The television host Marcelo “Teto” Medina was arrested this Thursday along with 16 other people in a case for alleged illicit association and reduction to servitude for the purpose of labor exploitation in a community intended for the rehabilitation of people with addictions, reported police sources and judicial.
The research focuses on a therapeutic community, called La Razón de Vivir -which did not have the authorization of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Healthaimed at the rehabilitation of people with addictionslocated in the town of Berazategui and Florencio Varela, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, and in the department of Punilla, in Córdoba
Judicial sources reported that in the place “some 200 people subject to labor and services of servitude for the purpose of labor exploitation, adults and minors, were identified.”
Medina was arrested at his home in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo by personnel from the Cybercrime Division against Children and Adolescents of the Argentine Federal Police and another 16 people were detained, as part of the 21 simultaneous raids carried out with the intervention of the Directorate of Trafficking in Persons of the Police of the province of Buenos Aires and the Police of Córdoba.
The chief and organizer of the community is Nestor Ezequiel Zelaya, who was also detained.
The procedure was carried out by the Fiscal Unit for Crimes Related to Trafficking in Persons, Child Pornography and Grooming of Berazategui of the province of Buenos Aires, in charge of the prosecutor Daniel Ichazo, with the intervention of the Court of Guarantees No. 8 of Florencio Varela, by Adrián Villagra.
In the investigation it was determined that there would be other provincial therapeutic centers involved in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, where the former member of the VideoMatch program actively participated in activities carried out by the organization’s representatives, judicial sources reported.
According to the judicial investigations, Zelaya was the one who established contacts and made appearances in the media, set the fees to be charged to enter the rehabilitation villas and coordinated the hospitalization of a new patient.
It was also the one that indicated how the conditions of servitude and treatment of the victims should be, including the punishment system and the prohibition to leave the farms, as well as the form, conditions and types of forced labor that some victims had to carry out, according to revealed to Télam judicial sources.
The voice of relatives
After learning of the arrest of those responsible for the community, the mother of a young man who is there in rehabilitation declared to the media at the door of the Berazategui headquarters that her son has been hospitalized “for 6 months and is another person along with 60 other guys.”
“‘Teto’ Medina is the best of all, he is a very excellent person, he travels by train from the North to be with the boys here, he teaches them about life, there was never anything,” said the woman.
Another relative of a patient hospitalized in the community stated that “The children who are here are cared for, protected, fed and with a new life that changed them, because it took them off the streets and drugs”.
For his part, Cristian, a rehabilitated former patient who was hospitalized for 14 months in the center, stated for La Nación+ that “what they say is not at all true” and added: “When I was here I never experienced what they are saying. On the contrary, Here they gave me a place, they gave me a roof, they gave me understanding, they could understand me”.
