Fernando Burlando lies. It sounds like a platitude. That a criminal and media lawyer, who defended murderers and thieves, says things that are not true seems something as obvious to affirm as that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night. But not: Fernando Burlando lies. And she lies a lot, non-stop, almost like an addiction, mounting one fallacy on top of the other until she builds a castle of falsehoods so fragile that it only remains to wonder when it will collapse in one breath.
Although the lawyer leads a life of dark places -for example, who paid for the defense of the murderers of José Luis Cabezas?-, his latest batch of lies escalated to become the cover of all the media in the country, an input for all television programs and sharp criticism on social networks. He started, to be precise, on Friday March 24 at 11 in the morning. “In one part of his spot, José Luis Auge appears, one of the ‘horneros’ who killed the photographer for this medium. Could he confirm that?” Mocking was speaking, in that interview on Radio Perfil, about his brand new campaign as a candidate for Buenos Aires governor, and that question was not expected at all. Nobody, in fact, imagined it. Until then it was not known that the lawyer, who promises to “defend the Province”, was hugging someone who committed one of the worst attacks against Argentine democracy in his advertising piece. It was even hard to believe and, above all, to understand.
“That case was many years ago. People of all kinds come. I embrace truth and ethics. If you see my face 35 years ago and you see me today, you will not recognize me on the street”. The lawyer ended the interview not only without admitting that he had been with Auge, but without even showing a sign of regret.
News: Just to make it clear. In the first spot of his where he throws himself into politics and talks about people’s decency, he appears embracing the murderer of José Luis Cabezas.
Fernando Burlando: Put it how you want. But even so, they are not going to change my ideas or my convictions.
That something will remain How many lies were inside the lawyer’s last lie? The first was exposed in the radio interview -a discovery thanks to teamwork with the journalist Gabriel Michi, colleague and friend of Cabezas, and the journalist Lola Ripoll from La Plata-: Burlando appeared hugging Auge in his first spot, a fact that in a matter of hours it would provoke the repudiation of hundreds of colleagues and citizens and the association of photojournalists ARGRA (“it would seem grotesque if it were not infamous, we want the people not to forget when voting”) and the forum of journalists FOPEA (” is offensive and outrageous”). “It’s the fox taking care of the chicken coop,” Michi defined it (see box).
But there were still more layers of lies to be scrapped. It is true that Burlando’s theory that it would have been impossible for him to recognize his former client was more than flimsy: in the spot, which lasts forty seconds and was recorded in Los Hornos -the town where the material murderers of the photographer’s crime were from from NEWS-, Auge appears three times. In the second nine she debuts in the campaign, walking behind Burlando, almost guarding him, in the sixteenth she appears standing next to him while the lawyer chats with a neighbor and shortly after the already famous hug arrives. Could Burlando not recognize someone who, as shown in the video, accompanied him throughout the entire neighborhood tour?
“It’s just that 35 years have passed,” explained the candidate, in another of his lies and inaccuracies. 26 years have passed since the crime. After Auge was released early -thanks to the laborious effort of Burlando, the same one who cried out “prison for life” to those who killed Fernando Báez Sosa-, 18 passed. On December 14, 2004, thanks to a bail of 20,000 pesos -which today would be around 5 million, a sum that to this day it is not known where it came from-, the murderer of Cabezas was released from prison, despite the fact that he had been sentenced to life and that he had only spent seven years in detention. But in December 2007, Auge would once again be behind bars for violating probation, in which case Burlando would also defend him. That is to say: from the last time they had seen each other as lawyer and client, not “35 years” had passed, but 15. Much less, not counting the obvious reality that someone who spends so much time with another person -the trial lasted three years – would recognize her even if many decades passed. Especially if she has him within arm’s reach.
But this is just the math behind the tragicomic spot. Then there are the facts.
Henchman. Los Hornos is a humble neighborhood of La Plata. Everyone there knows José Luis Auge. In fact, it was he who made sure that it was so. He had been the one who introduced the rest of the murderers, who would later be known as “Los Horneros”, with the perpetrator of the Cabezas crime, then-commissioner Gustavo Prellezo. Auge was a man from the criminal underworld who stopped with the barrabrava of Estudiantes and served as a political leader for the Federal League, a branch of Buenos Aires Peronism. And it was he who began to tell throughout the neighborhood, after January 25, 1997, that he had killed the photographer, with macabre pride. This was, in fact, how Justice began to direct the case: a witness, who had heard the story from Auge’s mouth, leaked the information.
Today, 26 years later, in Los Hornos they still know the last name Auge and they are afraid of it. It was a fear that grew for his children, both imprisoned for convictions of very violent robberies, in which there were no deaths only by a miracle. Boom wants to leave that image behind. Through a third party he spoke with this medium. He says that now he works in a bakery, that he was never close to the criminal world again and that, in a response as unusual as those given by his lawyer, the day of the spot he ran into Burlando by pure chance. “I came from work, I got to the neighborhood and I saw that there were people gathered, I asked and they told me it was Fernando and I went over to say hello,” he said.
