Seven crimes -five crimes of sexual abuse and two crimes of rape- are imputed to Martin Nicolas Ignacio Pradenas Durr who is deprived of liberty, fulfilling the precautionary measure of preventive detention in the Prison Compliance Center of Valdivia.
On July 21, 2020, the subject was formalized as the author of a series of sexual assaults against six women between the ages of 13 and 21, in crimes that were committed between November 2010 and September 2019 in Temuco and Pucón. The Public Ministry aspires to obtain against the accused sentences that in total add up to 41 years in prison.
The investigation originated after the suicide of AB, a young woman who accused of having been raped by Pradenas in a cabin in Pucón on September 18, 2019. The 20-year-old university student was unable to resist being under the influence of alcohol . She told what happened to her partner and those close to her, but found no support. After her death, on October 13, 2019, the family found messages on the young woman’s phone that alluded to her death.
On June 14, the trial began. This Thursday, after 37 hearings, from 9:00 a.m. in the Temuco Oral Criminal Trial Court, the closing arguments were held.
At the beginning of his closing presentation, prosecutor Miguel Rojas explained that “To this day, the six protagonists of these stories are women, some of whom when they were adolescents and others when they were children, were victims of sexual assault, a fact that caused a great affectation in them, a fact that marked a before and after in their lives. lives”.
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“But perhaps the common term that stands out the most when we see these stories and analyze them globally is that the aggressor of each of them is the same, Martín Pradenas,” he said.
The persecutor stated that the subject “Using the same mode of operation, taking advantage of a situational, contextual vulnerability that each of the victims experienced, he sexually assaulted them on different occasions.”
“Throughout this trial It was shown that this same way of operating evolved over time in the sense that this situation of vulnerability was taken advantage of by the accused in order to attack them in an untimely manner.taking advantage of the fact that the victims were paralyzed, shocked, also taking advantage of their greater physical capacity”, he stated.
Rojas also pointed out that “beyond the repetition of this same way of operating that evolved over time, we cannot fail to mention that the way in which he attacks the victims has also evolved over time.”
“We begin with acts that constitute sexual abuse to culminate in crimes that constitute the crime of rape. In our opinion, that is what has been proven throughout these more than thirty days”affirmed the prosecutor in his presentation this morning.
For his part, Pradenas’s defense attorney, Gaspar Calderón, pointed out that “the closing arguments make it very clear what happened in the trial.”
“Evidently what happened during these 30 sessions is very different from what was offered in the accusation in all its planes. I am very confident, I think the defense team has worked magnificently, the points that should be touched have been touched on and I think that here we are going to face acquittals. In other words, I don’t see any other possibility in the matter.” he claimed.
Meanwhile, the plaintiff attorney for AB’s family, Alejandro Guzmán, stated that they are calm while waiting for justice to reason with a “gender perspective.”
“I feel that the court will be able to form a conviction for all the facts that were imputed to it, so we are confident that a conviction will be applied with the requested penalties,” he said.
This Friday at 09:00 am, the responses of the intervening lawyers will begin and it is expected that the court’s verdict will be announced in the afternoon.