On November 17, 2021, four teenagers walk out of the training center of the Barracas Central football club, located in southern Buenos Aires. Lucas Gonzalez, 17, used to play there. His three friends had come to try their luck at joining the youth teams of this first division club. It’s 9:30. On the way back to the municipality of Florencio Varela where they live, located on the outskirts of the city, they stop to buy fruit juices and sweets, at the entrance to Villa 21 -24, a precarious district of the Argentine capital.
An unmarked and unregistered vehicle suddenly cuts them off. “I honked because I thought he was distracted”, the driver, Julian Salas, will say during the trial. When he sees one of the officers get out of the car, in civilian clothes, dressed in black and with a gun in his hand, he says that he thinks of an attempted robbery, and tries to escape by climbing onto the sidewalk.
The shots begin to merge, two bullets hit Lucas Gonzalez in the head. Julian stops the vehicle and calls for help. The uniformed policemen stationed nearby approach and quickly immobilize two of them, while the third escapes, only to be arrested a few hours later, when he went to the police station to report the facts. Lucas Gonzalez, meanwhile, will be transported under police surveillance to hospital before succumbing to his injuries the next day.
Fourteen police officers reported
Quick, the version provided by the police officers involved – who claimed to have been endangered by “four apparently minor, young individuals” Who “were armed”loses credibility. While they claim to have been threatened with a weapon, we discover that the latter is fake, and that therefore there was not a shot but a one-way shot. The boys’ parents assure the media that the weapon found in the boys’ vehicle was placed there by the police after the fact, which will be confirmed later by a testimony. Finally, a security video from the city of Buenos Aires, which partially recorded the sequence, shows, according to the magistrate who examined it, a scene that looks more like a “assault” by the police rather than an identity check.
On the media and on social networks, Argentine society is indignant. The impact is such that it will be Gregorio Dalbon, one of the lawyers of the vice president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who will finally represent the families of the victims.
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