“Poor performance and gender violence is clear”

The president of the trial jury, Evaldo Moya, asked the civil judge of Rincón de los Sauces, Sebastián Villegas, if he wanted to add anything, before they went on to issue the sentence that will define his continuity in office. The magistrate had never spoken. It was very brief: “I would just like to say one thing: thank my family for their accompaniment, my wife, Dr. Sandoval, Dr. Acosta, and I also hope that justice is done.”

Villegas arrived accused of poor performance in his duties. He is accused of having sexually harassed and mistreated an official from his court, María Soledad Garayo, between 2017 and 2019. The court heard 25 witnesses for three days and will have to decide whether to dismiss the judge, as the chief prosecutor requested yesterday, Pablo Vignaroli, or acquits him, as requested by the defender Iris Sandoval.

There is another possible sanction that you can impose and that is suspension up to 60 days without pay. This was the majority decision of the jury in the case of the former chief prosecutor of Cutral Co, Santiago Terán, who He was recently tried in the province when he vociferated his misogyny on national television.

In the closing statement, Vignaroli listed the facts in a general way. He even said that he was going to repeat them to us “because I already did it when presenting the case.” He assured that it had been demonstrated that the testimony of the victim corresponds to the rest of the evidenceespecially the comments made by the judge about the physical appearance and the clothes worn by the complainant: “look at the photo I found of Soledad, she dances in the pipe, how good she is.”

He also stated that Garayo’s rejection of the judge led to an overload of tasks and that the strongest evidence was the impact on his health. The psychologists who saw the lawyer’s preoccupational exam in 2017 indicated that there were no manifest pathologies and in 2019 she ended up with workplace mobbing.

Vignaroli stressed that Villegas intervened at that time in situations of gender violence, since the court in his charge was multi-law, and it was he who reproduced them within the judicial offices.

The prosecutor remarked that the judge had also lost his managerial suitability since the testimonies of his former employees reveal that he used terms such as “fat, lazy, crazy” to refer to them, and that the campus had “naturalized the abuse”. “He encouraged whoring”said Vignaroli, a stale phrase and far from the required gender perspective.

He maintained that during the process the magistrate did not show “the slightest hint of repentance” and that the poor performance and gender violence exerted was “clear”.

The defender denied all the facts and accused the prosecution of having called the witnesses to intimidate them. Sandoval mentioned that one of them witnessed a testimony when she could not do so because he had not yet testified and asked that it be investigated. She insisted on her case theory, which was to discredit the complainant.

Nor did it demonstrate any effort to apply the gender perspective. He exceeded the threshold when in his plea he emphasized: “the victims are not these types of cases that lie”, “Victims don’t spend two and a half hours in a cosmetician.”