This Friday, the Court of Appeals of Santiago reviews the appeals to the precautionary measures of the former mayor of Maipú, Cathy Barriga.
Last week, the Prosecutor’s Office formalized the former community leader for fraud once morest the treasury and falsification of public instruments, crimes that she allegedly committed during her administration and caused a deficit close to $31 billion in the municipality.
The judge of the Ninth Guarantee Court of Santiago Hugo Salgado did not accept the Public Ministry’s request for preventive detention for Barriga as he did not consider that the former mayor is a danger to society, that she might harm the investigation with threats or that there is a risk of flight.
This caused disagreement in the Public Ministry, to which the Eastern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office appealed last Tuesday to the appeal court of Santiago to reverse the precautionary measure and request preventive detention once more for Cathy Barriga. The State Defense Council (CDE) joined this request.
But it is not the only appeal. This Wednesday it was announced that the former mayor’s lawyers, Cristóbal Bonacic, Marcelo Hadwa and José Miguel Barahona, presented an eight-page brief to also change Judge Salgado’s ruling, accusing contradictions in the magistrate’s decision.
The defenders said that “despite having discarded each of the dangers or procedural risks invoked by the persecutors as hypothetical needs for caution, the court still applied a particularly intense precautionary measure, such as total house arrest, which ends up being a contradiction.”
In that sense, they stated that Barriga cannot be under total house arrest, since the same judge would have hinted that, at this stage of the process, the participation of his client in the crimes attributed to him cannot be proven, due to that there are still pending expertise.
The defense lawyers indicated that, despite the fact that the arguments “are characterized by imprecision and lack of further investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Judge concludes that in any case there is precedent that justifies the crime investigated; which, without a doubt, contains a contradiction and, therefore, a lack of foundation.”
The review of Cathy Barriga’s precautionary measures is carried out in the Sixth Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Santiago. The body is made up of ministers José Pablo Rodríguez and Erika Villegas, and lawyer Eduardo Gandulfo.
The hearing began around 8:30 a.m.
Also, the precautionary measures of Cathy Barriga’s former advisor, Luis Japaz, who is under nighttime house arrest, will be reviewed.
During the day, the court of appeal must also rule on the role of the municipality of Maipú as plaintiff in the case. This following the administration of Mayor Tomás Vodanovic was excluded from the case.
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