Tomorrow begins the trial of Mario Sandoval for the kidnapping of Hernán Abrita during the dictatorship

The former inspector of the Federal Police Mario Sandoval will begin to be tried this Wednesday for the kidnapping and torments of Hernán Abriata student and militant of the Peronist University Youth (JUP), who was illegitimately deprived of liberty in October 1976 and remains missing.
The trial will be held in person and will be open to the public in the SUM courtroom of Comodoro Py 2002 in this capital, where the Federal Oral Court 5 will judge Sandoval. The preliminary hearing is scheduled for 9.30 a.m., after which the prosecutor’s request will be heard and later an extension of the accused’s investigation.

During the afternoon of today, the TOF 5 notified the complaints that finally the trial would be in person, and not virtual, as it had determined in the first instance. “It was barbaric that it was virtual, because it was going to be a secret trial,” questioned Carlos Loza, a survivor of the clandestine center that operated in the former ESMA during the last civic-military dictatorship and a witness in this case. In turn, Loza criticized that the decision that the trial be face-to-face was communicated “from one day to the next” and pointed against Justice for “putting obstacles.” During the dictatorship, Sandoval was an Inspector of the Federal Police, served in the Superintendence of Federal Security and was a member of Task Group 3.3.2. of the ESMA. With the return of democracy, when investigations began into the human rights violations of the dictatorship, the former policeman took refuge in France, where he obtained citizenship. Relatives of Abriata filed a complaint against Sandoval after the annulment of the Due Obedience and Final Point laws, and in 2012 federal judge Sergio Torres filed the lawsuit in France to extradite the former policeman. In 2019 he was extradited to Argentina after the process that began in 2012, when the Argentine federal justice system made the first arrest warrant to be tried in the country for crimes against humanity. Sandoval’s career in the police and in the clandestine detention center of the ESMA links him to numerous crimes committed during the civic-military dictatorship, although France granted extradition only for the facts that had Abriata as a victim. Sandoval is investigated for his alleged participation in the Navy operation that executed the kidnapping of Abriata in the early morning of October 30, 1976, when the 25-year-old, student of Architecture and militant of the Peronist University Youth (JUP), was at his home in the Federal Capital.The TOF5 is composed of Daniel Obligado, Adriana Palliotti and Fernando Canero, while the prosecutors are Leonardo Filippini and the assistant Marcela Obetko.In the framework of the investigation of the case, in 2017 an investigation team in charge of federal judge Torres found in the premises where the clandestine center of the ESMA worked an inscription on the wall that would belong to Abriata, with a message of love for her partner. “H.A. Monica I love you,” one can read, in a small space where the student was kidnapped. 

Original source in Spanish