Ginés Vicente was convicted of exploiting a day laborer who disappeared 9 years ago after demanding a living wage, but was acquitted of his kidnapping. Last year, another employee of yours was lost. The UCO and the judge investigate it
Agents of the Central Operating Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard are registering at this time a garage in Villacarrillo (Jaén) which, as CASE OPEN has learned, is related to the disappearance of Ibrahim Dioufa 32-year-old Senegalese man who was working picking olives in the village when his trail disappeared on January 5, 2021.
A friend of the temporary worker then denounced that the young man had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. after having been with the boss who had him employed in his olive grove that season. As he explained to the Civil Guard, Ibrahima had just announced to his compatriots that he wanted to quit his job and was going to go with his partner to Cartaya (Huelva), where he had already collected oranges in previous years, but never took the bus nor did he reach his new destination.
The last person who was with him before he lost track, in the house that Ibrahima shared in Villacarrillo with other day laborers, was his boss, Ginés Vicente, according to the Senegalese’s colleagues. He is a 53-year-old businessman with record for exploiting another young African who disappeared in 2013 while working for the same employer and after arguing with him about his working conditions. His family has never heard from him again.
argued with the boss
Now, the Civil Guard is inspecting the businessman’s garage in search of incriminating evidence and elements that could link him to Ibrahima’s disappearance. The Villacarrillo Investigating Court 1 has taken charge of the case, which is under summary secrecy, according to judicial sources. At the forefront of the investigation has been the UCOthe same unit that has already solved other complex cases of missing people that were finally found, like the one in Diana Quer or the child Gabriel Cruz, and that this Monday he is making the records.
Eight years before Ibrahima was swallowed up by the earth, Tidiany Coulibalyanother immigrant who came from Mali to do the olive season on the Ginés Vicente farm, disappeared from the same house than the Senegalese. That December 17, 2013, Coulibaly, 22 years old, had argued with the employer after claiming a decent salary for him and his crew, just like Ibrahima would have done before disappearing.
As the Court of Jaén would later prove, the boss paid Coulibaly and his compatriots between 20 and 30 euros a day, that is, well below the minimum wage established at 50.36 euros. In addition, the man, who deducted from the salary of his employees the price of the material that they broke during their working day, had several employees in an irregular situation and without registering.
Earmuffs with your DNA
After that discussion with the boss, Coulibaly’s family and friends never heard from him again and reported his disappearance. The Civil Guard arrested Ginés Vicente after finding some day laborer’s earmuffs with your DNA on ‘the blackberryan olive farm of about four hectares that the businessman managed on the outskirts of the Jaen town of Villanueva del Arzobispo and where the seasonal worker had never been working.
The employer’s mobile phone placed him in that field the morning Coulibaly disappeared. In addition, Elton, the Civil Guard dog who participated in numerous searches for missing persons, such as that of Diana Quer, marked biological remains in an olive tree on the farm that was a few meters from the place where they found the earmuffs of the young African.
The businessman sat on the bench accused of enforced disappearancetwo crimes continued against workers’ rightstwo crimes against the Administration of Justicea crime of disobedience to authorityother against public health (deputies found 330 grams of marijuana on one of his properties) and a foul for electric fluid fraud in the house where he housed the seasonal workers.
Before the trial was held, in which the prosecutor asked for Vicente 16 years in prison, while Coulibaly’s family requested a sentence of 29 years, the businessman tried to coerce two witnesses into lying in his statement to the Civil Guard. He asked them to say that they had seen him the day his employee disappeared, precisely at the time I had no alibi. In exchange, according to the judgment of the Audiencia de Jaén, Vicente promised to forgive them a debt.
“Here the black is me”
Ten days before the court passed sentence, the accused businessman expressed himself in statements to the magazine Interviú: “I know they are going to sentence me, because I have already been sentenced. They have stigmatized me, With the nuance of the fainted black man who accuses the businessman, who are they going to listen to? To the nobler part so to speak.”
The man added: “I feel sorry for these kids, but deep down nobody is forcing them to be here and they will be nomads or whatever you want to call them, but they have moneybecause they don’t spend money and we even give them the clothes they wear. There are people of ours who are having a bad time and they are incapable of asking for a kilo of chickpeas, but these people stand in line a thousand times to ask”. Finally, the businessman from Villacarrillo assured that the Civil Guard had been taught “with the poorest”: “here the black It’s me”.
Finally, it was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “exploiting” their workers. The court considered it proven that the “cheated and abused them” taking advantage of the fact that they were “foreign immigrants, some of them without papers, and that they barely knew our language“. The Court of Jaén also found Ginés Vicente guilty of a crime of obstruction of Justice, but acquitted him of the crime of kidnapping due to lack of evidence.