The federal appeals justice of the city of Comodoro Rivadavia ordered to reopen the case that investigates the alleged abandonment of Santiago Madonado by one or more gendarmes in the Chubut River, or those who were with Santiago at the time of entering the water. In addition, the court ruled out that the crime of forced disappearance of a person existed, as Judge Gustavo Lleral had determined.
In the ruling, published by the Infobae site, it is considered that "a single criminal hypothesis was investigated - here definitively ruled out - without any possible causal link between any omission of Gendarmerie personnel or those who were introduced has been assessed and pronounced on the river with Maldonado. "
In this regard, the court revoked the dismissal of Gendarme Emmanuel Echazú.
The cameramen Javier Leal de Ibarra, Aldo Suárez and Hebe Corchuelo de Huberman; explained that "The intervening magistrate understood that the procedural object of this case was limited to the forced disappearance of Santiago Maldonado, so that having cleared that circumstance he ordered the dismissal of Emmanuel Echazu, who had voluntarily appeared in the process and rejected the evidence offered by the parties thus proceeding to a kind of archiving of the proceedings for lack of crime. "
Santiago Maldonado disappeared on August 1, 2017 during a procedure carried out by Gendarmerie personnel to evict Route 40.