The Murder of María Marta García Belsunce

Who María Marta García Belsunce was

María Marta García Belsunce was a 50-year-old sociologist who lived with her husband, Carlos Carrascosa, in the Carmel country club, a gated residential community in Pilar, in the northern outskirts of Greater Buenos Aires. She was active in community work and served as treasurer of the Asociación Amigos del Pilar, a local charitable association whose funds and chequebooks she kept at home. Her death on 27 October 2002 became one of the longest-running and most closely followed criminal cases in modern Argentina.

A death first described as an accident

On the evening she died, María Marta was found in the bathroom of her home, and the version given at first was that she had suffered a domestic accident in the bathtub. She was buried on that basis, without a criminal investigation being opened. Doubts soon surfaced, and 36 days after her death her body was exhumed. The autopsy changed everything: she had been shot several times in the head. What had been treated as a household mishap was in fact a homicide, and the weeks of lost time, and the handling of the scene and the body, would shape every investigation and trial that followed.

The investigation and the cover-up cases

Prosecutor Diego Molina Pico focused on the family. In January 2003 he charged several relatives and others with aggravated cover-up, among them the victim’s brother Horacio García Belsunce, her brother-in-law Guillermo Bártoli and members of her stepfather’s family. Carrascosa himself was arrested in April 2003 as the presumed killer and released on bail weeks later. In November 2011 a court convicted Bártoli, Horacio García Belsunce, Juan Hurtig and two other people of covering up the crime. As early as December 2002, however, the family had pointed investigators towards a neighbour inside the country club, Nicolás Pachelo, as a possible suspect, a line that would only reach trial two decades later.

Carrascosa: conviction, reversal and acquittal

Carrascosa’s legal path was unusually long. In July 2007 a San Isidro oral court acquitted him of murder but convicted him of covering it up, sentencing him to five years and six months. In June 2009 the Buenos Aires provincial Court of Criminal Cassation went further and convicted him of aggravated homicide, imposing life imprisonment, a decision the provincial Supreme Court upheld in September 2012. In November 2014 the national Supreme Court annulled the murder ruling and ordered a fresh review. In December 2016 the provincial Cassation court acquitted him, citing serious irregularities in the original proceedings. Prosecutors kept appealing until December 2020, when Argentina’s Supreme Court rejected their last challenge and made the acquittal final. In all, Carrascosa spent about seven and a half years in prison and is legally innocent of his wife’s death.

The case against Nicolás Pachelo

With Carrascosa cleared, the investigation turned to Pachelo. At his trial before San Isidro’s Oral Criminal Court No. 4, which ended in December 2022, two of the three judges voted to acquit him of the murder, while the presiding judge voted to convict. In the same proceedings Pachelo was sentenced to nine years and six months for a string of eight robberies at gated communities in Greater Buenos Aires, which he had admitted. Prosecutors and the family appealed the acquittal. On 27 March 2024, Chamber I of the Buenos Aires provincial Court of Criminal Cassation, with judges Florencia Budiño and Fernando Mancini, overturned it and sentenced Pachelo to life imprisonment for aggravated armed robbery and for a homicide committed to ensure the robbery went unpunished. The court concluded that he had entered the house to take the association’s metal cash box, was confronted by María Marta, and killed her. Pachelo has always denied any involvement.

Appeals and recent developments

The defence challenged the life sentence, and in February 2025 another chamber of the Cassation court, made up of judges Manuel Bouchoux and Fernando Mateos, rejected the appeal and confirmed the conviction. In April 2026, Argentine media reported that Oral Criminal Court No. 4 of San Isidro had rejected a request by Pachelo for conditional release. His lawyers have taken the case to the Supreme Court of Buenos Aires Province, so the conviction is not yet final; Carrascosa’s lawyer argued that further review was not warranted because the sentence had already been confirmed on appeal. Carrascosa described the release request as absurd. In 2020 the case also reached a global audience through the Netflix documentary series Carmel: Who Killed María Marta?, directed by Alejandro Hartmann and released in four episodes in November that year.

Why the case matters

The García Belsunce case is often cited in Argentina as a lesson in how an investigation can be compromised in its first hours. Because the death was not treated as suspicious, evidence was lost, the body was buried, and suspicion fell for years on the victim’s own family. The case also exposed the private world of the country clubs, the private gated suburbs around Buenos Aires where residents live in close-knit, guarded enclaves. Its long chain of contradictory rulings illustrated how Argentina’s layered appeals system works, including the principle that a conviction first imposed on appeal must itself be reviewed by another court. More than two decades on, María Marta is remembered as a sociologist and community volunteer whose death deserved a proper investigation from the start.