The Prosecutor's Office of Argentina has decided to proceed with a complaint from the Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM), a human rights organization specializing in the prosecution of torture crimes, which points to those responsible for the Penitentiary Service of Unit 51 of Magdalena for alleged torture and sexual abuse committed against five female prisoners on June 3.
"On June 3 (...) four women housed in Penitentiary Unit 51 of Magdalena were victims of torture and mistreatment: sexual abuse, beatings, wet submarine, pepper spray thrown at close range on the face and other serious acts perpetrated by agents including the prison authorities. After hours of torture, three of the victims were transferred to other units with all their belongings broken and the one who remained in the place (...) attempted suicide," the organization has denounced through a statement.
Prosecutor Álvaro Garganta has admitted the CPM's presentation, which had initially been dismissed by a court in La Plata for being "premature," despite the severity of the narrated events and the evidence provided in the case.
According to the initial proceedings, everything would have been triggered after an alleged fight, when the prison director, Daiana Balmaceda, and five other male officials detained two inmates. In that context, they would have forced them to "kiss Balmaceda's boots" and, subsequently, subjected them to torture and sexual assault.
"Atrocities committed by several people, many of them authorities, can only be understood from the systematic nature of institutional practices that are usually normalized and endorsed by a judiciary that, as in this case, hinders the intervention of the CPM, which attempts, as the Local Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, to investigate and punish these criminal behaviors," has denounced the secretary of the CPM, Roberto Cipriano, in statements to the newspaper 'Página 12'.
The next day, three of the affected women were transferred to other penitentiary establishments. Their belongings, already damaged by the agents, were mixed with waste, and subsequently the same pattern would have been repeated with the other three victims, distributed in three different prisons.
That same June 3, a clinical report signed by nurse Raquel Boccardo indicated that one of the inmates "presented no recent visible injuries" during the physical examination. However, subsequent expert reports and CPM evaluations documented clear injuries. According to the organization, the woman remained in isolation, without receiving food and in the same cell where she attempted to take her own life.
The seriousness of what happened led to inmates still in Penal Unit 51 of Magdalena staging a protest on Friday the 5th, which was suppressed by prison staff. The investigation maintains that, as a consequence of this repression, one of the inmates suffered a serious eye injury.
The Registry of Cases of Torture and Mistreatment of the National Penitentiary Prosecutor's Office (PPN) counted 332 victims in Argentine federal prisons during 2025. These attacks were grouped into 223 verified episodes, of which 199 were individual aggressions and 24 were collective incidents against several prisoners at the same time.
The official report does not offer a precise breakdown of the volume of complaints for sexual violence in prison, although it warns of "the context of confinement and the healthcare setting as particularly conducive scenarios for sexual violence, due to the power and dependency relationships that characterize these spaces."