RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Police Brutality Grows with Unrest

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 2 2002 (IPS) - Police brutality is on the rise in Argentina, with 1,000 victims in 2001, due to the impunity enjoyed by the security forces, which lately have been active cracking down harshly on unemployed protesters in this crisis-ridden country.

Argentina’s police force has not undergone any reform since the brutal 1976-1983 military dictatorship, the president of the local human rights group Correspi, María del Carmen Verdú, told IPS.

According to the activist, not only have the democratic administrations that have governed since then had no interest in reforming and purging the police, but government officials would actually like to give the police more power to suppress the social unrest that has continued to mount, with nearly daily protests, since the collapse of the government of Fernando de la Rúa in December.

Last year, the average age of the victims of police mistreatment or “trigger-happy” officers was 17. Most of the victims were unemployed young men from slum areas, some of whom had taken part in roadblocks, like the ones staged at several highways leading into Buenos Aires on Jun 26.

That day, two young pickets – unemployed workers who frequently hold protests that involve throwing up blockades to cut traffic – were killed and over a hundred people were wounded in police repression at the bridge linking the city of Avellaneda with the southside of the capital.

President Eduardo Duhalde described the police action at the bridge in Avellaneda as an “atrocious shooting-party.”

The governor of the central province of Buenos Aires, Felipe Solá, in whose jurisdiction the incidents took place, sacked those responsible and named a new justice minister, Juan Pablo Cafiero.

“There will be no impunity for the murderers” of the two protesters, Darío Santillán and Maximiliano Kosteki, and “we are going to de-criminalise the social protests,” said Cafiero when he assumed his new post on Jul 1.

However, as Cafiero himself admitted, “reforms of the police force have always ground to a halt when they were only halfway there.”

Extrajudicial executions of suspects, who are the victims of “trigger-happy” police and of mistreatment in police stations, are steadily rising, said Verdú, who heads Correspi (Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression).

The human rights group documented 262 deaths in 1996, when it began to monitor the number of deaths resulting from police brutality.

The total climbed to 382 in 1997, 471 in 1998, 625 in 1999, 833 in 2000, and 999 in 2001, without counting the 30 victims of the protests that led to the Dec 20 resignation of president Fernando de la Rúa, halfway through his four-year term.

Around 44 percent of the cases occurred under the jurisdiction of the police of the central province of Buenos Aires, several of whose officers have been implicated in the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, a Jewish social institution, and in the 1997 assassination of photo-journalist José Luis Cabezas.

The Jun 26 police action in Avellaneda was a demonstration of what can happen in this country, which is in the grip of its worst economic and social crisis ever, say human rights activists.

In Argentina, there is a “critical” problem of police impunity that dates back to the dictatorship, which is contributing to the steady worsening of the country’s human rights situation, as the social tension intensifies, José Beltrán, the head of an Amnesty International mission, said last February.

The Amnesty delegation expressed concern over the refusal of Duhalde, who was appointed president on Jan 1, to receive them. “What concerns us more than the rebuff is the indifference,” Beltrán said at the time. “This demonstrates that the question of human rights is not high up on the agenda.”

Since then, the poverty and unemployment rates have continued to rise – to 50 and 25 percent, respectively – and with them, the civil unrest.

Organisations of unemployed workers told the press on Jul 1 that the violent clashes between protesters and the police and the looting and rioting that followed the protest in Avellaneda “were organised by the government to justify a crackdown on the social conflict.”

The Duhalde administration had warned a few days earlier that it would not allow traffic to be cut off, after several organisations representing the jobless announced that they planned to block roads.

But local authorities, who initially blamed the violence and excesses on the demonstrators, were forced to retract due to evidence of unprovoked police brutality captured in photos published by the press and videos broadcast on TV.

Four police officers were immediately arrested, and the government of the province of Buenos Aires replaced top-level security authorities and the district police chiefs.

Opposition legislators described the Avellaneda police station as “a Nazi concentration camp” due to the manner in which some 160 detainees – including pregnant women and minors – were treated. All of the detainees were released within a few hours of the incidents.

“We were tied up and on our knees, and they beat us,” said one of the protesters who had been arrested.

In a report presented by Correspi last December, six months before the latest deaths, the rights group said the victims of police brutality were “nearly all young, poor, jobless and marginalised men, the sons and brothers of those who stage roadblocks, because even the right to protest has been taken from them.”

Lawyers for Correspi, who are now representing the families of the two young men killed on Jun 26, presented as eyewitnesses cameramen, photo-journalists and people who took part in the protest, all of whom agreed that the head of the police operation that day, police superintendent Antonio Franchiotti, shot at least one of the two demonstrators who were killed.

The witnesses also said they saw members of the Naval Prefecture and the Gendarmerie shooting at protesters.

“This was a police operation that had a political leg, a military leg and a journalistic leg, with the mainstream media immediately accusing the pickets of being responsible for the deaths and the violence,” said Verdú.

But “that was a deliberately staged incident aimed at generating chaos and setting an example of what can happen if people protest,” she maintained.

The activist added that “the state can no longer avoid its responsibility for these events. It cannot evade the fact that there were one provincial and three national security forces there.

“We cannot just allow them to lay all of the blame on one pathetic commissioner,” who claimed he was using rubber bullets, but who actually shot at least one of the fatal victims with a firearm, she argued.