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ARGENTINA: Imprisoned Paraguayan Activists on Hunger Strike

Sebastián Lacunza

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 24 2008 (IPS) - Six rural activists from Paraguay who are in prison in Argentina have been on a hunger strike since Aug. 15 to protest what they claim is their “unjust detention” carried out with the “complicity” of the Argentine government.

The six peasant farmers are being held in the prison in Marcos Paz, 48 km east of Buenos Aires, in connection with their prosecution in Paraguay in the case of the kidnapping and murder of Cecilia Cubas, the daughter of former president Raúl Cubas (1998-1999).

The extradition request sent by the Paraguayan justice system was initially approved but has been appealed.

Agustín Acosta, Basiliano Cardozo, Simeón Bordón, Gustavo Lezcano, Roque Rodríguez and Arístides Vera were members of a now-defunct Marxist movement, Patria Libre (Free Fatherland), the Movimiento Agrario y Popular (Agrarian Popular Movement), and small farmers’ cooperatives.

Acosta was also a seminarian, and taught in the impoverished central Paraguayan province of San Pedro, where President Fernando Lugo, who took office in August, served as a bishop for a decade.

In their hunger strike, the prisoners have the support of a number of human rights organisations, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, associations of Paraguayans living in Argentina, and prominent intellectuals like Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and writer Osvaldo Bayer from Argentina and writer Eduardo Galeano and singer/songwriter Daniel Viglietti from neighbouring Uruguay.

Human rights groups and leftwing parties held a demonstration in downtown Buenos Aires Tuesday demanding the activists’ release.

Cecilia Cubas, 31, was kidnapped on Sept. 21, 2004 in San Lorenzo, on the outskirts of the Paraguayan capital. Although her family paid 800,000 dollars in ransom, she was not released. Her body was found nearly five months later underneath a house near Asunción.

The incident shook Paraguayan society and sent shock waves through the government of then president Nicanor Duarte (2003-2008). The investigation immediately focused on members of Patria Libre, a group described as “terrorist” by Duarte, who belonged to the Colorado Party which ruled for six decades, until Lugo became president.

Finding themselves targeted by the investigation, several rural activists sought refuge in the embassies of different countries.

The six hunger strikers say then Argentine ambassador in Paraguay, Rafael Romá, recommended that they cross the border and apply for asylum from Argentina’s national refugee eligibility committee, CEPARE, made up of representatives of the ministries of the interior and foreign relations and advisers from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil society organisations.

The asylum request was filed in May 2006. But just 72 hours after their arrival, three of the six Paraguayans were arrested by Interpol (the international police) at the CEPARE office in Buenos Aires, in response to an arrest warrant issued by the Paraguayan courts.

Two others were later arrested in the Buenos Aires district of Florencio Varela, and the sixth in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood, in a high-profile police operation.

One of the activists’ defence lawyers, Liliana Meaza, told IPS that two of the hunger strikers are in an especially delicate state of health. Vera has suffered episodes of high blood pressure that have caused concern among the doctors, and Cardozo no longer gets out of bed.

The activists have stated in several public documents that “executions” and arbitrary imprisonment are committed in Paraguay by a police and legal apparatus “inherited from the dictatorship (of Alfredo Stroessner, 1954-1989), with judges who serve the mafia that operated and continues to operate under the Colorado Party, which has persecuted and killed opposition leaders for 61 years.”

The rural activists do not lay any of the blame for their situation on the centre-left government of Lugo, who was sworn in on Aug. 15, the day they launched their hunger strike. However, they doubt the new government’s real capacity for action in the face of the strong state apparatus left in place by the Colorado Party.

In the extradition trial, Argentine federal Judge Ariel Lijo ruled on Dec. 14, 2006 that “there is no reliable evidence that (the six Paraguayans) are suffering from political persecution.”

The judge based his verdict on the decision reached by CEPARE immediately after the request for asylum was filed. The refugee committee upheld its resolution on Jul. 20 this year.

CEPARE said that because the activism of the six men was “low profile,” it considered “the possibility of political persecution” unlikely.

However, that decision ran counter to an initial opinion issued by the Argentine government’s Secretariat of Human Rights.

The UNHCR office in Argentina declined to comment to IPS on the case, citing confidentiality concerns.

In Paraguay, in the meantime, Judge Pedro Mayor threw out the case against the six men, but a higher court reopened the case and ratified the extradition request.

Under Argentine law, an appeal of an extradition ruling must go directly to the Supreme Court.

But the Supreme Court decided this year to postpone any resolution on the matter until the Interior Ministry rules on the appeal presented against the CEPARE decision.

Because of that delay, the Paraguayan detainees’ defence lawyers, who belong to the Legal Investigation and Defence Foundation (FIDELA), requested that their clients be released on bail. But Judge Lijo denied the request, arguing that they are a flight risk.

Argentine activist Hebe de Bonafini, the head of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association, told IPS that “we brought the case up to the minister (of justice, Aníbal Fernández), and he told us it is a strictly legal matter. In this country there are laws, and the government cannot do anything until the courts reach a decision,” said de Bonafini, who supports the position taken by the government.

But FIDELA lawyer Meaza replied that “Aníbal Fernández is a big liar.” She pointed out that in a radio interview, the minister had referred to the Paraguayan activists as “the ones who killed Cecilia Cubas.”

In her view, the young woman’s murder took place in the context of “kidnappings carried out internally by the mafias within the Colorado Party.” Cecilia Cubas’s father, Raúl Cubas, was accused of having his vice president, Luis María Argaña, assassinated in March 1999.

Several years later he was acquitted of that crime.

The charges against the six Paraguayan activists state that they took part in a January 2005 meeting in which the murder of Cecilia Cubas was reportedly planned, and that they failed to report the meeting to the authorities.

The Duarte administration also alleged that Patria Libre had ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest guerrilla group active in that war-torn country.

Meaza said the incriminating testimony against her clients is weak and the proceedings have been plagued with irregularities, undergoing changes “even in the date when the young woman was killed.”

“With our unjust detention, the Argentine government has become an accomplice to this situation, and is also violating the seventh article, point five, of the San José Pact (American Convention on Human Rights), because we have been in prison for over two years without a trial, and without any prospects for a prompt solution,” the activists said in a statement issued 33 days into their hunger strike.