He posed for 10 years as the son of the disappeared to collect compensation

2023-07-01 11:06:25

Adrián Martínez Moreira, as it appears on his ID, posed as the son of a militant couple of the Argentine People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) who had been kidnapped in Paraguay during the last dictatorship in that country to collect compensation.

He testified before the federal Justice in the Plan Condor case and there he began to deploy his modus operandi, which allowed him to make contact with other victims to whom he offered his trade as a supposed lawyer to represent them before the State. The objective of the maneuver was to collect financial reparations as victims of crimes against humanity.

To achieve this, he falsified federal court records and doctored statements of real victims with fictitious names. After an arduous investigation that has taken years and is still ongoing, he was prosecuted in the last few hours along with four other people who were complicit in his deception, according to Clarín.

“We put all the pieces together because it was a puzzle. There were different elements scattered in many places,” Federico Efron, national director of Legal Affairs of the Human Rights Secretariat, told the Buenos Aires media outlet, to begin explaining the complexity of the case.

False facts since 2013

Martínez Moreira was “the helmsman” of the criminal gang. His first formal statement dates from 2013, when he introduced false facts in the trial process for crimes against humanity. To achieve this, he had collected information on causes and names of actual victims. Thus he got a civil judge to grant him the identity he claimed.

According to the account revalidated by the Justice at that time, his parents had been kidnapped in 1988 and he, at the age of two, was seized by an Argentine soldier. A subsequent investigation by the specialized unit for child abduction cases contradicted this version. There was more because his biological sister was found, but he refused to do a genetic test.

His real name is Matías Ezequiel López and he was not born in 1986, but in 1993. But he used his false identity to deceive real victims of the dictatorship for years and thus represent them before the Argentine State. “There was a deep and careful job to not give recognition to someone who was not a victim or reject someone who really was,” Efron said.

The modus operandi with these real victims was to deceive them by saying that he was a lawyer and that he had contacts to solve everything quickly. This is how he achieved representation: he presented injunctions for default against the national State so that the files come out quickly.

Documents were also found in files for fake victims. The plan was to add documents to show the victims the power they had when it came to claiming compensation.

It was a kind of circular motion. “I made an amparo for default, a reparation file began, then a trout certification from the National Memory Archive, another from a file from Conadep. And so it was advancing and deceiving the real victims about the fate of their relatives”, indicated the representative of the Secretariat of Human Rights, who presented himself as a complainant.

The actions of Martínez Moreira continued in the same way. He even visited relatives of the disappeared and generated affective ties with them. His plan was to obtain information and then use it his way. “A story was fabricated to link to the missing victims, to predate their birth and build on this lie,” Efron added.

When asked about the existence of some type of mental disorder, sources from the investigation told this newspaper that Martínez Moreira “perfectly understands what he is doing, the difference between good and evil.”

total fraud

His fraud was total, since he even made counter-complaints, some related to gender violence. One of them against a lawyer whose signature he forged 50 times. Another, filed against a victim who had discovered his scheme.

In a raid carried out at a home in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito, where the supposed headquarters of the legal firm operated, they seized countless boxes with documentation of all the files.

Now, Federal Court No. 5 of the city of Buenos Aires, in charge of María Eugenia Capuchetti, prosecuted him along with his four accomplices: Omar Enrique Ramón García, Leticia Concepción Gaete, Nicole Carolina Garrido Piris and Susana Claudia Feldman.

The five members of the gang are accused of being part of a criminal organization dedicated to falsifying evidence in trials for crimes against humanity and files of claims for reparation laws in search of economic benefit.

“Beyond the falsifications, deception of the victims and the judges, it has not had results in terms of judicial or administrative resolutions. And that’s very important,” Efron clarified.

The purpose of the complaint is to take him to trial. Meanwhile, Martínez Moreira cannot leave the country or change his address. But he “continues fishing,” they warn. Part of his defense strategy is to insist that his story is true. For this reason, from the Human Rights Secretariat they believe that it is possible that there are more cases that have not yet come to light. There are 62 facts, but they believe there are more victims.

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