On November 17, 2021, four teenagers drive out of the training center of the Barracas Central football club, located in the south of Buenos Aires. Lucas Gonzalez, 17, was playing there. His three friends had come to try their luck to join the youth teams of this first division club. It is 9:30 a.m. 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 cakes, at the entrance of 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”, will tell the driver, Julian Salas, during the trial. When he sees one of the officers, in civilian clothes, dressed in black and with gun in hand, getting out of the car, he says he thinks of an attempted robbery, and tries to escape by climbing on the sidewalk.
The shots begin to fuse, two bullets hit Lucas Gonzalez in the head. Julian stops the vehicle and calls for help. Uniformed police stationed nearby approach and quickly immobilize two of them, while the third escapes, before being arrested a few hours later, when he had gone to the police station to denounce facts. Lucas Gonzalez, meanwhile, will be transported under police surveillance to hospital before succumbing to his injuries the next day.
Fourteen police officers charged
Quickly, the version given 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 there was therefore no shooting but one-way shooting. The parents of the young boys assure in the media that the weapon found in the vehicle of the teenagers was placed there by the police a posteriori, 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 appraised it, a scene that looks more like a “assault” from the police than an identity check.
In the media and on social networks, Argentine society is outraged. The impact is such that it is 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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