Antonio “Jaime” Stiuso became news again for a judicial presentation he made in the causes Nisman. He said that he wants to testify again because he found out from the newspapers about issues that he had not addressed in a previous statement and he considered that the prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, in charge of the investigation, should know. The judicial official accepted the request and set a date for the call: it will be November 29. What will he say?
At the end of 2021, a former AFI agent testified in the Nisman case as part of a super summons to former spies who had had communications with each other in the moments before and after the prosecutor’s death. As revealed by the journalist Raúl Kollmann, that agent is Juan Michael Pradoa former Army major who worked at the AFI until the management of the macristas Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani and then went to the Ministry of Security with Patricia Bullrich.
In his statement, agent Prado said that among the tasks that his boss, Fernando Pocino, an old enemy of Stiuso in the former SIDE, asked him to do was spy on the prosecutor. Viviana Fein. According to Prado, he had to do the early morning shift in front of the prosecutor’s office and inform who came and went. That task was assigned to him within hours of Nisman’s death. In those days, one of the most wanted men by the K government was Stiuso. His thesis is that in addition to spying on Fein they were also waiting for him, and both things are illegal and now they can be compromised in court. That is what “Jaime” is looking for.
In his previous statement, in March of this year, Stiuso maintained that Kirchnerism had launched a campaign against him. “This lady who presided over the government asked for reports and she had to control everything,” he said about Cristina Kirchner. “All of that stemmed from the woman’s sick brain,” he added.
Stiuso’s thesis is that the CFK government used him as a scapegoat to shift the focus of Nisman’s death. That they made the pantomime that they were looking for him all over the world, even with a blue Interpol circular, when in the Foreign Ministry they had an apostilled document in New York with Stiuso’s whereabouts.
Enemies. One of Stiuso’s main adversaries within the Intelligence Secretariat was the aforementioned Fernando Pocino, with whom the war reached the point of trying to resolve problems by shooting. “I did not speak with Pocino except once when I spoke because some agents were shot at us,” he said in March 2019. In that same statement, he made it clear that Pocino’s agents were always linked to criminal matters.
“At one point the people of Pocino had my phones, but later we took them away because they had been stuck in a bank robbery on Callao Avenue,” he said.
In another section of the testimony, the prosecutor asked him if he knew a person named Gladys Inés Leis and Stiuso replied that it was “someone from Pocino, who I don’t know if he was in the quilombo of wiretapping Burstein and Ciro James, came out in the newspapers”. Ciro James was an intelligence agent who was involved in a case of illegal wiretapping during the government of Mauricio Macri in the City of Buenos Aires.
Prosecutor Taiano also asked him if he knew a certain Diego Raitano, to which Stiuso replied: “He was Pocino’s driver, but well, later in the Severo issue he appeared in contact with Severo, but formally he was a driver.” Alfonso Severo was a witness in the murder case against militant Mariano Ferreyra. Severo was kidnapped for 24 hours, supposedly by the SIDE. In the investigation, telephone exchanges between Severo and intelligence agents emerged.
In his previous statement, Stiuso was in charge of leaving Pocino tied to causes and facts that were attributed to him. So now he is expected to slip more punches back to his enemy’s side.
According to reports, Pocino has already testified in the Nisman case and about his work at the AFI he would have stated that he was only limited to carrying out the orders of Oscar Parrilli and Juan Martín Mena. That is, he pointed up.
At this point a contradiction arises about the judicial search for Stiuso. In June 2021, a case was closed that the former agent had initiated against Cristina Kirchner, Parrilli and Mena, among others, for the same “persecution” and “campaign” against him that he also denounced in the Nisman file. At that time, Judge Sebastián Ramos decided to dismiss the defendants and Stiuso himself presented a written statement in which he stated that he would not appeal the judge’s decision because he believed “I was doing my bit to leave the past behind.” And in that same paragraph he added: “But leaving the past behind is not forgetting or denying what happened.” Apparently he decided to forget about everyone except Pocino.
