Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARGENTINA: Families of Fire Victims Demand Justice

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 4 2005 (IPS) - “These tragedies only happen in countries like ours,” complained José Iglesias, the father of one of the young victims of the fire that recently claimed 185 lives in a rock club in the Argentine capital.

He was talking with Roberto Almirón, who lost his son in a similar blaze that left a death toll of 464 in a supermarket last August in Paraguay.

Almirón and Iglesias agreed that the same deadly combination of negligence, inefficiency and corruption, added to the avarice of business owners, lay behind the two biggest avoidable tragedies that have occurred in the last six months in South America.

Iglesias, who was talking to Almirón by telephone Monday from the Radio Mitre studio in Buenos Aires, is the father of Pedro, 19, who died in last Thursday’s blaze in the “República Cromagnon” club, located in a neighbourhood near the centre of Buenos Aires.

Iglesias offered his services as a lawyer to all of the families of victims interested in taking collective legal action against “those responsible” for the tragedy that plunged this country into mourning over the New Year holiday weekend – the worst non-natural disaster in the history of Argentina.

The only person arrested so far, who testified in court Tuesday, is businessman Omar Chabán, the owner of the club where the rock group Callejeros played Thursday.

The young followers of Callejeros are a rowdy bunch, and traditionally set off flares during the band’s concerts. People who have attended the group’s shows in the past say fans fire at least 10 or 15 flares for every song.

In fact, just four days earlier a small fire had broken out in the same nightclub during a Callejeros show, but employees managed to put it out.

Heads have started to roll in the Buenos Aires city government. On Saturday, Juan Carlos López stepped down as the city government’s secretary of justice and citizen safety, and Fabiana Fiszbin resigned Monday as the head of the city’s safety inspectors.

A number of relatives of victims also criticised the national government and President Néstor Kirchner himself – who was on holiday in his home province of Santa Cruz, in southern Argentina – for their silence in the wake of the tragedy.

“Even the Pope (John Paul) expressed his solidarity, and our president didn’t even come out to say ‘I am with you'” in your pain, a crying Mónica Barroso, who lost her son in the fire, told the media.

Human rights lawyer Marcelo Parrilli filed charges of “simple homicide” and “injuries” Monday against Buenos Aires Mayor Aníbal Ibarra, Juan Carlos López (the former secretary of justice and citizen safety), and other local officials.

“The idea is that the blame must not simply be limited to the kid that shot off the flare, or the owner of the club,” Parrilli told IPS.

He was alluding to a report by the Argentine daily Clarín which indicated that the fire may have been caused by a flare launched by a 10-year-old boy sitting on his father’s shoulders. The fire apparently broke out when a flare set the club’s foam ceiling alight.

“There is no doubt that Ibarra was aware” that the safety regulations and enforcement for nightclubs are not strict enough to prevent this kind of tragedy, said Parrilli.

“In Argentina, thousands of people die every year of easily avoidable, absolutely absurd and completely preventable causes,” said the lawyer.

In a similar incident in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, a fire swept through the Ycuá Bolaños supermarket in August 2004. Most of the 464 victims burned to death after the owner ordered the doors closed to prevent customers from fleeing without paying for their merchandise.

Locked doors were one of the similarities between the Dec. 30 Buenos Aires tragedy and the August fire in Asunción. In República Cromagnon, most of the doors were chained or wired shut, to keep people from getting into the concert free.

Other irregularities in the Buenos Aires rock club included the use of flammable materials and the overcrowding – the number of people crammed into the locale was at least three times the maximum allowed by the club’s permit.

In addition, the club was never inspected last year by city authorities.

Most of the victims died of smoke inhalation. Of the more than 250 survivors who remain hospitalised, two died on Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 185.

Among the victims were a number of children who were in the club on their own or had come with their parents. Witnesses said a makeshift nursery had been set up in the women’s bathroom, where parents left their small children during the concert.

“It frightens me that we haven’t learned a thing,” said Almirón, the head of the commission of families of the Ycuá Bolaños victims.

He underlined to Iglesias that only the pressure from victims’ families and survivors of the Buenos Aires tragedy could ensure that those responsible are held accountable.

Argentine social psychologist Alfredo Moffat, who has worked with the survivors of the fire in Paraguay, said he was struck by the similarities between the two catastrophes.

“I just spent Christmas with the relatives of Ycuá Bolaños victims who are still in mourning, and I came back to find the same drama in the city,” he commented to IPS.

One difference in the psychological assistance needed by the families in the two cases, he said, arose from the fact that in Asunción most of the bodies were charred and could not be identified, while a majority of the victims in Buenos Aires died of smoke inhalation, including a number who were even able to walk out of the club before collapsing from their injuries and dying on the sidewalk or in the hospital.

But Moffat found strong similarities with respect to the lax enforcement of safety regulations and the unscrupulous failure of business owners to adopt fire prevention measures. “This was a photocopy” of the Ycuá Bolaños tragedy, said the psychologist.

“The lack of controls, the businessman who has the doors locked, and families once again organising to prevent impunity,” added the expert, who provided emotional assistance to many of the families who flocked to the club late Thursday night to find that their sons or daughters, most of whom were teenagers or young adults, were dead.

Moffat said the families in Argentina are already setting up a coordinating committee. “They are furious. On Sunday one group wanted to set the judicial morgue on fire” because of the endless paperwork they have been subjected to before they are finally handed the bodies of their loved ones.

IPS spoke with the father of a 15-year-old boy who went missing for a whole day until he was finally located near the club, in a state of confusion. He had gone to the concert with three friends who were trampled to death as people stampeded towards the exits.

The young concert-goers had fled towards the exit doors when they saw that the flames could not be controlled, and began to have a hard time breathing. But they found that the emergency exits were locked.

The doors were forced open when the fire fighters arrived, but for many it was too late. Dozens died in piles of bodies of people who had collapsed from smoke inhalation.

Thousands of relatives of victims of the fire and of earlier tragedies in which no one was ever held accountable marched Sunday and Monday to demand the resignation of key city officials, and are planning another protest for Thursday.

The parents of 17 youngsters who died in similar circumstances over a decade ago in the Kheyvis discotheque in the Olivos district of Greater Buenos Aires complained that “the impunity of the past allowed this to happen again.”

“For 11 years we have been warning that there could be another Kheyvis,” said Marta García, whose son Darío died in that fire, in connection with which no one was ever arrested, despite the total disregard for safety norms.

Protesting alongside the families of victims of the two dance club fires were the relatives of those who died in the 1990s bomb attacks on the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community centre, AMIA, in Buenos Aires, the victims of airplane crashes, kidnappings or police brutality, and even mothers and grandmothers of those “disappeared” during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

Once again, tragedy has brought together families condemned to marching while holding up photos of their loved ones and demanding justice, which remains elusive.