On December 6, Agustín Nahuel Gallo got into his car, a Fiat UNO patent NET014. It was 3:47 p.m. in Mendoza, and a long trip awaited the man: He had to cross two more countries until he reached his final destination. A few hours later the gendarme, a first corporal who works in squad number 27 in Uspallata, arrived in Santiago de Chile. There he left his car and entered the airport: traveling from the neighboring country to Colombia is cheaper and more practical than traveling from Argentina. At 0:50 on December 7, Gallo got on a plane.
At some point that morning the aircraft parked in Bogota. The gendarme was going to spend the entire day delayed at that airport, until at 10 p.m. he boarded another one, bound for Cucuta. This city, of almost 800 thousand inhabitants, has several peculiarities: on the one hand it is one of the poorest in its country, first in the ranking of homeless people, and on the other it has been receiving a flood of tourists and immigrants in in recent years, especially after July 28.
That day were the elections in Venezuela, in which the Chavista regime imposed itself by force and against any guarantee of democratic transparency. Since then, many exiles escape through Cúcuta, and some others pass through there to reach Venezuela. That city, in the north of Colombia, is one of the most used border crossings to arrive at the neighboring nation. Agustín Gallo had such a plan, although the reason is still in dispute.
Almost two days after beginning his journey, at 5:30 in the morning, Gallo faced the Simón Bolívar International Bridge. He went there with a taxi driver of Venezuelan origin, apparently named Carlos, who the gendarme’s wife would later say had been hired by her to facilitate the arrival of her husband. That, in any case, never happened.
At 7 in the morning Gallo went through immigration control to enter Venezuela, and that was when what is now a scandal of international proportions began to unfold: they took his cell phone and his luggage and left him delayed. At 10:57 on December 8, a message arrived on the cell phone of Alexandra Gómez García, Gallo’s partner who had returned to her native country to take care of her mother a few months ago. It was from the phone number of the taxi driver he had hired, although the recipient claimed to be the gendarme.
Gallo told him what was happening and told him that they were about to perform another confrontation. That was the last time his wife spoke to him. After she made her complaint public, the Argentine Government reported an “illegal kidnapping” and thus began a new fight with Chavismo. The end is still uncertain, even in several ways: the case even slipped into the official internal system.
Maze
“I would never have authorized a gendarme to go to Venezuela. What is happening is the sadly obvious consequence, but since I am not from the Security area I do not give an opinion.” The one who wrote this message on her X account was neither more nor less than Victoria Villarruel. The vice president, perhaps still hurt because Milei did not fulfill the promise he made to her in public and private to give her the management of the Defense and Security portfolios, shot Patricia Bullrich.
This occurred on the afternoon of December 19, when the case had already dominated the media discussion. Bullrich responded harshly. and he once again stirred up the internal violence against the vice president. 11 days after Gallo’s arrest – at the time of going to press – the case remains shrouded in mystery. Beyond the data reported at the beginning of the note, checked with the information of his travels and his departure from the country, the rest is the subject of dispute.
The version given by Gallo’s wife, which is the same as that of the Milei Government, is harshly contrasted by the Venezuelan dictatorship. “As it hurt them, it hurt them,” said Diosdado Cabello.Minister of the Interior of that regime and one of its spokespersons, on December 17. “It hurt them because he came to carry out a mission and we dealt him a hard blow,” he said, ensuring that Gallo was a spy sent by the Argentine government in a “terrorist operation.”
Since then they engaged in a tough back-and-forth with Bullrich. Cabello called her a “sick fascist” and she called him a “lackey of a criminal dictatorship” and warned that it was “an almost act of war.” The minister ended by showing the eight trips that Gallo had made outside the country in the last six years, replicating the version that the Venezuelan had given that the gendarme lived traveling the globe.
The situation is now boiling. The Argentine Government assures that Gallo is illegally detained at an intelligence base in Tachira, while the Venezuelans refuse to give any clues. Foreign Minister Gerardo Werthein, who also harshly criticized Chavismo, is asking third parties to intercede: Colombia and Brazil (which took charge of the Argentine embassy in Caracas after Mileism ignored Chavismo’s electoral results) are the ones targeted, although the negotiation is blocked. For now, Gendarme Gallo remains in Venezuela.
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