ARGENTINA: Local Clans Enjoy Impunity

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Viviana Alonso

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 30 2003 (IPS) - Local clans that have held tightly onto power in several Argentine provinces for the past 50 years remain virtually untouchable, despite public demands for justice in a spate of murders in which people close to the local elites are implicated.

Two young women, Leyla Bshier Nazar, 22, and Patricia Villalba, 26, were brutally slain early this year in Santiago del Estero, the capital of the northern province of that name.

According to a witness whose identity has not been revealed, Nazar died of an overdose after she was given cocaine at a party organised in the neighbouring province of Catamarca by officials from the two provinces and the sons and daughters of the local business and political elites.

The witness said the party guests included a provincial legislator, the Santiago del Estero people’s defender, and the son of the province’s deputy governor, Darío Moreno, who stepped down on Jun. 4 amidst the growing scandal.

The remains of the two young women were found on Feb. 6 in a field on the outskirts of the city. Only part of Nazar’s skeleton was found, because her body had been dismembered and burnt to make identification more difficult. Villalba had been tortured and strangled.

"Santiago is a feudal fiefdom. Total impunity has reigned here for 50 years. The judges are completely dependent on the provincial government that appoints them, to whom they are beholden when it comes to administering justice," lawyer Héctor Adle, with the Argentine League for the Rights of Man, told IPS.

"The impunity here is atrocious," said Jorge Vidal, the coordinator of the local branch of the group Madres del Dolor (Mothers of Pain). "There are more than 60 unsolved murders, mainly of young people, over 100 cases of beatings and torture, 12 girls who went missing after leaving the same discotheque, strange suicides, and mutilated bodies that show up floating in the river."

Madres del Dolor is made up of family members of young people who have been murdered in shady circumstances in which people in power or their close associates are often implicated. The Santiago del Estero branch was founded six years ago by Vidal and his wife, Teresa Prola, and several other parents whose children have been killed.

"The people of Santiago del Estero are imbued with great sadness over what has happened, but they also feel hopeful now. They have finally begun to lose the constant fear in which they lived due to the murders and the coercion and threats faced by those who cross or stand up to the ‘governing couple’," said Adle.

The "governing couple" are Governor Mercedes Aragonés and her husband Carlos Juárez, the local Justicialista (Peronist) Party (PJ) "caudillo" or political boss, who at the age of 86 continues to control the province.

Sociologist Marcos Novaro at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) said regimes like the one in Santiago del Estero "emerge in democracy, but turn into a sort of machine that perpetuates itself in power, becoming a perversion of the democratic system."

Novaro said these local regimes, "which in the past 20 years have led to a build-up of enormous political tension," are now "more violent and more fragile to public opinion."

"These are local governments that do not come from an oligarchical tradition, but that begin by controlling the state, from which they obtain money and are enriched, and that later resort to violence to control the population," he said in an interview.

In that sense, Santiago del Estero is similar to Catamarca, which has been dominated since the 1950s by the Saadi family, a powerful Peronist clan.. There are also similarities between the death of Nazar and that of María Soledad Morales, who died of an overdose in Catamarca in 1990.

Morales died at a party in which she had been raped by Guillermo Luque, whose father was, at the time, a national lawmaker representing the PJ.

Morales’ death caused a commotion in Catamarca and gave rise to loud protests and public demands for justice, which led to the fall of then-governor Ramón Saadi.

But "Santiago is not Catamarca, and we are not the Saadis", said Governor Aragonés, who underlined that in the Morales case, the Catamarca government covered up what happened, while she in contrast dismissed – "with one stroke of the pen" – those who committed irregularities in the investigation of the murders of Nazar and Villalbaa.

The governor said the murders would not affect her administration.

"When you have been in power for 50 years, the people follow you because they understand what is real, because they know we love them, and because all we do is think about what more we can do for the people of Santiago del Estero," she maintained.

The province of La Rioja, next to Catamarca, has been governed by the families of former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and his ex-wife Zulema Yoma since Menem was first elected governor in 1973.

Menem held onto that post, except during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, until he was elected president, and the province continues to be ruled by his supporters.

Although the local power structure in La Rioja does not go back so far, the case is similar to those of Santiago del Estero and Catamarca. It differs, however, from the situation in the provinces of Corrientes, to the northeast, and Salta, to the northwest, where "power is in the hands of the traditional elites," said Novaro.

"Tradition ensures these families control over the land and a firm grip on local political power," said the researcher, referring to the Romero clan in Salta and the Romero Feris of Corrientes, who have been in power for four decades.

In Corrientes and Salta, "society is more stratified and extremely classist," said Novaro.

There are also families or clans that have been in power for many years in the central province of San Luis and Neuquen in the southwest. But they have a different style of government -û one that is "less violent and less primitive, with a tendency to modernise," he pointed out.

These local political leaders are "more careful to create a system of political and institutional control, and have to resort to violence much less," said Novaro, who added that "they have better-run provinces."

That is the case of the Rodríguez Saá family, which has exercised power in the province of San Luis for nearly a century.

Adolfo Rodríguez Saá governed his province from 1983 until Congress designated him caretaker president on Dec. 24, 2001, after protests and rioting brought down the government of Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001). However, he lasted only six days in the post until he was forced to resign by continued civil unrest.

The Popular Movement of Neuquen, a party that emerged in the early 1960s, is headed by the Sapag family, whose members, or people close to them, have since governed the province, one of Argentina’s main oil and gas-producing regions.

"In recent years, the role of the provincial politicians has changed, and governors have become more important now," said Novaro, who noted that after institutional reforms were adopted in the 1990s, the provinces began to take charge of the health and educational systems, which were formerly administered by the central government of this Southern Cone country of 37 million.

"Now they have more resources for public spending, and are held less accountable than before," said the FLACSO researcher.

However, Novaro said the provinces "are not yet shifting, dynamic political spaces," but "in many cases, they reproduce traditional ways of doing politics," as demonstrated by the families and groups that have been holding onto power for half a century.