The Prosecutor’s Office Federal of Reconquista investigate whether in the company Vicentin There was complicity with state terrorism during the last dictatorship, after a former cereal worker declared this week that he had been kidnapped twice in 1976 for his union activity.
Federal prosecutor Roberto Salum heard last Thursday the testimony of Oscar Zarza, who said that he was kidnapped in January 1976, shortly before the start of the dictatorship and then in November of that same year, judicial sources reported.
“They stopped me at the factory, shortly after I went to work, and they made me a report with a typewriter that was given by company personnel. They took me to a room and the one who facilitated everything was a foreman who we called “El Sapo” Vicentin, but it was not part of the family that owned the firm, ”said Zarza.
The worker, who is currently over 70 years old, lives in the city of Avellaneda and is known by the nickname “Cacho”, and reported that he was released in February 1976 and that he rejoined the company.
However, on November 2 of that year, he assured that he was kidnapped again in the afternoon, when he returned from his work in Vicentin to his home. According to the testimony that he gave before the Prosecutor’s Office, that day the security forces kidnapped 14 workers who were active as union delegates in Vicentin.
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In his statement, he claimed to have seen members of the II Army Corps, belonging to battalion 621, who arrived from Rosario to carry out this operation.
Zarza, who also had union activity at the firm, said that after his kidnapping he was transferred to the III Air Brigade, where he was “beaten and kicked” by his captors and later transferred to the Reinforced Infantry Guard in the city of Santa Fe, a police station where a clandestine detention center operated. Zarza ended up “legalized” in the Coronda prison, at the disposal of the Executive Power, and from there he regained his freedom on Christmas 1978.
These events will allow the Prosecutor’s Office to initiate a second section of case 050, in which crimes against humanity were investigated in the Reconquest zone during the last military dictatorship.
That file was instructed by Salum and ended with a trial in which Commodore Danilo Sambuelli and Major Jorge Alberto Benítez, both from the Air Force, and police officers Carlos Nickisch, Horacio Machuca, Rubén Molina, Arnaldo Neumann and Eduardo Luque.
In this oral and public process, the existence of a repressive circuit was verified that began in the III Reconquest Brigade, continued in clandestine illegal detention centers near the capital of Santa Fe, and if the detainees were “laundered”, it ended in the Coronda prisons , Devotee or some criminal of the South of the Country.
Now, the prosecution is waiting for the Secretariat of Human Rights of the province of Santa Fe to provide information and data to advance the investigation.
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The Oil Federation, a union of workers in the sector, announced its intention to review its files to provide data that would allow the investigation to proceed.
“We believe that as a union we must assist our affiliates to justice and we will review our files to analyze the minutes of assemblies and see if we can provide information for the cause in relation to whether delegates who spoke at the assemblies were taken,” said Juan Combi , legal representative of Aceiteros.
The union intends to present itself as a plaintiff in this case, something it did in 2014 in the investigation of crimes against humanity that were committed at the Avellaneda (Buenos Aires) plant of the Molinos company.
“The current intervention of Vicentin by the State generates some expectation in relation to the information that we can find in the company’s records,” said Combi. In addition to the union, the League for Human Rights will also be presented as a complainant to promote this investigation.
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