Buenos Aires, March 30 (NA) – The head of Federal Court No. 8, Marcelo Martínez De Giorgi, declared the nullity of the money laundering case against the widow of Pablo Escobar, María Isabel Santos Caballero; her son, Juan Sebastián Marroquín Santos; and former Boca Juniors player Mauricio 'Chicho' Serna, who were acquitted.
The case had been elevated to trial in June 2020 by Morón Federal Judge Néstor Barral, who considered that there was an international criminal association in the Argentine financial system involving assets derived from illegal drug trafficking operations, with bases in Colombia, the United States, and Argentina, and whose detained leaders were Colombian drug trafficker José Bayron Piedrahita Ceballos and lawyer Mateo Corvo Dolcet.
According to De Giorgi's ruling, to which the Argentine News Agency had access, Prosecutor Sebastián Basso and the prosecutors of the PROCUNAR traveled to the United States to investigate Piedrahita Ceballos under the figure of a 'collaborator,' but that interview lacked essential formality and international authorization.
The magistrate annulled the collaboration pact through which Piedrahita had delivered company shares in the national territory for a sum of 4 million dollars.
In November 2005, María Isabel Santos Caballero, the widow of who was considered the world's largest drug trafficker, was acquitted along with her family in a case in which they were investigated for the same crime. For that case, initiated in 1999, Santos Caballero spent more than a year in prison, while her son was imprisoned for about 45 days.
When the file had already been elevated to trial, the judges José Martínez Sobrino, Horacio Vaccaro, and Jorge Gettas acquitted the widow and her family and closed the case, dismissing the accusations and concluding that the entire elevation to trial was null, as 'one cannot pressure prosecutors to accuse if they consider there is no evidence.'
The drug lord detailed his past in the Cali Cartel, his links with the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, who were its founders, and how he met the family of Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
Additionally, he linked 'Chicho' Serna to Carlos Mario Aguilar, former head of the Envigado Office in Colombia. According to Piedrahita Ceballos, after Escobar Gaviria's death, the drug trafficking business was divided among other cartel members, and he ran a laboratory with a production capacity of up to 500 kilos per day, a circumstance that translated into an income of between 50 and 60 million Colombian pesos.
