The rapper L-Gante during a concert at the Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires in October 2021. Marcelo Endelli (Getty Images)
One of Argentina’s most popular rappers, Elián Valenzuela, is on trial for unlawful deprivation of liberty, threats and aggravated concealment. The musician known as L-Gante is accused of threatening a man and a woman with a weapon and kidnapping them after a fight in a nightclub in late May. Valenzuela, who was taken into custody in June, was released in September.
The 23-year-old singer was denounced at the end of May by one of his former neighbors in the community of General Rodríguez, on the western outskirts of Buenos Aires. The man, Gastón Torres, claimed the rapper pointed a gun at him in the early hours of the morning after a fight and forced him to get into his car. According to the complainant, the musician kept him kidnapped for almost half an hour.
The judge has now ordered that L-Gante be charged with the crime of “simple threats in real competition with deprivation of liberty in ideal competition with coercive threats” with regard to Gastón Torres, namely for “illegal deprivation of liberty in simple competition with simple threats”. ” by Catalina Passi and for “cover-ups aggravated by the pursuit of profit,” according to the Télam news agency, which had access to the verdict. The judge acquitted Valenzuela of the crime of “simple possession of narcotics” in part because he believed the drugs he was carrying were intended for “personal consumption.”
The judge who ordered the transfer to court, Gabriel Castro, is the same one who approved the rapper’s release in September. This verdict was appealed and the Chamber overturned Castro’s decision, but the judge refused to re-arrest the musician as requested by the prosecution and the injured person. After his release, the rapper told the media: “I used the time I spent here to strengthen myself mentally and take care of myself a little more, not giving opportunity to bad things and everything I like , mess up.”
As a representative of the new Argentine cumbia, the singer played in session number 38 of the Argentine producer Bizarrap in March 2021. His popularity continued to grow when Argentine Vice President Cristina Kirchner referenced him months later, in July. At an event at a school in Buenos Aires, Kirchner recounted an interview in which the musician said he recorded and edited his first viral hit on one of the computers distributed by the state to public schools. “That’s what he’s saying [computadora de] “With “Connect Equality,” which he received in 2014, and a microphone, a song was created that today has 176 million views on YouTube,” said Kirchner, recommending the music of “Élegant,” as he called it, to young people.
Months later, in October, the country’s president, Alberto Fernández, received him. In December he moved into a private neighborhood with his girlfriend and daughter and was arrested six months later. His fans mobilized outside the detention center and his lawyers condemned the police’s cruelty towards the singer. But it wasn’t the first time he’d had trouble with the law. In March 2021 he was arrested for disrupting public roads and in February 2022 for again intimidating a young man with a firearm.