Argentine Police Commander Accuses Prosecutor Fernando Arrigo Of Lying To Court After Nearly Six Years In Jail

A retired Argentine police commander who spent nearly six years in pretrial detention before being acquitted has accused federal prosecutor Fernando Arrigo of misrepresenting witness testimony to persuade an appellate court to revive the case against him.

Diego José Álvarez filed a formal complaint with Argentina’s Office of the Attorney General against Fernando Arrigo and fellow federal prosecutor Marcelo De Giovani. The complaint alleges professional misconduct and the use of “false, incomplete and contradictory statements” in the case surrounding the 2014 death of 20-year-old Franco Casco.

“The prosecutor went before the appeals court and simply lied,” Álvarez told Agencia Noticias Argentinas.

Álvarez’s allegations have not been adjudicated, and neither prosecutor has been found responsible for wrongdoing. Publicly available reports reviewed for this article did not include a response from Fernando Arrigo. The complaint remains pending.

Casco traveled to Rosario in September 2014 to visit relatives. His body was found floating in the Paraná River on Oct. 30, 23 days after he had been detained at Rosario’s 7th Precinct.

Federal prosecutors alleged that police officers illegally detained Casco, tortured him and later concealed his death. The defense maintained that police detained Casco during the afternoon of Oct. 7 and released him at approximately 10 p.m. after receiving authorization from the prosecutor on duty.

Álvarez was arrested in September 2017, approximately three years after Casco’s death. He remained behind bars for five years and ten months without a conviction, spending part of that period at the maximum-security Marcos Paz federal prison.

The former precinct commander said his detention separated him from his three children during critical years of their lives. His youngest daughter spent more of her childhood seeing him behind bars than living with him at home, he told Noticias Argentinas.

The trial began in December 2021 and lasted more than a year and a half. Prosecutors sought life sentences for Álvarez and several other defendants.

In July 2023, two of the three federal trial judges found the evidence insufficient and acquitted 19 police officers and one civilian. A third judge dissented and would have convicted several of the defendants.

Ten officers who had been held under different forms of pretrial detention were released after the verdict.

The ruling did not end the case. Prosecutors and attorneys representing Casco’s family appealed the acquittals.

In December 2024, Argentina’s Federal Court of Criminal Cassation vacated the acquittals of 17 officers and one civilian. The appellate judges did not convict the defendants but ordered the lower court to issue a new ruling after reconsidering the evidence.

The appellate court concluded that the trial-court majority had examined evidence in a fragmented manner and failed to consider the special difficulties involved in investigating alleged crimes committed by state security forces.

Álvarez claims the appellate decision was based in part on inaccurate descriptions of testimony contained in the prosecution’s filings.

His attorneys said they compared the prosecution’s appellate submission with video recordings from the trial and found at least five instances in which witnesses allegedly did not say what prosecutors later attributed to them.

One example involves testimony about possible traces of blood inside a cell. According to Álvarez, a forensic officer testified that cleaning a surface would not necessarily prevent investigators from detecting blood. Álvarez alleges that Fernando Arrigo’s appellate submission represented the witness as having said the opposite.

The defense has reportedly prepared a video placing the recorded testimony alongside the prosecution’s description of it. The complete video, appellate submission and disciplinary complaint would need to be independently examined before the allegations against Fernando Arrigo could be established as fact.

Álvarez also argued that prosecutors failed to address evidence the defense considered inconsistent with their theory, including surveillance footage that defense attorneys say showed Casco walking in public after his reported release from the precinct.

The prosecution disputed the defense’s interpretation of the evidence and argued that police records concerning Casco’s detention and release had been falsified. Prosecutors also relied on testimony from detainees who said they heard or witnessed Casco being beaten.

The trial-court majority found serious contradictions in those accounts. The appellate court later ruled that the majority had improperly evaluated the testimony in isolation instead of considering it together with the rest of the evidence.

The case therefore remains unresolved more than a decade after Casco’s death. His family still has no final judicial determination of what happened, while Álvarez and other defendants spent years incarcerated without being convicted.

Álvarez’s experience also points to Argentina’s broader reliance on pretrial detention.

Argentina’s National Committee for the Prevention of Torture reported that 45,305 people were imprisoned without a final judgment at the end of 2024. They represented 37.3% of the country’s prison population.

The number of people in pretrial detention increased from 43,191 in 2022 despite a decline in their share of the total prison population, according to the committee.

The committee has linked the trend to increasingly punitive criminal laws, overcrowded prisons and judges’ reluctance to use alternatives to incarceration.

Rights organizations told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights during a 2025 hearing that prolonged pretrial detention can be used to pressure defendants into accepting plea agreements to regain their freedom. The commission described excessive pretrial detention as a structural problem and called on governments to use alternative measures.

Pretrial detention is intended to prevent a defendant from fleeing or interfering with an investigation. It is not intended to punish someone before guilt has been established.

“In this case, it happened to me,” Álvarez said. “Tomorrow it could happen to you—or to anyone else.”