PARAGUAY: LENIENT VERDICT ON HISTORIC SUPERMARKET FIRE LEADS TO STREET RIOTS; JUDGES GO INTO HIDING.
Family members of the hundreds of victims of a 2004 fire in an Asuncion, Paraguay, supermarket rioted after a court gave the market's owners what the victims' relatives thought was too light a jail sentence. At least 15 demonstrators and 12 police officers suffered injuries on Dec. 5 when a three-judge tribunal found the owners of the Ycua Bolanos supermarket and a security guard guilty of a lesser charge that carried a five-to-seven year sentence. Those judges spent the night in hiding for fear of being lynched. The president and Congress called for a review into whether the accused could be retried and whether the judges should be removed from the case.
The verdict stemmed from an August 2004 fire that, according to the Associated Press, killed more than 430 people and injured hundreds more (see NotiSur, 2004-08-20). It was the worst peacetime disaster in Paraguayan history. An international team of investigators reported that the blaze began when an improperly vented and unmaintained grill vent caught fire, leading to a series of explosions. The fire spread rapidly through the 8,340 sq meter complex, which included offices and a parking garage. Locked doors and improperly-labeled emergency exits trapped 2,000 people, many of them children.
The tragedy revealed the high degree of danger fire poses in Asuncion, where firefighting resources are inadequate and buildings frequently fail to meet safety standards. Corruption among city officials also contributes heavily to lax safety enforcement, leading survivors and victims' relatives to seek the prosecution of mayor Enrique Riera and Martin Burt, mayor when the shopping complex--which opened in December 2001--was built.
"Negligent-homicide" conviction gives owners 5 years, not 25
The judges chose to convict the owners of homicidio culposo or negligent homicide. Family members had clamored for charges that held the crime as deliberate homicide (homicidio doloso), which carries a much higher sentence of 25 years.
The owners faced accusations that, once the fire broke out, they ordered the doors of the market locked to prevent looting. There were also charges the building violated building and safety codes in several ways.
The tribunal's president, Judge Doddy Baez, and Judges Elio Ovelar and Manuel Aguirre were trying Ycua Bolanos owner Juan Pio Paiva and his son Victor Daniel, along with the chief security guard they employed, Daniel Acero. Also on trial were stockholders in the Ycua Bolanos...
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