The Disappearance of Santiago Maldonado
On 1 Aug, Santiago Maldonado took part in a demonstration by members of the Mapuche community in Chubut province, Patagonia, over land rights. The Pu Lof in Resistance are engaged in a struggle for an ancestral territory, currently owned by part of the Benetton empire, one of many overseas concerns that bought up big chunks of the far south in the 1980s and 90s. Protests had taken place alongside Route 40, the main north-south artery near the popular tourist destination of El Bolsón, demanding the release of the lonko (community chief) Facundo Jones Huala, jailed over an extradition request from Chile. In response to orders from the Federal Judge, Guido Otranto, more than 100 troops from the Argentine National Gendarmerie broke into the community’s encampment, in Cushamen, setting huts and shelters alight and firing rubber and lead bullets.
Maldonado, a 28-year-old tattoo artist and craftsman from Buenos Aires province, had been travelling in the south and was part of a group of protestors who were chased by security forces into the river Chubut. The others escaped, but eye-witness reports say that he was bundled into a police van. He has not been seen since. The police operation was directly overseen by Pablo Noceti, Chief of Staff of the Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich, of the ruling Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition. Noceti, a lawyer, has defended members of the military tried for crimes against humanity, and has in the past publicly spoken out against attempts to bring those accused of human rights violations to justice.
The government’s initial response to habeas corpus requests from Maldonado’s family, politicians, and human rights organisations, was to deny all knowledge of his whereabouts, almost as if hoping that the case would die out in due time.
In a move both bold and self-defeating, the government charged the same judge, Guido Otranto, who ordered the police action, with investigating subsequent events; Otranto was later replaced, only after Maldonado’s family appealed, citing concerns about his impartiality. Soon after the case came to prominence, Minister Bullrich, as well as media sources supportive of the government, including the newspapers Clarín and La Nación, circulated rumours that Maldonado had been involved in a robbery, was elsewhere at the time of the confrontation, or had fled to Chile. Almost two months later, with Maldonado still missing and with the Gendarmerie as the main suspect, all of these theories have lost credibility. And the Argentine government, with legislative elections around the corner and unable to distract attention from the case, has finally publicly acknowledged the gravity of the situation.
The word “disappeared” has a chilling resonance in Argentina, as some 30,000 of its citizens vanished into the military machine during the 1976–83 dictatorship. Maldonado is one of a small group of the so-called “disappeared in democracy.”
This group includes the journalism student Miguel Bru, murdered and disappeared while in police custody in 1993, after denouncing an illegal raid in his house. It also includes Julio López, a builder disappeared in 2006 before his final testimony as one of the plaintiffs, during the trial of Miguel Etchecolatz, a former police chief accused of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. Such cases, betraying the perpetuation of certain practices by the Argentine security forces, are tragic and frightening. Maldonado’s case is especially poignant because of the simultaneous proximity of those involved to the highest echelons of power in Argentina, the flagrancy with which the police have acted, and the initial blasé attitude of the minister responsible and the government, in spite of complaints from Amnesty International, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, and the public outcry from a vast part of the Argentine population.
Ahead of a protest march in the city of Córdoba, police raided political and social organisations, including a kitchen providing food for poor children, and seized placards and other materials. A number of individuals, including children, were detained to “have their records checked”, a catch-all excuse for arbitrary detention in Argentina. Conventional and social media allied to the government and conservative sectors have made much of the “politicisation” of the case, including protests against a proposal by a prominent teachers’ union to talk about Maldonado in schools. The hashtag “#conmihijono” (not with my child) has trended strongly. How though, one wonders, could a case in which a government chief of staff has overseen the violent break up of a peaceful protest be anything other than political? Perhaps such calls to de-politicise an inherently political event make sense only within the logic of the Cambiemos alliance. In contraposition to the Kirchnerist administration Macri has built for himself an image of an apolitical leader, replacing the Kirchners’ fostering and dependence on militancy with a saccharine “revolution of happiness,” to quote Cambiemos’ electoral slogan back in 2015.
A month after Maldonado’s disappearance, thousands protested on the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities, the vast majority peacefully. The more prominent local media focused, almost inevitably, on the incidences of violence that occurred, and these stories and images have been picked up by the international press. But credible reports on the ground have spoken of plainclothes police and hired provocateurs at the rallies, starting trouble. This practice is not unheard of in Argentina, a country where some of the more violent far left organisations have long been suspected of working for the security services, or at least of being infiltrated and used by them. In El Bolsón, a van full of masked men arrived at the end of a peaceful vigil, throwing Molotov cocktails and painting slogans on cars and buildings. This feeds the government’s concerns over “security,” including international drug trafficking, border controls, and the menace of “anarchist” terrorists, an all-purpose enemy justifying pre-emptive measures against social activists and protestors.
The Maldonado case is the latest chapter in a bloody struggle that goes back to the colonial era, but which is especially acute in the history of Argentina as a nation state, with class, race, land, and national identity at play.
The Argentine southern border was secured with a campaign of extermination against indigenous peoples in the late 1800s, the euphemistically named “Conquista del desierto” (Conquest of the Desert). In the twentieth century, striking workers were victims of violent attacks in the 1920s, known as the “Patagonian tragedy,” a preamble of acts of violence against workers to come. In the post-dictatorship era, foreign investors have bought up mega-estates in the far south, irrespective of those who have traditionally or ancestrally occupied the lands. Successive governments have sided with the new owners of Patagonia. Maldonado is the latest victim in this centuries-old conflict, but one whose fate raises important questions about the priorities and politics of President Macri’s administration.
27 Sep 2017
Image: y el bombo (208), luzencor, Creative Commons.
Ben Bollig
St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. Editor Board Member, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Fernando Sdrigotti
writer and cultural critic. Online Editor, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Editor Minor Literature[s].