Police in Argentina found on Saturday (04.07.2020) the lifeless body of Fabián Gutiérrez, former private secretary of former Argentine President and today Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The find occurred in El Calafate, in the southern province of Santa Cruz, after the victim disappeared on Thursday. After raiding his home, the presence of bloodstains was detected.
“We have four people in detention and we find the body,” said coroner Carlos Navarte, for whom “the motive can be a robbery or a possible cause of passion.” Among those arrested early Saturday morning is a 20-year-old boy who had entered into an affectionate relationship with Gutierrez. None of them had a criminal record.
Gutierrez suffered a blow to the head and a white gun cut, the judge said, who detailed that some objects of the victim were found in the home of one of the detainees, precisely the one with whom he “had a closer connection”. “I have no evidence to tell me that it could have been a political issue,” Navarte said, taking into account the victim’s judicial situation.
Crime “of the greatest gravity”
The body of the businessman and former secretary was found “buried, wrapped in a sheet”, on the grounds of a house behind the data revealed by one of the four arrested. The magistrate reported that, according to the first investigations, the murder would have been perpetrated in the home of the former secretary of Fernández in El Calafate and then his body would have been moved in his own van to the place where it was finally found.
Gutierrez, who also worked with former President Nestor Kirchner, was admitted in 2018 as a “collaborator” witness (to weigh the eventual conviction) in a case of alleged bribes in public works during the Kirchnerist administration, involving dozens of businessmen, officials and the former president herself, known as “the cause of the notebooks”.
The opposition coalition Together for Change considered that “the kidnapping, disappearance and murder of Fabián Gutiérrez is a crime of the greatest institutional gravity”. Former Conservative President Mauricio Macri’s alliance (2015-2019) urged that the murder investigation pass to Federal Justice “for the possible connection of his death to federal crimes” and for “no relatives of Vice President Cristina Kirchner in the process”, in reference to the fact that the case could be placed under the orbit of prosecutor Mercado Natalia, the niece of the former president.
