The three police officers are accused of murdering teenager Lucas González.RR SS
Lucas González was murdered by police at the age of 17. It happened on a Wednesday in November 2021, in the middle of the morning, in southern Buenos Aires. A soccer player for a club in the Barracas neighborhood, he was just getting back from getting into a friend’s car when another car started chasing them, passing them and intercepting them in the middle of the street. They were police officers, but they wore civilian clothes and their car had no official number plates. Lucas and his three friends, all 19, mistook it for an attack and tried to escape. In the attempt, they collided and were shot at by the other car. Lucas received two bullets, one to the head. The police then called their headquarters and called for reinforcements: they said they witnessed a confrontation with four armed men. Then they planted a gun in the car.
A court sentenced these three police officers to life imprisonment on Tuesday. Inspector Gabriel Alejandro Isassi, Senior Officer Juan José López and Officer Fabián Andrés Nieva were found guilty of the murder with five aggravating factors: treason, firearms, intentional group action, murder by members of the security forces and because the act was loud court was motivated by racial hatred. The verdict is historic. After four months of trial, the court established its jurisprudence by ruling that the institutional violence included racism as an aggravating factor.
“They thought they would get away with it because they acted with class prejudice,” public prosecutor Guillermo Pérez de la Fuente emphasized in his closing arguments. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Gregorio Dalbón, had asked the court to take into account that the detained boys were “tan”. “You were chosen for that, not for anything else,” he said in his final argument, in which he also asked the court to consider what would have happened if the case hadn’t involved young people from a poor neighborhood Audi with three children with blue eyes.”
On November 17, 2021, Lucas lay dying in the car while police arrested two of his friends. The third of them, Niven Huanca, managed to escape but was arrested in the afternoon when he and his mother went to report the incident to the local police station. The three young men spent the night in a cell while their friend died in hospital.
Over the next two months, the three officers charged with murder and unlawful detention were arrested and another dozen charged with concealment. The court that sentenced the three officers this Monday also sentenced another police officer, Sebastián Jorge Baidón, to eight years in prison for “torturing” the youths. Six other police officers – including two commissioners who headed the delegation – received prison sentences of between three and six years for helping to tamper with evidence. Five were acquitted. After the verdict was announced, the court called for an investigation into the role of the Buenos Aires police chiefs.
“They stigmatized him, they discriminated against him, they saw them twice for being dark [morenos]’ Lucas’ father, Héctor González, told the Telam agency. “They left a villa from a disadvantaged neighborhood like Barracas and went to train there. They saw him, they chose him, they waited for him, they put bullets through him, they tortured him and they burned him with a cigarette,” he said. “If there has been no regrets up until now, I think there will be no regrets today either. For my part, I will not forgive them, may God forgive them,” lamented her mother, Cinthia.
The case shocked Argentina, where criticism of trigger-happy police agencies clashes with one of the most popular slogans of conservative political circles: calls for a “strong hand” on street crime. Argentine police have a history of violence. According to the Coordinadora contra la Represión Policia e Institucional, an NGO that monitors police violence, nearly 9,000 people have been killed by the state’s repressive machinery since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. In that year alone, 319 murders occurred in custody and 80 were trigger-happy murders.
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