He was 27 years old and had gone to the doctor. When he left the consultation, he said he would return home “around late afternoon.” That was the last news of Mario Golemba, in 2008. Almost two decades later, Argentine justice arrested 16 police officers from the province of Misiones, in the northeast of the country, this Monday, investigated for the forced disappearance of Golemba. The prosecution accuses them of having participated, with varying degrees of involvement, in a criminal plan that included the illegal detention of the victim, his subjection to physical violence, and a subsequent “pact of silence” to hide the facts.
Although his whereabouts are still unknown and his remains have not been found, investigators believe that Golemba was murdered at the police station in the town of Dos de Mayo, 1,100 kilometers from Buenos Aires.
Mario Golemba worked as a farmer and lived with his family in the rural area known as Picada Indumar, a yerba mate region, near that Misiones town. He was very thin and was trying to gain weight. With that purpose, on March 27, 18 years ago, he visited a nutritionist doctor in the city of Oberá, about 80 kilometers from his home. The text message announcing his return home was sent from his phone to his partner: they were going to get married at the end of that same year.
In his absence, his family’s desperation grew from that very night. Within 48 hours, his parents filed a judicial complaint. Posters with his face multiplied throughout the province: “Where is Mario?”, “What happened to Mario?”, “How long will this agony last?”, they asked. The Misiones government offered a reward. But nothing worked. The trail was lost in Oberá.
The slow investigation that this week led to the arrest of 16 police officers had its first lead a year after Golemba’s disappearance. Two prisoners who had been detained at the Dos de Mayo police station testified as witnesses with reserved identity. “I got the impression they were telling the truth,” said the victim’s father, Antonio Golemba, who died in 2016. “Each one separately tells the same story. They say they saw Mario arrive handcuffed [at the police station], one of them knew him from the Indumar yerba cooperative. He says [the police] beat him and then he was able to see how they took Mario away in a truck.”
A version that Golemba’s family found plausible indicated that the police confused Mario with a suspect wanted at that time, an alleged member of a gang of thieves operating in the region.
The initial investigation, carried out by the Oberá Instruction Court 1, failed to determine what had happened. The case was reactivated in mid-2021, when the lawsuit representing Golemba’s family managed to transfer the file to the federal court of Posadas, the capital of Misiones. There began an investigation focused on the crime of forced disappearance of persons, a crime against humanity, imprescriptible.
Based on evidence, wiretaps of the suspects, and collected testimonies, Judge María Verónica Skanata ordered this Monday the arrest of Commissioner Evaldo Katz, who at the time of the events was in charge of the Dos de Mayo police station; the officers on duty Edgardo Arce and Liliana Saft; the head of the guard Carmelo Cerdán Cruz; the secretary José Pereyra Da Silva; the driver Alejandro González Samudio; the guards Maximiliano Gutiérrez, Ramón Cardozo, Mario Villar, and Diego Armando Amarilla; the radio operators Alfredo Lorenzo Ortiz and Cristian Andrés Silva, and the agents Wiliams Gabriel Lunge, Baldemar Parra, Juan Ramón Ferreyra, Ofelia Gladys Ziller, and Eduardo Pellizer. Several of the accused are already retired personnel. Except for Ortiz, who remains a fugitive, the arrests were carried out by the Gendarmerie force at different points in the province.
According to the federal prosecution’s accusation, the police allegedly used the police station’s structure to carry out Golemba’s illegal detention and make him disappear. The prosecution understands that the accused participated in a common criminal plan, with different functional contributions.
Furthermore, prosecutor Silvina Gutiérrez points out that, after the disappearance, they put into motion an “institutional pact of silence” that included “the systematic refusal to acknowledge the victim’s deprivation of liberty, omissions in official records, the uniformity of certain versions provided by police officials, contradictions detected between different administrative and judicial actions, and the installation of alternative hypotheses that would have diverted the investigation.” The result of that pact was, the prosecution states, “to keep hidden the fate of Mario Fabián Golemba and to prolong until today the ignorance about his destiny.”
Golemba’s family now hopes to advance in the full clarification of the crime. “The truth is already explicit. We are convinced of the criminal participation of this group in a common plan,” said the plaintiff’s lawyer Rafael Pereyra Pigerl to Radio Up. “We hope they can start talking and that justice will be done soon,” he added. When the federal case was opened five years ago, the first person to testify before the prosecution was, recalled the newspaper Clarín, Mario’s mother, Irma Komka: “I only ask for a little bone to be able to bring him a flower.”
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