In days when there is a lot of talk about the disappearance of Loan Peña (5) in Corrientes, the collection of fingerprints, evidence and the work of the experts and the specialized dogs to find the child, there is a “character” who could well have been involved in this investigation of national impact as he has done in so many others, although perhaps he has already learned his lesson and does not want more problems with Justice. This is Marcos Herrero, a dog trainer from Río Negro who was condemned in Mendoza for planting evidence in the search for a woman in order to gain notoriety, and who will now be tried for another high-profile case: that of Facundo Astudillo.
Recently, the Bahía Blanca prosecutor Santiago Martínez asked to take the accused to the stand, accused of “false testimony repeated on seven occasions, aggravated by having been committed in a criminal case against the accused.” According to the representative of the Public Ministry of that city, the suspect maliciously and illegally intervened between July 2020 and March 2021 within the framework of the proceedings to find out what had happened to this young man from Buenos Aires.
“He tried to incorporate mendacious conclusions and planted evidence, with the clear objective of incriminating members of the police forces in the disappearance of Astudillo“said the prosecutor in his submission to debate.
In this action for which he is accused, Herrero would have made marks with his dogs in the presence of alleged traces of the smell of Facundo in different measures and would have managed to find elements that allegedly belonged to this boy. At the time, police units and patrols were raided and requisitioned with the participation of the “peritrucho”, But for the prosecution, all his work was irregular and outside of professional protocols, which now earns him an imminent trial.
The case Astudillo, almost four years after the tragic end for the victim, is still not clarified. Although the focus has always been on the Police, to date there are no defendants and doubt remains as to whether it was a crime, an accidental death or a suicide.
The young man disappeared on April 30, 2020 and his skeletonized body was found in the crabbed of the Bahía Blanca estuary on August 15 of that year. He had left the day before from his house in Pedro Luro to Bahía Blanca to go see his girlfriend, in months when movement restrictions were in force in Argentina due to isolation in the pandemic. This infraction led to his arrest by a group of officers who detained him when they saw him hitchhiking on the road.
That was the last certain information about his whereabouts, until he was found dead. The autopsy confirmed that he died violently from asphyxiation due to submersion.
The precedent that was set in Mendoza and other suspicions against him
Among the arguments that the Bahía Blanca prosecutor deployed to bring Herrero to trial, he recalled his time in Mendoza and the sentence to 8 months of suspended prison that he already served as a result of a similar modus operandi.
This man was found guilty in March of last year for false denunciation and testimony, usurpation of titles and simple concealment. He had arrived in the province at the end of 2021, hired by the family of Viviana Luna, the woman who disappeared in Potrerillos in 2016 and of whom there is still no clue.
Regarding this cause, the Homicide Division ordered multiple searches and operations in the area to find her, all with negative results. However, the trainer, in just 20 minutes and in a place already reviewed by the investigations – an abandoned hotel -, “found” a skull and a purse with notes, with names of well-known people from Mendoza, such as judges, businessmen and politicians. .
Given this discovery, the accused notified the Police and the prosecution, who from the first moment questioned the quality of this material. They subjected that skull to studies, and quickly ruled out that it corresponded to the woman they were looking for. On the contrary, it belonged to a male.
But also, the true experts They detected a large amount of Herrero’s DNA in those skeletal remains, an indication that they had been extremely manipulated by him.
Already with great suspicions about his conduct, Justice demonstrated that those same bones had “appeared” in the case of Marcela López, a woman who disappeared in Santa Cruz and in whose search this subject also participated.
Added to all this were testimonies, wiretaps and recordings that complicated the false expert, who ended up arrested and charged. He was detained for eight months, until he was released in August 2022.
In the debate, led by judges Ariel Spektor, Luis Correa Llano and Ramiro Salinas, and with the prosecutor Gustavo Pirrello in the prosecution, it was condemned for the same amount of time he was detained and the sentence was served.
However, the suspect’s run-ins with Justice will continue: the trial awaits him in the case of Facundo Astudillo and in December 2023, the Criminal Cassation Chamber of Buenos Aires requested that he be investigated for his performance in the case of the femicide of Aracelli Fulles (22), who disappeared for 25 days in 2017, in which he played a leading role in the prison. life of three men, a sentence that was reversed by the aforementioned chamber.
