On March 11, when drug trafficking was the main news item in all the media, NOTICIAS magazine published on the cover the note Prosecutors in Danger. There the story of four judicial officials who investigate and accuse the most dangerous and violent gangs in the country was told. And yet, three months later, they are once again the protagonists, but due to an outrageous fact: the audit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a summary against them for having spoken.
The statements made in that article do not hinder any ongoing investigation, hardly bother to describe the climate in which prosecutors must work. Even so, they decided to put Pablo Socca and Valeria Haurigot in the dock.
The beginning of the summary was carried out as soon as that edition of NOTICIAS hit the streets. The press officer of the Rosario Regional Prosecutor’s Office, Sebastián Carranza, asked that they be investigated for the demonstrations. He alleged that the writer of the note had contacted him and, given his refusal, had spoken directly with judicial officials, which is a common practice in journalism.
The regional prosecutor María Eugenia Iribarren processed the summary and forwarded it to the General Management Audit Office of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPA). There the sanction of the two appointed prosecutors was decided. In the case of Matías Edery and Franco Carbone, they had no reproach because it was considered that their statements were prior to the request for silence demanded by the press officer.
The demonstrations that bothered the most have nothing to do with specific causes, but with legitimate feelings of prosecutors. “The narcos are out. They have such high sentences that sentencing them to 10 or 20 more years seems like a joke to them,” Haurigot had told Noticias. That generated controversy. “Is incredible. In the hearings we laugh”, adds the young prosecutor later. Those were the statements that bothered so much.
For his part, What Socca is accused of is saying “they don’t kill us because they don’t want to, not because they can’t.” For Iribarren, this implied devaluing the authority of the officials who must confront the drug gangs.
For now, the union of prosecutors did not manifest itself in this regard. But just the information was published by the journalist Hernán Lascano in the newspaper La Capital de Rosario, dleading politicians and judicial officials began to echo and protest the decision of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, a body that seemed more concerned with the silence of its subordinates than with giving them restraint and providing them with more tools for the fight against drug trafficking.
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