This Tuesday and Wednesday, May 28 and 29, the Supreme Court will hold an evidentiary hearing related to the request for the removal of prosecutor Xavier Armendáriz from office. This request was filed by opposition deputies at the beginning of April.
The hearing is held within the framework of the investigation that links the general director of the Carabineros, Ricardo Yáñez, and senior officers of the police institution with the crime of “omission” of having done what was necessary to prevent illegitimate pressures committed by some police officers during the protests of the October 2019 outbreak.
The hearing will be held in the Hall of Honor of the Court Palace, and the parties have been summoned at 9:00 a.m. both days. “The evidence must be incorporated in said hearing, and both the acquitter and the witnesses will give statements before the Minister, Mr. Diego Simpértigue Limare,” detailed the Judiciary.
Prosecutor Armendáriz has stated that it is “very complex for him to raise a defense,” since the deputies’ request does not present a clearly determined set of precise facts on which an accusation could be structured. Furthermore, he points out that this requirement seems to be more of a “pretext for a political-media agenda,” deviating from the purposes of the disciplinary process expected of the Supreme Court.
“The requirement is not only vague and non-specific, but it suffers from a serious problem in its foundation and that is related to the sources of information used and especially with the information of those few cases that are referred to in particular,” said the prosecutor. through a statement.
Prosecutor Armendáriz also argues that a part of the accusations are “simply disagreements” with decisions of persecution or non-persecution, and that the interpretations of his alleged bad behavior and manifest negligence are far from what the Supreme Court has understood for these reasons.
“We warn that this deviation of purposes has already had to be faced by this Court regarding previous procedures. The Most Excellent Supreme Court has been completely clear in maintaining that the present process is a procedure of a legal and mostly disciplinary nature for the highest authorities of the Public Ministry and not a trial of a political nature,” he indicated.
Prosecutors have been in the crosshairs of General Yáñez’s defense from the beginning. “When it was seen that the formalization was coming, the defense lawyer, Jorge Martínez, started attacking his peers, lawyers who act as prosecutors. And he asked, on November 24, to disqualify the North Central Metropolitan Regional Prosecutor, Xavier Armendáriz, and the prosecutor in the case, Ximena Chong,” explained a lawyer. That request was unsuccessful, but it did manage to remove Armendáriz from investigations related to complaints for crimes against humanity, which were assigned to the Antofagasta Regional Prosecutor, Juan Castro Bekios.
From the right they affirm that the persecutor of the North Central Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office would have a kind of “cruelty” against the current Carabineros boss.