Global Courant 2023-05-15 14:00:30
He was in jail convicted of raping five women. He had to undergo dialysis treatment and two prison guards accompanied him to the hospital. He went through the only thing that he could not go through: in the middle of the treatment, the prisoner disappeared and only the handcuffs remained in the room where he was being treated. Prisoner escapes are repeated and in the last two months at least eleven cases have been reported, one more absurd than the other.
Emilio Zacarías Bustos (63), sentenced to 21 years and 6 months in prison for sexually abusing five women, went from the Bouwer prison to the Córdoba hospital accompanied by two agents of the Penitentiary Service of that province, but despite that he managed to escape . The event occurred on April 23.
In the middle of the treatment, a doctor noticed that the prisoner took off the only handcuff he was wearing and escaped from the third floor of the health center through the parking lot. There is a not minor detail: he is missing two fingers of one hand and they handcuffed him by that same arm, so he took advantage of that circumstance to get away.
Emilio Zacarías Bustos, the escaped prisoner for rape in Córdoba, was recaptured.
That same Monday night, the rapist was arrested at the home of a relative. The two prison guards were accused of “favoring guilty evasion.”
Due to the escape, two agents were made available in order to “attribute or determine” responsibilities in the escape. The transfer to the availability of other troops who may be involved in the custody of the convicted person is not ruled out.
After that case, the case of a man convicted of homicide who escaped from the San Luis jail was known. Due to the episode, two agents of the Penitentiary Service of that province were made available.
Alberto Figueroa (61) was in prison sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of kinesiologist Darío Gramaglia, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2004 in that province.
The victim’s family had warned the courts about the irregular treatment that the now fugitive received when he requested semi-liberty last February.
Alberto Figueroa, sentenced to life for murder, escaped from a prison farm in San Luis.
Figueroa was housed in the Penal Colony five years ago, a kind of farm for prisoners with exemplary conduct. The property that depends on the Penitentiary Service and is located at kilometer 796 of the Autopista de las Serranías Puntanas, surrounded by a simple wire fence and a gate a few meters from that expressway. On Sunday at 9.30, they realized that he was not there. The murderer is still on the run.
Two days before that escape, on Friday, April 28, two prisoners filed down the bars and escaped through the entrance of Section 1 of the Morón prison. The leadership of the police station was relieved due to suspicions of police complicity.
One of the prisoners was recaptured after a few hours. This leak was the second in less than a week in the Province of Buenos Aires. The other was on Sunday, April 23, when three prisoners escaped from the 10 de Tres de Febrero police station. The place was overcrowded: there were 16 prisoners where five enter.
According to the police version, an officer did not lock the cell and the prisoners threatened him and reduced him with a pointed stick. The criminals left through the main door of the police station, located in Sáenz Peña.
The criminal raid did not end in the escape. As soon as they set foot on the street, they stole a Peugeot 408, two blocks from the police station. The car was abandoned in Villa Devoto.
In the same month, but on April 16, five prisoners who were at the Avellaneda 1st police station escaped during the early hours of the morning. The technique they applied was, once again, filing the bars of a window, with a prefabricated saw, which serves as ventilation in a bathroom in the cells.
The next morning, the agents toured the facilities and found that the bars had been cut. This is how they realized that Fernando Maggio (31), arrested for an attempted robbery; Lucas Raúl Daniel Verón (21), arrested for robbery in a town and in a gang; Leandro Ezequiel Giménez (20), for aggravated robbery with a firearm; Alan Ariel Verón (23), for robbery in a town and in a gang; and Gabriel Horacio Roldán (39), arrested for attempted robbery, had escaped.
Five prisoners escaped by escaping through the roof of a police station in Avellaneda.
The men entered the outer patio and, from there, they climbed to the roofs with the help of a sheet and then escaped. The next day, Maggio was arrested in the Villa Corina neighborhood, in Villa Dominico, when he was walking down the street. They are still looking for the other four.
With the same tactic used at the Avellaneda police station, three prisoners escaped from the 21st police station in Rosario. Two of the fugitives were arrested. One of them, Jorge Cardozo, was found in the southwest of the city. He had in his possession a 14 caliber pistol.
The other person recaptured was Rodrigo Ezequiel Martínez, who was walking with a woman in the western part of Rosario and at the time of his arrest was carrying a homemade weapon. The third prisoner, Oscar Gómez, is still a fugitive.
Leaks in groups of three did not stop in April. At the beginning of the month, three prisoners fled from the Sixth Northeast District Police Station, in Villa Celina, around 2:30. After subduing an escaping detainee, other prisoners attacked the officer on duty and Miguel Ángel Gómez, Alan Mauricio Moreira and Claudio Oscar Vadala escaped.
While the other detainees staged a riot demanding to be transferred to prison units, which led to the intervention of the Halcón group.
More unusual escapes occurred in April, such as the escape of a handcuffed prisoner -Víctor Hugo Gómez (29)- at the 12th sub-station of Los Troncos in Santa Fe. The day he entered, he escaped. He was waiting to be transferred to another police headquarters with a place to stay when, around 9:00 p.m., he took advantage of “a distraction” by the guards to escape through the funds of the unit. An hour and a half later he was caught.
Another escape occurred on April 14 when a prisoner – Ezequiel Alberto Schefer (45) – took off his handcuffs and ran out of the 10th police station in the city of Santa Fe.
Two prisoners also escaped after filing down the bars of the cell of the Tapalqué police station, Province of Buenos Aires, during the early hours of March 28. Juan Carlos Harika Mendoza (37) and Juan Ramón Barreto Villalba (32) were captured.
At the beginning of March, four prisoners housed in the 7C Neighborhood Police Station in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores escaped at dawn through the roofs of neighboring houses. One of the detainees managed to escape from his cell by breaking an unprotected grating and then opened other cells.
Víctor José Pana (18), David Ferrari (32), Diego Guerrero (23) and Luis Silveyra (34) fled, but the next day, March 5, Ferrari was arrested again. He had dyed his hair blonde and wore a cap.
The event coincides with the collapse of prisoners in the Buenos Aires city alcaidías. In the sectionals there are 1,284 detainees when the capacity is 543.
Official data
There are no official figures for the number of prisoners who manage to escape from the police stations, but there are from prisons. The National System of Statistics on the Execution of Sentence made the last report in 2021 where it records the escapes of detainees in the provincial and federal prison services.
The document reports the response of the detainees to the question of whether “did they attempt to escape or evade during the last year?” Of the total of 101,267 prisoners, 190 answered that they tried to escape and 257, to escape.
In turn, the Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF) stated that there were no escapes of defendants in its prisons, while in the provinces they registered 16 cases. In the prisons of the Province of Buenos Aires, four prisoners escaped, one in Córdoba, two in Chubut, one in Mendoza, three in Río Negro and five in Santa Fe.
The same trend continued with the condemned. In the SPF no leaks were registered, but there were in the provinces, 74: Buenos Aires (30), Corrientes (2), Chaco (2), Entre Ríos (1), Mendoza (22), Misiones (1), Río Negro (4), Santa Cruz (4) and Santa Fe (8).
MG
