings with accomplices) was the 4th floor of the Executive Tower, a building that Lacalle described as a place where he enters “anyone” and at whose door nothing is controlled, at least until now.
This case became a kind of strudel of opaque facts, such as the one reported that the Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, authorized entry of a man and a woman of Russian nationality who, strangely, later got married in a supermarket in Chuy in a ceremony that Colorado Mayor Eduardo Calabuig officiated.
the various differences
The case of the two passports granted during the government of Tabaré Vázquez, on April 13, 2009, does not have the same characteristics as the Astesiano case, and the list of differences is extensive.
To start, it was not an organization established in the heart of the national government, as it was what was armed by Astesiano and his accomplices, but of an isolated event with other elements to consider. While Astesiano’s organization orchestrated the false birth certificates from within to make believe that Russians had Uruguayan ancestry, and thus grant them national passports, the other case was not built by the government, or anything like that.
The couple Arno Wollensak (under the assumed name ‘Marc Neumann Peter’s’) and Julie Ravel (under the assumed name ‘Angelina Thaler’) entered Uruguay with false birth certificates allegedly issued by the State of Guyana but processed in Brazil. They were validated by a notary public and accepted by the General Directorate of Civil Registry; With all this process they obtained their first Uruguayan identity card in October 2007.
The false document said that Neumann Peter’s had been born in Guyana on May 3, 1960, but in reality she had seen the light in Oerlinghausen (Germany) on May 3, 1955. The alleged Angelina Thaler Gotthard had been born in Guyana on May 17 May 1961, but it was also a lie, because her name was Julie Ravel and her date and place of birth was April 25, 1954 in Burguffeln (Germany).
Fleeing
Both were fleeing from the German Justice since 2007 for being important members of the esoteric sect “Oasis of Light”, whose tentacles also spread throughout France, Portugal and Belgium.
The young Lea Saskia Laasner was sexually violated by Wollensak since she was 13 years old, when her parents put her into the sect after being convinced that she was coming “the imminent apocalypse”. She was the sexual slave of the criminal for more than eight years until she was able to escape from Belize, where the sect had already settled, escaping from the first police persecutions. Also his victim was the renowned artist, photographer, lecturer and psychologist Katharina Meredith who, along with her parents and her 8-year-old brother (she was 10 at the time), were all victims of this criminal group.
After the Uruguayan authorities managed to tie all the ends and pull the thread of the man’s history, he was arrested and put in the Libertad Prison in 2015.
He was found dead on the shores of the Río de la Plata near La Floresta, and his autopsy indicated that he had died of suffocation.
Why did they receive Uruguayan passports?
Tabaré Vázquez received all the documents supposedly in order from the other state instances, and relied on the provisions of Law 16,340, which in its article 1 establishes that “Any foreign person who has acquired the situation of retirement or retirement abroad and who obtains permanent residence in the Republic from the sanction of this law, will be entitled to the benefits referred to in article 3 of this law. ”
Then, the requirements are, for example, having a minimum income equivalent to US$1,500 for retirement from abroad, having acquired a property to live in Uruguay with a value greater than US$100,000, which cannot be sold for 10 years , or else, buy public securities issued by the Uruguayan State for the same amount (which cannot be disposed of in ten years).
Article 3 also empowers the applicant to bring goods into the country, such as a motor vehicle (which may not be sold for four years). To receive and maintain the Uruguayan passport, in addition to all these economic and registration requirements, they must have life insurance for all dependents.
Article 5 prohibits the beneficiaries of this law from working, since they must only be retired.
Article 7 establishes that “retired officials, retirees and foreign pensioners, from international organizations, Embassies, Consulates and foreign military and commercial missions accredited in the Republic, who to date meet the requirements established in the Republic, shall have the same rights. this law”.
