RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – He was there when the municipal police broke into his apartment on José Bonifacio Street in Flores in November 2019, an old model from the 80s, face, and body of a boy, but dressed in a schoolgirl quadrillé sweater, under a spotlight in a corner next to the old curtains, in his apartment that was a shrine of horror.
Suárez, a retired PAMI ( National Institute of Social Services for Retired and Pensioners) employee and former federal police sergeant who retired from the force in 1995, had taken one of his many computers to a computer store in his neighborhood for repair in February of that year. The employee who took care of it took the machine with him.
Curious, he leafed through the file folders a bit. He found a backup copy and looked at the contents. The employee made a copy. Then he called the city police and handed over the material.
More than 11,000 images were found on the hard drive. Two thousand of them were child pornography photos and videos showing minors between four months and 14 years. One of these videos was particularly disturbing.
It was not new, but looked a bit old, at least 15 years old. It showed a thirteen-year-old girl in a white coat pretending to come home from school. The girl left her backpack on a chair, took off her smock and all her clothes, and went naked into the shower. Suarez, or whoever was filming her, forced her to pose, to show herself.
Thus, the Cybercrime Division of the City Police began an investigation under the indictment of Court No. 33 of Dr. Dario Bonnano.
Suárez was different from the beginning. There are usually no grand plans behind law enforcement raids for child pornography. The targets are generally men living alone in shabby apartments, sharing files they found on old P2P networks like eMule or Telegram groups. However, the production of the material is not as common.
Ricardo Russo, the former pediatrician from Garrahan who was sentenced to ten years in prison for filming his patients, girls who came to his office with their mothers, used his phone to film children running naked on the beach without anyone noticing. Suárez, on the other hand, had turned his desire into a small and medium business.
Bonnano and the Buenos Aires police faced one of the biggest wolves of one of the worst crimes in the criminal code, a pedophile who operated on a scale almost unknown to the justice system.
No one in recent Argentine history had filmed as much as he had.
They found a film studio in his apartment with all the necessary materials, cameras, and recording equipment. There was digital equipment, UHF radio equipment, film machines, miniDV tapes, equipment for digitizing VHS tapes, and two pistols, one of them with filed numbers.
In the apartment, there was a stack of posters of the children’s series Patito Feo. Using a fake Facebook profile, which is still online today, he pretended to be casting for the popular series. And that was the trick.
Of all those victims, four could be identified, including the girl in the white coat seen in the video shot circa 2002. Justice could locate an address in the images by finding a small picture that showed the front of a house. Not only that, but a VHS box had the minor’s name and age on it.
Suárez refused to testify at his three interrogations and in the court that convicted him. This month, Suárez was finally sentenced: Criminal and Penitentiary Court No. 8, with Judges Josefina Cano Frers, Javier Anzoátegui, and Luis María Rizzi, sentenced him to 14 years in prison for seducing minors and producing and possessing child pornography.
The testimonies of these four victims were crucial to his imprisonment. Justice found the girl with the white coat. Today, as an adult, she spoke. She remembered everything.
Her story was a central element in the plea of prosecutor Ana Helena Díaz Cano. The victim said she knew Suárez because he was a friend of her paternal grandfather. When he was 12 years old, the former police officer told his family that he “had contacts for television castings on Channel 9 and Channel 2.
He was the bodyguard of Tinelli’s daughters” that “he had contact with the star of Patito Feo.” So he agreed to let me take pictures of her.
She didn’t remember the situation in the shower. She agreed to watch the video. She recognized herself unmistakably. Moreover, another detail was found. Among Suárez’s AFIP-registered addresses was the house in Lomas del Mirador, where she filmed the attack. The victims’ faces were also confirmed using a forensic facial recognition procedure.
The investigation revealed that Suárez crossed certain lines that other pedophiles dare not to upload videos to YouTube. The judgment on which the conviction is based invokes recordings uploaded from his account on August 9, 2017, using a false name.
The video lasts 4 minutes and 23 seconds and shows a girl between the ages of 7 and 10 being filmed by an unseen person while performing “dexterous movements such as crescent-shaped turns,” the document states.
It looks like a video of a proud grandfather, but the lens’s focus is on the child’s underwear. Uploading that video became a separate charge, for which he was acquitted.
Suárez’s motions for nullity and statute of limitations were also unsuccessful. The temporal extent of the crimes the former police officer is accused of is another issue: according to the indictment, they date back at least to 2000.
The material found can be considered geological, layers, and images from different times and places, a stacked history of pedophilia in Argentina. It proves only one thing: that the photos of abuse never disappear, that they persist somewhere, guarded by someone who immortalizes the rape of a girl or boy as his private jewel.
Suárez’s sentence will be considered served in September 2033, shortly before his 85th birthday.