ARGENTINA: Attempt on ‘Grandmothers’ Leader amid Police Impunity

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 20 2002 (IPS) - Unknown assailants opened gunfire early Friday in Argentina against the home of Estela de Carlotto, president of the human rights group Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Just two days earlier, she had accused the police of engaging in “terror practices”.

“I have not doubt that this is related to the filing of the legal complaint,” said Carlotto, who was alone at her home in the city of La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires province, when she heard what she described as explosions.

The bullets penetrated the door and broke several windows, and were found embedded in the front and interior walls of the house. The gunfire reached the bathroom and the living room, where Carlotto had just taken a telephone call that was then cut off.

According to the human rights group Amnesty International, the shots are believed to have come from a specific type of long weapon that the Argentine Federal Police have used in crackdowns on street protests.

The minister of security of Buenos Aires province, Juan Pablo Cafiero, stated that “it was not an attempted robbery but a serious attack against an individual, and the possibility that it occurred as a consequence of the charges recently filed (by Carlotto) has not been ruled out.”

Several human rights organisations immediately issued statements condemning what they consider an attempt on the activist’s life.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to me — an attack using high-calibre weapons — not even during the dictatorship,” said the woman who since 1977 has led the association that is dedicated to finding the children kidnapped or born during the illegal captivity of their parents during Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983).

On Wednesday, Carlotto presented a complaint about specific police practices to the Supreme Court of Buenos Aires province.

The document contains testimonies from political and legal officials, lawmakers and human rights leaders, many of whom are members of the provincial Memorial Commission for victims of the dictatorship.

The accusations are that the Buenos Aires police engage in “practices of eliminating persons that are similar to those used during the last military dictatorship, such as executions and ‘quick-trigger’ crimes,” and that “the proliferation of torture and prison overcrowding constitute terror practices”.

Carlotto said the human rights violations committed by police are very serious. She cited the case of a youth who Federal Police agents forced to jump into the Riachuelo (the river separating the federal capital from the province of Buenos Aires), stressing that his body has not yet been found.

“They are true death squads that act with complete impunity,” Carlotto had said in the days leading up to the Friday gunfire attack in La Plata, some 60 km down the coast from Buenos Aires.

Last Saturday, three youths aged 14 to 19, were forced by the police to jump into the highly polluted Riachuelo river and swim across. Only two made it. The third, Ezequiel Demonty, 19, is still missing.

The survivors, ages 14 and 17, stated that the police had detained them in the early morning hours as they tried to hail a taxi to return home from a dance.

But the agents did not take them to the closest police station, but to the banks of the river, where the police beat the youths and forced them to enter the water.

The authorities of the Federal Police have placed 11 agents under preventive arrest in connection with Saturday’s events.

It is not the first time police have thrown minors in the river, but this time their actions had serious consequences, one did not make it across, and the family had the determination to denounce the tragedy, according to residents of Bajo Flores, the neighbourhood of the three youths.

The 14-year-old, who chose not to give his name, told journalists not to ask him any more questions because he had received many telephone calls in which he has been threatened to “shut up, or else”.

Approximately 1,500 reports of torture or mistreatment have been received by the Databank on Torture, which the Buenos Aires legal ombudsman’s office created in March 2000.

But the investigations of those cases nearly always get bogged down in bureaucracy, and steps are rarely taken against those responsible. Furthermore, the Databank on Torture has been left practically without operating funds.

In the period 1999-2000, at least 60 minors died in alleged clashes with the police, says a report released last year by the Buenos Aires Supreme Court.

Information from the public attorney’s office indicates that the dead children may have been victims of a group of men who work for private security agencies and is known as “the death squad”.

“There exists an ideological environment among some wealthy social sectors that rationalise the ‘quick-trigger’ and applaud the physical of the youths,” acknowledged recently the attorney of the provincial Court, Eduardo de la Cruz.

In Buenos Aires, he said, “the feeling of insecurity is created in order to generate business” for private security entities.

Several residents of the wealth Buenos Aires neighbourhood of San Isidro told IPS that they pay a weekly sum to what is ostensibly a security agency, but in fact is an organisation made up of police from the local station who in fact should be protecting them without charge.

But the residents said they are afraid of what might happen if they quit making the payments.

Cases of police arbitrariness, of the quick trigger finger, and the investigations that show police participation in kidnappings, rape and assault have been filling the crime pages of Argentine dailies for the last several months.