RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Attacks on Immigrants – Racism or Real Estate?

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 30 2000 (IPS) - The boom of upscale gated communities on the northern edge of the Argentine capital has a dark side: poor Bolivian families living in the area have become the targets of a wave of attacks by a criminal ring apparently attempting to frighten them off their property, the value of which is steadily rising.

Fidencio Choque, one of the victims, was admitted to hospital with burns and internal injuries to the liver and one of his lungs a week ago, and is afraid to return home.

One night a group of hooded individuals broke into the makeshift dwelling Choque built on his plot of land, shouting “police!”. They tied up his youngest children, stole 3,000 dollars — and tortured him for three hours.

While they repeatedly threatened to rape Choque’s 14-year-old daughter, the aggressors kicked him, whipped him on the back with chains, burnt him with an iron, tied his genitals with wire and applied electric shock.

The band is made up of security force agents, according to the National Institute Against Discrimination (INADI), which has offered legal aid and other support to some 80 Bolivian families attacked in the past three months.

The justice system’s investigators believe the organised criminal band is terrorising the immigrants in an attempt to force them to leave the area.

“I am inclined to believe that security force agents are implicated in these attacks,” INADI director Raúl Zaffaroni said Wednesday.

That suspicion was echoed by one of the legal investigators, who commented to IPS that big real estate interests could lie behind the apparent wave of xenophobia.

When the first reports of attacks on Bolivian immigrants surfaced, the courts, police and human rights organisations pointed out that the incidents were characterised by xenophobic sentiments.

Prosecutor Juan José Maraggi — one of the investigators — initially speculated that the aggressors resorted to torture to force their victims to reveal where they hid their money.

But representatives of the Bolivian Embassy who took a hand in the matter and the director of INADI flatly ruled out theft as the chief motivating factor in the attacks.

It is estimated that 50 incidents have occurred. However, only 20 were reported, because many Bolivians did not turn to the police for fear of reprisals, or due to their status as undocumented immigrants.

But at an assembly Wednesday in the municipality of Escobar — where a large number of the attacks have taken place — many families said that with the support of INADI, they would dare to file a complaint.

After an initial period of awkward silence, the participants began to tell their stories and to protest the lack of safety and the weak police response to their complaints. They also underlined the violence employed by the aggressors, who systematically begin by tying up the youngest members of the families.

Dozens of immigrant families have returned to Bolivia for fear of new attacks, according to local residents.

The aggressors not only take the families’ savings, which Bolivian immigrants tend to stash somewhere in their homes, but also torture their victims, only leaving after several hours of beatings, insults and threats.

The leaders of the local Bolivian community commented to IPS that the beginning of the wave of racism coincided with the appearance in April of a new weekly, whose first cover-page article was titled “The Silent Invasion” — an allusion to the flow of immigrants from neighouring countries like Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay.

The “study” manipulated statistics, forged data and padded out the number of immigrants who, it stated, stole jobs from Argentines at a time when unemployment is soaring.

The article also stated that immigrants — who it described as “dirty” and “stinky” — made use of public health services and the educational system without paying taxes.

The continuing attacks, which have been carried out with total impunity, have led investigators to exchange their original hypothesis of theft with xenophobic overtones for speculation that the incidents are part of a preconceived strategy of terror aimed at “cleansing” the neighbourhoods in question.

Around 1.5 million Bolivians reside in Argentina, a country of 35 million. The immigrants live mainly in the northwest, near the border with Bolivia. But in the past decade, some 150,000 farming families have settled on the northern periphery of Buenos Aires, in the municipalities of Pilar and Escobar.

Living in precarious housing, they cultivate fruit and vegetables that they sell in the market of Escobar, which was largely created by the local Bolivian community to sell their produce and crafts. But they prefer to hide their savings at home, rather than opening bank accounts, which makes them easy targets for thieves.

Pilar and Escobar, however, are not only home to a large Bolivian community, but also to young middle, upper-middle and wealthy families fleeing to the suburbs in search of large open spaces and a safer place to live.

Over the past decade, the number of “gated communities” has tripled in the area around Buenos Aires. The most affluent are located on the northern edge of the city.

Real estate developers are making a killing buying up large extensions of land, splitting them up into lots, laying in streets, installing utilities, and selling to families fleeing Buenos Aires — a city of 12 million — in search of a more peaceful lifestyle.

The new developments, often built alongside shantytowns, are fenced or walled in, with a gate and sentries keeping out anyone who doesn’t “belong.” The largest gated communities are constantly patrolled by a permanent staff of guards.

In Escobar and Pilar, the garden plots of Bolivian families are now encircled by upscale new housing developments, and investigations have found that for some time now the immigrants have been the targets of varying kinds of pressure to leave their land, which is steadily increasing in value.

Local authorities in the two municipalities ordered the immigrants to close in their gardens with the most expensive kind of fencing, and to foot the bill for a street lighting network, under the threat of fines of up to 10,000 dollars in case of incompliance.

Some 50 families sold their plots at below market price and went back to Bolivia. But tens of thousands of immigrants are hanging on.

“Closed neighbourhoods have cropped up in this area, and there is no more room to expand” due to the plots owned by Bolivians, said Escobar town councillor Jorge Derra, who belongs to the centre-left ruling Alliance.

“The business also includes the installation of giant ‘hypermarkets’ and large shopping centres in the area, which means the hypothesis guiding the investigation is not illogical,” added Derra, who is convinced that the attacks are part of an organised attempt to push the immigrants out.