Four former air force members sentenced to 25 years for crimes against humanity

Four former members of Argentina’s air force were sentenced to 25 years each for committing crimes against humanity with 133 victims during the last military dictatorship. During the hearing, which came two years after the start of the trial, the judges informed they had concluded in their ruling that the charges effectively were crimes against humanity. Julio César Leston, Juan Carlos Herrera, Juan José Zyska and Ernesto Rafale Lynch were convicted for dozens of counts of forced imprisonment and torture, aggravated for using violence and threats, and due to the fact that many of the victims were being politically persecuted. Two of them were also convicted for sexual assault and rape. Herrera was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault of five women and one man, as well as of raping seven women and one man, aggravated due to the use of force or intimidation. Herrera raped most of his victims on more than one occasion. Lynch was convicted with aggravated sexual assault of one woman and one man, and with aggravated rape of that same woman. Following the reading of the sentences, survivor Zoraida Martín — one of Herrera’s rape and illegal imprisonment victims — said: “I will not be raped anymore.” “This is for me and all those women who suffer gender-based violence,” Martín said, speaking with community radios La Retaguardia and FM En Tránsito, which livestreamed the hearing. “This was an excellent trial. I waited 50 years, and justice was made.” Martín was 16 when she was kidnapped in 1977. Her sister, Adriana, was also kidnapped months prior at 14 and released in early 1977. Also among the 133 victims of the convicted defendants are José María Laureano Donda and María Hilda Pérez, parents of politician Victoria Donda Pérez. The couple remain disappeared to this day. Crimes in Mansión Seré The investigation centered around crimes committed in several clandestine centers of detention, torture and extermination located in western Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, including an old mansion called Mansión Seré and the Buenos Aires Intelligence Regional (known as RIBA in Spanish). This is the fourth trial that investigated crimes committed in Mansión Seré and the second for RIBA crimes, while it was the first time that crimes committed in clandestine centers in Moreno city were investigated. The judges agreed to give the defendants 25 years in prison, the highest possible sentence for their crimes, which is what the plaintiff and the prosecutors had demanded. All four of them are already in house arrest. In addition, the sentence ordered national and provincial authorities to exonerate the four defendants from the air force and to terminate any retirement pension or subsidies they may be receiving. They were also ordered to withdraw any weapons they may own. The fifth defendant A fifth defendant died without receiving a conviction for the crimes investigated in this trial: Juan Carlos Vázquez Sarmiento, who worked in air force intelligence during the last military dictatorship. Vázquez Sarmiento died in February while he was being tried for the false imprisonment of three people in 1978. He was already serving a 15-year sentence in the Ezeiza prison for appropriating a child from a kidnapped couple and raising him with a new identity. The parents of that child are María Graciela Tauro and Jorge Daniel Rochistein, two of the 133 victims of false imprisonment included in the trial. Both remain disappeared. Their son, Ezequiel Rochistein Tauro, recovered his true identity in 2010. Vázquez Sarmiento was a fugitive for almost 20 years until he was caught in 2021 and later sentenced in 2023. His wife, Stella Maris Emaldi, was Lynch’s niece. In Tuesday’s ruling, the judges ordered a “truth trial” to investigate the crimes Vázquez Sarmiento was charged with and that were left unpunished after his death. While no one will be convicted in that trial, the goal is to uncover what happened to the three disappeared victims: Gabriel Pontnau, Manuel Pérez Rojo and Patricia Roisinblit.