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Former police officer Mario “Churrasco” Sandoval was sentenced this Wednesday to 15 years in prison for the kidnapping and disappearance of a student during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-83), local judicial sources reported. Sandoval was extradited from France in 2019.
After the trial carried out by an Argentine court, Sandoval was found guilty of “illegitimate deprivation of liberty, aggravated by his status as a public official, and of the imposition of torture to the detriment of a politically persecuted man,” according to the state agency Télam. .
Hundreds of other cases of illegal repression weigh on the convicted person, but France only accepted his extradition for the case of the architecture student and militant of the Peronist University Youth (JUP), Hernán Abriata, 24, kidnapped on October 30, 1976. , according to the ruling.
In an interview for RFI, Carlos Loza, who met Abriata four decades ago at the Navy Mechanical School in Buenos Aires, where it is believed that some 5,000 people passed through that torture center, considered that this sentence “is a form of of reparation for the family, especially for her mother”, Beatriz Cantarini de Abriata, who has sought justice since 1976. Abriata is still missing.
Sandoval listened to the sentence from his cell in the Campo de Mayo military barracks, west of the Argentine capital. The Prosecutor’s Office and the complaint had requested penalties ranging from 20 years in prison to life imprisonment.
The convicted man said during the trial that Sandoval was not the author of the kidnapping but a namesake, but the court considered strong evidence and testimonies against him.
Sandoval obtained French nationality in 1997. Without hiding his name, he became a consultant at the Institute of Higher Studies in Latin America in Paris. He was a professor at La Sorbonne Nouvelle and at the University of Marne-La Valle.
with AFP
