“50 Seconds: The Fernando Báez Sosa Case”: The New Netflix Docuserie

A true crime title is its first thesis. And in the case of the new Netflix documentary about the crime that paralyzed Argentina, the title is a stopwatch. “50 seconds” isn’t a poetic choice; it’s a brutal time constraint. Fifty seconds is “the exact amount of time the brutal beating that ended the life of Fernando Báez Sosa lasted.”

This narrative choice, from director Martín Rocca and producer Fabula, is no accident. It’s not called “The Villa Gesell Crime” or “Justice for Fernando.” By calling it “50 seconds,” the series forces the viewer to focus on the microscopic horror of the event, not the years-long legal process that followed. It’s a claustrophobic device.

More importantly, the title encapsulates the central legal argument that would define the trial. What can happen in fifty seconds? For the defense, fifty seconds is the epitome of chaos: a “brawl,” a tragic but unintentional fight, a spontaneous act of group violence. But for the prosecution, and ultimately the court, fifty seconds is an eternity. It is more than enough time for coordination, for selecting a target, and for a deliberate execution. It is enough time for what the law calls “alevosía,” or treachery.

The documentary, therefore, doesn’t invite an abstract legal debate from the start; it invites the viewer to live inside that inescapable minute and confront the speed at which a life can be extinguished.

Chronicle of a Dawn in Villa Gesell

To understand the case’s impact, you must first understand the setting. The tragedy doesn’t happen in a dark, anonymous alley. It happens in Villa Gesell, an epicenter of the Argentine summer, a place synonymous with the beach, youth, and adolescent rites of passage. The crime was the desecration of a social space considered safe.

The facts, which the series sets out to reconstruct “minute by minute,” are as simple as they are devastating. Fernando Báez Sosa, an 18-year-old, is on vacation. He is attacked outside the LeBric nightclub. His assailants aren’t strangers in the night; they are “a group of boys his own age.”

This is where the term that became central to the case’s social analysis comes in: “rugbiers.” In the Argentine context, this word is not a neutral sporting descriptor. It is loaded with social connotations that point to a culture of toxic masculinity, a misguided esprit de corps, and, in some circles, a sense of privilege and impunity.

The attack was not a one-on-one fight. It was a group act. The violence was so overwhelming that it didn’t just center on Fernando; the subsequent trial also debated the “injuries suffered by five friends of Fernando” who were with him at the time. It was the “pack” dynamic against the individual that transformed a homicide into a symbol of national horror.

The Social Echo: An Uncomfortable Truth

The murder of Fernando Báez Sosa “marked Argentine society” and “shocked the entire country.” The Netflix documentary subtitles its exploration with a key phrase: “An Uncomfortable Truth.”

The obvious question is: what is that truth?

The easy answer would be that the uncomfortable truth is classism or the violence inherent in sports. But the reality exposed by the case is deeper and more discouraging. The Báez Sosa case was not an isolated event that served as a brutal lesson for society. It was, instead, the most visible manifestation of “an unresolved ordeal.”

The “uncomfortable truth” is that, despite the “great social and media weight” of Fernando’s case and the life sentences that were eventually handed down, group youth violence in nightlife settings did not stop. It didn’t even decrease. The case does not appear to have served as a deterrent.

The evidence is a tragic pattern of repetition. After the crime in Villa Gesell, other young men died in chillingly similar circumstances:

Brian Cuitino, beaten and killed with a brick outside a nightclub in Pilar.
Agustín Ávila, 16, beaten to death by a “patota” (gang) at a festival.
Lautaro Alvaredo, 19, attacked by four young men leaving a nightclub, dying after days of being brain-dead.
Tomás Telio, chased and murdered by a group of more than nine people on a waterfront.

These cases, all occurring after the national shock over Fernando, show a “trend of limitless violence in nightlife settings.”

The Netflix documentary, therefore, does not arrive as an epilogue or a ‘case closed.’ It arrives in the midst of an active crisis. The rhetorical question hanging over the case is, “Who is going to stop this problem?”

There is another layer to this uncomforable truth, one that society is even more reluctant to discuss: racism. Fernando’s case, it is argued, is the “last link in this chain of racism.” The documentary and the case force society to “look inward” and ask, “What monster did we all create by not talking about this?” The “uncomfortable truth” is not just that violent young men exist, but that this violence is the product of a society that fuels it, whether through classism, racism, or the glorification of aggression.

The Anatomy of Justice (and its Reconstruction)

The heart of true crime is the legal process. In this case, the trial was a narrative battlefield. The defense for the eight accused young men tried to sell the idea of chaos. They asked for the case to be treated as “homicide in a brawl,” a crime that, with a maximum penalty of six years, suggests a mutual loss of control, a tragic fight where death is almost an accident.

The Oral Tribunal of Dolores categorically rejected that narrative. The verdict was for “homicide doubly aggravated by treachery and premeditated conspiracy.”

Let’s break that down. “Premeditated conspiracy” means the group agreed to attack. “Treachery” is a key legal term: it means the attack was carried out without risk, eliminating any chance for the victim to defend himself. For the court, those 50 seconds were not a ‘brawl.’ They were a coordinated execution.

However, the court did not treat the group as a monolith. The law cannot convict a ‘pack’; it must assign individual responsibility. And this is where the verdict becomes fascinating. All eight defendants were convicted, but not in the same way. The court dismantled the group and assigned two levels of culpability:

Five of the young men were sentenced to life in prison as “co-authors” of the homicide: Máximo Thomsen, Ciro Pertossi, Enzo Comelli, Matías Benicelli, and Luciano Pertossi.
Three of them were sentenced to 15 years in prison as “secondary participants”: Ayrton Viollaz, Blas Cinalli, and Lucas Pertossi.

This division is the legal anatomy of the attack: it demonstrates that, even within a 50-second group act, the justice system identified a core of perpetrators and a ring of facilitators.

The Netflix documentary reconstructs this legal battle using “exclusive testimonies” and “unpublished file footage.” Significantly, it features the participation of two central figures in the prosecution’s narrative: Graciela Sosa, Fernando’s mother, and Fernando Burlando, the family’s lawyer.

By centering their voices, the series does not pretend to be neutral. It positions itself as the definitive chronicle of the victim’s fight for justice, validating the “treachery” narrative and telling the story from the epicenter of pain and the legal strategy that led to the life sentences.

The Timeline

The when of this tragedy and its aftermath is as follows. The murder of Fernando Báez Sosa occurred on January 18, 2020. The trial was held at the Oral Criminal Tribunal No. 1 of Dolores, and the verdict was delivered on February 6, 2023. The other incidents of similar violence that followed this pattern occurred in the subsequent years, including the case of Brian Cuitino in 2022, Agustín Ávila in 2023, Lautaro Alvaredo in 2023, and Tomás Telio in 2024. “50 Seconds: The Fernando Báez Sosa Case,” the documentary series that revives the crime and its consequences, premieres on Netflix on November 13.