The Reconquista federal prosecutor, Roberto Salum, heard last Thursday the testimony of 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 told the news agency Telam.
“They stopped me at the factory, shortly after I went to work, and they made me a report with a typewriter that was given to them by company personnel. They took me to a room and the one who facilitated everything was a foreman who we told him” Toad “Vicentin, but was not part of the family that owned the firm”Zarza said in statements to Télam.
The worker, who is currently over 70 years old, lives in the Santa Fe city of Avellaneda and is known by the nickname “Cacho”, related that he was released in February 1976 and rejoined the company.
On November 2 of that year he was kidnapped again in the afternoon, when he returned from his job 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.
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, He said that after his kidnapping, he was transferred to the III Air Brigade, where he received “blows and kicks” from his captors.
He was then transferred to the Reinforced Infantry Guard of 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 Branch, 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 Secretary of Human rights from the province of Santa Fe provide you with information and data to advance the investigation.
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 should 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,” he told Télam. the lawyer 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 regarding 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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