The genocidal Juan Miguel Wolk has died in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata, at 92 years old, and this time it is true: it was confirmed by the Naval Prefecture, which was in charge of guarding the house where he was serving house arrest. In the nineties, the ex-police officer, who during the last civic-military dictatorship was the top official of the clandestine detention and torture center known as Pozo de Banfield, managed to avoid justice with a false death certificate. It was Marta Ungaro, the sister of one of his victims, who discovered he was alive and enabled him to be later sentenced to life imprisonment for homicide, child appropriation, illegal deprivation of liberty, and torture.
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The death of Wolk, who was also known as the Nazi and the German, was reported on August 21. Wolk was a commissioner of the Buenos Aires provincial police when the government of Isabel Martínez de Perón was overthrown and the de facto government launched a systematic plan to annihilate political organizations and actions considered “subversive.” He was head of the Pozo de Banfield, where a clandestine maternity ward operated and where around 350 people were illegally held, including the ten students who fought for the student ticket and were kidnapped on the so-called Night of the Pencils.
With the return of democracy in 1983, the repressor was sentenced to 25 years in prison but was granted freedom under the impunity laws that were in effect until 2002. In 2000, Judge Baltasar Garzón requested his extradition to try him for the disappearance of Spanish citizens in Argentina, but the government at the time, led by Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001), did not grant it.
Wolk managed to evade justice for years. When he was summoned in the late nineties to testify in the Truth Trials, he presented a false death certificate that the court accepted as valid. Marta Ungaro worked in the Argentine electoral justice system and noticed that years passed, but Wolk remained on the electoral roll despite supposedly being deceased. She sent an official request to the agency in charge of paying pensions to police personnel to inquire who was collecting his pension, and after insisting a lot on the request, they confirmed that the person collecting was not his widow, but himself. Wolk lived in Mar del Plata, just minutes from the sea.
Back to life in the judicial system — and charged in crimes against humanity cases — Wolk began serving house arrest but fled in 2012, for which his daughter, María Luján Wolk, was prosecuted for allegedly aiding the escape. The justice system recaptured him a year later, with a reward, and ordered his placement in a common prison, where he stayed for a short time.
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In 2016, he was again granted house arrest, claiming that the man, then 82 years old, suffered from illnesses that made his stay in the Federal Penitentiary Complex 1 of Ezeiza inconvenient. Since then, he remained in his house in the coastal town and, finally, was sentenced: in 2023 he received a life sentence in the case known as “Hogar de Belén” and in 2024, in the “Brigadas” case.
Marta Ungaro’s discovery was just one of many steps she took throughout her life searching for her brother Horacio, who was 16 when he was kidnapped. “I am 78 years old and have been searching for him since I was 23. We do not know where his remains are; they were never found or identified. Wolk leaves like so many other genocidal criminals without saying a single word about where the children born in the Pozo de Banfield are, about the abuses in the Hogar de Belén, and the murders of the kids from the Night of the Pencils,” she laments, and denounces the lack of control over the house arrests of genocidal criminals. In 2024, a military man convicted of crimes against humanity celebrated his golden wedding anniversary with a party of at least 60 people and a show by Palito Ortega.
The death of Wolk occurred just days before the 50th anniversary of the Night of the Pencils, which became a symbol of student repression and motivated the establishment of that date as the Day of Secondary Student Rights. “On September 16 there will be a very large march and we are preparing activities — says Ungaro —. The students of the city of La Plata know they have a ticket that cost lives and the pencils now belong to others who continue writing history.”