Vice-President Victoria Villarruel, who has been criticised for her “denialist” approach to the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, has appointed a former military officer accused of attempting to destroy crucial records to a key Senate post.
Villarruel, 50, on Wednesday appointed Juan Manuel Gestoso Presas to a top auditing post in the upper chamber, as deputy director general of audit and management control.
Gestoso Presas is a former military officer who previously served as head of the Fifth Intelligence Company in Salta. In 2008, he allegedly ordered the destruction of two books of medical records at the Military Hospital in Salta registering births between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s – documentation that could help identify babies who were taken from their mothers during the era of state terrorism and given to other families.
According to reporting by the Noticias Argentinas news agencies, court sources aware of the casefile pertaining to an investigation into the alleged offence have been told to treat it as reserved material in the days prior to Villarruel formalising the appointment Decree 0306/25.
Gestoso Presas is due to start his new post on Saturday.
The prosecutors in charge of this case previously indicted Gestoso Presas and former Salta Hospital director Carlos Fernando Tozzeto Arias for an offence linked to crimes against humanity for the attempted destruction of that type of evidence. However, in 2014 a Salta court considered that no crime against humanity had been committed, acquitting them on the basis of the statute of limitations.
On May 15, 2008, Tozzeto Arias found two books in the laundry of the Military Hospital in Salta, handing them over to Gestoso Presas since he considered that they contained important information.
The latter received the material and entrusted Army Captain Silvio Manino with burning it.
The officer pretended to carry out the order but in fact, kept the books in his house, in due course presenting them to the Defence Ministry then under the control of Nilda Garré. The Defence minister then filed a criminal lawsuit and an internal enquiry, leading to both Tozzeto Arias and Gestoso Presas being passed into retirement.
Gestoso Presas’ previous position as head of the Fifth Intelligence Company is particularly notable. A taste for espionage would seem to form a pattern in the case of Villarruel – among her closet collaborators and advisors is Claudio Gallardo, a key figure important in the intelligence structure of former Army chief-of-staff César Milani.
– TIMES/NA
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