Former governor Sergio Urribarri arrested after court rejects his “stress” and “depression” arguments

Former Entre Ríos governor Sergio Urribarri was arrested at 2 a.m. Saturday after the courts rejected his final attempt to serve an eight-year corruption sentence under house arrest. He was taken to the judicial detention facility in Paraná and is expected to be transferred to the Gualeguaychú prison.

Urribarri, 68, argued that health problems justified home detention. In a filing, he cited post-traumatic stress disorder with dissociative depersonalization symptoms and said he was receiving treatment from psychiatrist Julio Horacio Curotto, including sertraline, clonazepam and armodafinil. His lawyer, Leopoldo Cappa, also said Urribarri had received emergency treatment for a severe major depressive episode when the Supreme Court finalized the conviction. The article notes that this diagnosis had not appeared in earlier defense filings.

The court rejected those arguments. Urribarri had offered his home on Néstor Garat Street in Concordia, where he lives with his wife, Ana Lía Aguilera, as the place where he would serve the sentence. That request was also denied. He is not yet 70, the age set by the legal code for seeking house arrest, so his defense relied on health grounds.

The Supreme Court left the eight-year sentence in place for incompatible dealings with public office and embezzlement in five cases heard by provincial courts. The sentence also bars him from holding public office. Justices Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti rejected the defense’s extraordinary appeal as inadmissible, along with similar appeals from other defendants.

Urribarri, an ally of Kirchnerism who served as ambassador to Israel during Alberto Fernández’s presidency, was convicted in April 2022. Entre Ríos’ appeals court upheld the ruling in 2023. He had spent 50 days in preventive detention from November 2024 before a provincial ruling released him in January 2025. Anti-corruption prosecutors later sought his immediate detention so he, his former culture minister Pedro Báez and his brother-in-law Juan Pablo Aguilera could serve their prison sentences.