( Spanish) — This Monday begins the trial against eight former Argentine rugby players accused of beating Fernando Báez Sosa to death at the exit of a dance venue in the resort town of Villa Gesell on January 18, 2020. Three years after the crime, the trial will begin in the courts of Dolores, in the province of Buenos Aires.
The trial is expected to include 150 witnesses and the defendants are in court, according to information from state news agency Télam.
The eight defendants, young people between the ages of 21 and 23, have been in pretrial detention since 2020, accused of “aggravated homicide by the premeditated participation of more than two people and treachery.”
The defendants could face up to life imprisonment for this crime.
Báez Sosa, a young law student, died in the early morning of January 18, 2020 as he left a dance venue in the seaside resort of Villa Gesell, located 380 km from Buenos Aires. The young man died as a result of the attack with punches and kicks that he received from a gang of several rugby players.
According to the autopsy, the young man died of “cranial trauma.” “They beat him a lot, said the victim’s mother, Graciela Sosa, after the young man’s death. “They beat him until they couldn’t find him anymore, until they killed him.”
The fight would have started inside a dance venue in Villa Gesel, from which the attackers were removed by the security of the establishment, According to a story from Argentine Public Television. Once outside the place, Báez Sosa reportedly called the incident over, but 15 minutes later, the group attacked the young man with kicks and fists, leaving him seriously injured.
Local media, cited by Reuters, reported that the assailants came together to attack Báez Sosa despite the fact that he was seriously injured on the ground.
Báez Sosa’s mother, Graciela Sosa, told that she found out about the events through a phone call in which she was informed that her son was taken by ambulance to the hospital.
“I thought I was going to take care of him, but no. It wasn’t like that,” Sosa said about how she found out her son died. “It was the most terrible day of my life,” the woman said between tears.
“Everything fell apart. It was our support, our fight to move on. My house is empty when I get up and look at his bed, he’s waiting, and I know he’ll never come back because of what they did to him,” Sosa said a month after the death of his son in a public demonstration in Buenos Aires.
In principle, 11 young people between the ages of 18 and 20 were arrested after the crime. At first, only two of the defendants were accused of being the material authors of the murder of Báez Sosa, however, the Dolores attorney general confirmed to that one month after the crime, the accusation was expanded so that the eight detainees had that accusation.
The defendants’ lawyer told local media in 2020 that the principle of innocence corresponds to them.
On January 23, 2020, thousands of people took to the streets of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, to demand justice in the case.
In the weeks and months that followed, three of the eleven defendants they were dismissed from the caseleaving only the eight current defendants under the scrutiny of the authorities.
The courts ordered pretrial detention for the eight defendants on February 14, 2020. Since then, they have been deprived of their liberty at Melchor Romero’s Mayor’s Office 3. For the trial, it is expected that they will be transferred to the Dolores Penitentiary Service, in the province of Buenos Aires, Telam reported.
— With information from Iván Pérez Sarmenti, Hugo Mario Correa and Emilia Delfino from in Buenos Aires.
