Five years as a "doctor" in Río Negro ending in a suspended sentence, and a hotel arrest in Buenos Aires on a warrant for forged titles: Argentina's false doctors of 2026

Argentina's cases from 2025, the Monte Castro consulting rooms with their forged University of Buenos Aires diplomas and the man who kept seeing patients under house arrest, are recorded elsewhere on this site. Two more from 2026 show how the cases end.

According to Mejor Informado, a woman named in the report as Mariela Fernanda Marzano practised as a doctor in Río Negro province for more than five years without holding the qualifying degree, using forged documents and titles. A federal judge approved an agreement under which she received a sentence of three years' imprisonment, suspended, so she will not go to prison. In Buenos Aires, Cadena 3 and the agency Noticias Argentinas reported the arrest of a 39-year-old man at a hotel in the city centre who had posed as a doctor and asked patients' families for money for treatments that did not exist; he was wanted under a warrant for fraud and forgery of titles issued in July by a prosecutor's office in Ituzaingó, and the arrest was endorsed by a federal court in the capital.

The Río Negro outcome is the one worth noticing. Five years of unqualified practice, documents forged, titles forged, and the result was a conditional sentence negotiated by agreement. That is not unusual; courts in many countries treat the forgery as the crime and the practice as an aggravation, and the patients as witnesses rather than victims. The deterrent is weak, and the register, not the courtroom, is where the protection has to come from.

Argentina's provincial licences and the national register of health providers are public, and both impostors were absent from them for the whole of their careers. For students considering Argentine or any other medical school, the register that would have exposed these two is also the register your own degree must eventually enter. Choose the school whose graduates are on it.