Between 2019 and the middle of 2020 three men were killed in the course of robberies in Tucuman province, in the northwest of Argentina. The case that tied them together began with the last of them. After Jose Porcel was killed, two of the men involved, Marcelo Bernardo Alderete and Juan Alfredo Acosta, were in an accident and were detained. When detectives went through the phones they were carrying, they found calls before the killing to several people, among them Jose Ramon Rojas and Antonio Ismael Sanchez. The Homicides division, under commissioners Jorge Dib, Diego Bernachi and Juana Estequino, carried out a series of raids, arrested them, and witnesses picked them out in a lineup.
La Gaceta, the provincial daily, reported in August 2020 that five names appeared across the three case files and that two of them appeared in all three: Jose Rojas, then twenty-six, known as Gordo Walter, and Ismael Antonio Sanchez, then twenty-four. Sanchez had no papers, and the prosecution asked for a fingerprint analysis to establish whether he had been charged under any other name. Rojas had previous matters recorded against him for gender violence, threats and injury, and was already wanted for beating a man. The charges at that stage were homicide doubly aggravated by cruelty and criminis causa, killing to secure or conceal another crime, and two counts of homicide in the course of robbery, each carrying more than twenty-five years.
The case reached judgment on February 28, 2023. The Sala Penal Conclusional No 2 convicted unanimously in case 40137/2020, and the court's own account of what it found is precise about who did what. Sanchez and Rojas were co-authors of the killing of Jose Antonio Gomez, committed in the course of robbery. Sanchez, Rojas and Acosta were convicted of the aggravated killing of Damian Florentino Gomez, charged as criminis causa and joined with aggravated robbery committed in open country and in a band. All four defendants, Alderete among them, were convicted over the killing of Jose Porcel in the course of robbery and the armed robbery, in open country and in a band, of Ivan Guillermo Luna, who survived. Sanchez, Rojas and Acosta received life. Alderete received ten years. A fifth man, Pedro Orlando Reynaga, was acquitted of the charges relating to Damian Florentino Gomez.
The Supreme Court of Tucuman upheld the sentences by a resolution of October 5, 2023. Acosta then took a federal extraordinary appeal, recorded in the court's files under the caption Acosta Juan Alfredo y Otros, on robbery followed by homicide under article 165 of the penal code and aggravated robbery in open country and in a band, and the court examined whether it could go forward.
La Gaceta put the question directly in its own headline in 2020, calling them serial killers of Tucuman, and then answered it in the body of the same article. Criminology, the paper wrote, reserves the term for a person who has killed three or more people across a period longer than a month, with an interval between the killings, and whose principal motivation is the psychological satisfaction the act of killing provides. On that definition, it said, the term did not apply to this case, and at the time the men had not been convicted of anything. The same article set the case beside older Tucuman cases that had raised the same question and never answered it.
The convictions have since arrived, and the pattern the reporting identified is real: three killings in a little over seven months, by the same two men, in the same province, in the same circumstances. What the record does not show is a motive of the kind the definition requires. These were robberies in which people were killed, prosecuted as such, and the court convicted on that basis rather than on any theory of compulsion. Whether Sanchez and Rojas count as serial killers depends on whose definition is used, and the reporting that first gave them the name was the first to doubt it.