“My transfer was at my request for security reasons, strictly security. The authorities of the Ministry of the Interior and the Prosecutor’s Office are aware of a serious event that happened to me and I could not continue working there,” said departmental prosecutor Diego Chaves, to The Observer, when asked about the reason for his transfer to the Libertad headquarters, as reported by Caras y Caretas.
Chaves said that Durazno “is a very complicated department, very complicated.”
“Since I arrived here I have carried out many very large operations, we dismantled two important gangs here that were operating in two neighborhoods. And obviously that played a trick on me,” he explained.
“Something happened to me that obviously cannot be told because of my privacy and because I want to protect my family but I couldn’t continue living there. So, since that happened I called Mónica Ferrero desperate, telling her what had happened. Obviously she empathized with me because it happened to her. Everyone here knows where I live. I don’t have security, I walk down the street alone. Then I started to move so that she could move me,” he said.
Although he admitted that prosecutors are exposed to threats in hearings, in the prosecutor’s office, what happened “was much more. Montevideo Intelligence intervened,” he said.
It just coincided with paternal leave, given that he was a father for the first time and the Court prosecutor, Mónica Ferrero, let him go on leave early so that he could calm down “because he was already about to collapse.” Upon his return, he said that he made two formal requests. He clarified that there are concrete files that prove it. One of those requests contains everything that happened, and based on that the transfer is finalized.
Chaves said that the news of what happened to him did not spread because he asked that it be kept strictly confidential “to preserve” his integrity but also “because it is never a good message that threatening prosecutors remove him from the places.”
Prosecutor Diego Chaves
He related that he even told Ferrero that if they did not remove him he would not continue working. “I wasn’t fit to continue, I wasn’t sleeping, I was walking badly on the street. Sometimes you think you can, the world is ahead of you, but when you fall into reality and see yourself alone in a place you say, the truth is that this is too much. Then I saw that I really couldn’t anymore,” he expressed.
Regarding the Ezquerra case and the level of progress of the proceedings in which the former mayor of Tacuarembó is being investigated, Chaves said that the prosecutor knew he was under her orbit because she was the one who appointed him prosecutor of Durazno when the case had already fallen to that prosecutor’s office, when the two prosecutors of Tacuarembó and the prosecutor of Paso de los Toros declined jurisdiction.
Chaves said that in the context of what was happening to him “the causes are totally secondary.” He added that it is advanced but that the new prosecutor who is assigned can continue it. “Do you want me to stay here and end up dead?” he claimed.
“I never spoke with Mónica about the case. You gather the evidence and when you have everything, one of the alternatives is to formalize it and the other is to file it. If I had wanted to formalize it, I would have formalized it. The defense was thinking of presenting evidence. I still believe that regardless of that, of what one could do, of what one was thinking of doing, I never spoke with Mónica about the case. If I was thinking of filing it or if I was thinking of formalizing it, it is my issue and the hierarchy has nothing to say about it,” he explained.
He reiterated that Ferrero never asked him about the status of the case. “If she had had a political interest in defending the accused, as they say, she could have told me: “File it and I’ll transfer it to you.”
He also said that the express request he made to the court prosecutor was to move to Montevideo to be able to live in a safer area, so the transfer was delayed because a vacancy had to be created in a place closer to the capital, which happened now. He said that at that time, there was a vacancy in Tacuarembó or Artigas but if “something serious happens to me working, the least the institution can do is harm me even more and send me to the north.”
Asked about the role of prosecutor María Fernanda Delpino* in that prosecutor’s office, she said that she is seconded, therefore she is not the one who handles the case or who defines the accusation, but that is done by the titular prosecutor. The approval of the prosecutor Delpino caused the Frente Amplio to will postpone the vote this Wednesday.
Senator Caggiani stated to The Observer that day he asked to return to the committee because the order of priority of the competition list had not been respected. From the Prosecutor’s Office they said that there were two competitions in which that prosecutor participated and that the permission was requested by the first one where the remaining prosecutors were already promoted.
For his part, prosecutor Chaves also questioned that the prosecutor’s office does not have resources to protect its prosecutors. “The prosecutor’s office and the Association of Prosecutors are constantly asking for resources for the security of the prosecutors, and no one cares about anything. What happened with Ferrero (in relation to the attack that arose at his house) and we are still in the same conditions.”
*Clarification: This paragraph was modified because its initial version erroneously attributed to Chaves a statement about his colleague Delpino that he did not make. What he referred to was the role of the assistant who is not the one directing the investigation.