But neither that nor the one that the lawyer maintains is reality. NEWS was able to verify it. In Los Hornos they say that it was Auge and his nephew – a man who does social work in the area, who is talked about very well and who has terminals in Buenos Aires Peronism – who took care of the logistics for the spot. “They warned that Burlando was coming and gathered people, the usual thing,” says a neighbor from the neighborhood. It is the classic task of a pointer: guide and guarantee security and presence for the politician on duty. A local lawyer, who knows Burlando very well, also confirms the information. “In that part of Los Hornos you need to enter with someone who supports you, who has a weight in the neighborhood. José is ideal for that because at one point he became well known there because of Cabezas, that’s why he helped Fernando on the tour, as he also helped other politicians who went there, ”he says.
“Pitu” Salvatierra, a panelist for C5N and Futurock radio who in the past shared time in jail with Auge, also pointed in the same direction. “The descent was put together by Auge, where to go, how to go, he was the foot,” she said, an idea that Gladys Cabezas also expressed (see box).
So much so that Auge’s own nephew appears in a part of Burlando’s spot, smiling next to him. And not only that. A woman, a relative of Auge, also appears, chatting with the lawyer. To be clear: there are three Auges in Burlando’s publicity, the one who first wanted to make believe that he did not know that Cabezas’s murderer was there, that he would not have recognized him even if that was the case, and that later, as a last line of defense, argued that it was by pure chance, almost a miracle, that they met in Los Hornos. Fernando Burlando lies. Again.
contradictions. There is also another layer of lies. One is about her relationship with Cabezas’s parents, with whom she said she had a “very affectionate” relationship, a crazy version that both Gladys Cabezas and Gabriel Michi denied.
But there is also another branch of falsehoods that are more related to its political construction. It is that he went from asking for a strong hand for the rugby players who murdered Báez Sosa (“cowards, reverend sons of bitches, murderers, they have no scruples, treacherous, they deserve life imprisonment”) and for the murderers of Lucio Dupuy (“they are monsters, they have than die in jail”), to become a guarantor with Auge. “I am not the one to cancel anyone, I do not judge, we all have the right to rebuild our lives,” he said, in a very convenient twist.
It is that Burlando mounted his Buenos Aires campaign on the visibility that the Báez Sosa case gave him and, especially, on his constant attacks against rugby players, who were in tune with a society moved by the murder. It was such a notorious twist in Burlando’s biography -why, in the lawyer’s new moral standard, were rugby players crueler murderers than Los Horneros, whom he never criticized?- that NEWS portrayed him on a cover in January this year: “The laundering of Burlando”. The spot with Auge reveals how false his metamorphosis is: the lawyer chooses who to attack not because of his values but for convenience. And not only that: in Neuquén, parallel to the Báez Sosa case, Burlando was involved in a trial in which a young man was cruelly murdered, but defending the murderers (see box).
Arrives? The appearance of Auge damaged his political launch, which is already fragile. Despite the fact that she is doing well in the polls (and that on Instagram, for example, she has 1,200,000 followers, 200,000 less than Cristina Kirchner), she still has not been able to find a candidate for president with whom to go to the elections. In his space, which will compete under the seal of the Federal Integration Movement, this is a central issue: a candidate for governor needs to be on the list of a presidential candidate to have some chance. With Javier Milei, with whom initial conversations had taken place between the second lines, the negotiation is stuck.
But missing. Perhaps until the votes arrive, more lies about Fernando Burlando, the man with a thousand faces, will be discovered.
The role of Boom. He was a key piece in the crime of photographer José Luis Cabezas. Not only because of his role at the time of the kidnapping and murder, but because he was the link that had presented the then commissioner Gustavo Prellezo, the perpetrator of the crime, with the rest of the Los Hornos gang.
The policeman’s father, Anastasio Prellezo, had known Auge since he was a child. And Auge was the one who knew everyone, the uniformed man and his fellow criminals. It was Auge who obtained the “manpower” for the criminal recruitment of Prellezo.
Before the murder, he was a barrabrava of Estudiantes de La Plata -along with another of “the bakers”, Retana- and did “political” tasks in a local Justicialista Federal League in his neighborhood. In fact, Auge was the one who told Rubén De Elía, the Los Hornos community delegate, the details of the brutal crime the day after it was committed. And it was De Elía who brought that clue to the cause, first through Senator Carlos Martínez and, later, Governor Eduardo Duhalde, who in turn passed it on to Justice.
Despite having been sentenced to life, Auge was the first to be released. After just seven years and nine months, he obtained, with a bail of 20,000 pesos that it is not known who paid – today around 5 million -, his freedom, for which his lawyer Burlando worked hard. In 2007 Auge would return to prison for violating probation, just like Braga.
Boom today works as a baker and freight forwarder, in addition to making tours for politicians in his neighborhood. Braga is finishing his studies to be a lawyer, just like Prellezo, who graduated.
