2023-07-14 05:05:10
The audio circulated from phone to phone. They were looking for the lawyer Alberto Nallar. “We have turned around everywhere,” he heard himself. “It’s after four in the afternoon, and we still don’t know where he is.” From his office, an assistant answered messages. “The chat has been opened –he explained-, and I am writing to his contacts so that everyone knows that he was arrested for sedition. They stopped him outside his house.” They were the first news of a “new list”, as they are beginning to call in Jujuy, the hunt waged by drops for two days by the Judiciary that responds to Governor Gerardo Morales on lawyers and members of the protests of 17, 20 and June 30.
At the same time as the arrest of Nallar, who until then had only collected signatures against the new reform of the Constitution and demanded the intervention of the Judiciary, the rumor of new arrest warrants began to circulate, this time for four lawyers: Ariel Ruarte , René Vicente Casas, Roberto Carlos Alemán and Alicia Chalabe, defenders of detainees from the latest protests but also lawyers for native communities and human rights and even one of them, a former federal judge. The Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation headed by Horacio Pietragalla presented a preventive habeas corpus in the federal court of Jujuy, only one of those that were presented during the day and only one of the actions that were activated.
“We were notified of his possible detention, and in the face of this very serious alert, we resorted to this constitutional guarantee, to protect his safety and personal integrity,” said the SDH. “The lawyers who are about to be arrested should be considered ‘human rights defenders,’ in the terms of the United Nations Special Rapporteurship on the situation of human rights defenders.” And in a later tweet: “All of them have defended numerous people who denounced having been criminalized for protesting and who are facing misdemeanor and criminal proceedings within the framework of the judiciary of the Province of Jujuy.”
The collective of lawyers Mario Bosch filed a habeas corpus in similar terms in the same court but also sent a letter to the Jujuy Bar Association and the Federation of Argentine Bar Associations demanding a ruling. The Ministry of Prosecution of Jujuy in a press conference called at night denied the existence of arrest warrants for the lawyers, with the exception of Nallar by then already located in the Alto Comedero Prison. Prosecutors Diego Funes and Walter Rondon argued in his case that he was detained for “public incitement and sedition” and when they had to explain it, they added the real reasons that cause alarm to the organizations: “He encourages the people who are on the picket lines to take power –they said-, ignores the judiciary, ignores the institutions and requests the intervention of the Province. That seems to be the reason in the autonomous republic of Morales.
By then, two days of another witch hunt had ended, which began on Wednesday in Humahuaca with 23 arrest warrants and continued on Thursday in San Salvador with another 20, of which a total of 13 effective arrests have already been made. In this context, the National University of Jujuy issued a statement to offer asylum to all the people of Jujuy. In a postcard that accounts for the regression of rights in a province that has remained in a state of emergency since December 2015, he pointed out: “Given the facts of public knowledge that occurred in our province on the day of the date, since dozens of Jujeños and Jujeños have and they continue to be arrested at their homes and detained in different police detachments and given that the article of the Higher Education Law expresses “that the public force cannot enter the national university institutions except through a strict order from a judge” the university decides to put at the disposal of the town of Jujuy the cut and its residence” and all its academic units “offering solidarity asylum” to any of them.
Ariel Ruarte, one of the lawyers, was staying at the university. Still in the afternoon, he did not know what was going to happen to him. Defender of Milagro Sala, in cases against humanity, representative in Jujuy of the SDH lawyers, sought to understand what he had done, minute by minute, in recent days, to know what reasons there were for an arrest. Then he remembered the only possible one: Father’s Day, Sunday the 18th, he took Pietragalla to the Purmamarca court to find a solution to the conflict and returned home to tell his daughter that he was not going to be able to be there that Father’s Day because he had to work.
“This afternoon versions began to run, around three, through WhatsApp groups,” he says. “I came here but I was not running away from anything, I came alone because if there is an arrest I want them not to hit me, because that is what the detainees have been saying in recent days: that they take them around, beat them, insult them. . I try to make everything as civil as possible. If they tell me that there is an arrest warrant and it is complied with, I will turn myself in to prove my innocence.”
— Fear?
— I don’t know if fear –he says-. I don’t feel like getting hit, I want everything to be clear and not clandestine, to be public so that the collateral damage is not too much. I don’t want my daughter and my mother to take an image of me beaten, but if I am arrested for doing something, that is what I have to do, and that it be with dignity.
At that time, the Mario Bosch collective was rushing the draft of the habeas corpus with the names of all the lawyers. Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, part of that space, said that the significant data of the new raid is the name of Nallar. “He collected signatures against the Constitution,” she says. “That is the data, a lawyer without an organization, which indicates more than ever, more than in all these seven and a half years, that this is the real dictatorship. This is exactly what happened then.”
Sonia Alesso had spoken with her about the teachers in the province unemployed for salaries and in protest of the reform. That intermittent terror that is making the teachers begin to be afraid of continuing on the street also sneaks into these talks.
the arrests
The latest arrest warrants and effective arrests were preceded by the protests on June 20 in San Salvador and on June 30 in Humahuaca. More than 40 orders, and around 13 detainees.
According to data from the Center for Legal and Social Studies, the methodology with which the arrests in the last few hours were carried out was intimidating. In Humahuaca, the raids and arrests were carried out simultaneously on July 12. In the first cases, it involved people summoned to appear at police stations to be notified, but once there they were detained. Then there were simultaneous raids as if they were raids. The same thing was repeated on the morning of July 13 in San Salvador. In Humahuaca there were three cases of detainees who, before appearing before the judge, were transferred to San Salvador, 130 km away, to undergo a “mental examination.” The transfer took from 3:45 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. the next day, because the police forces used alternative routes under the excuse of “cuts.” However, that day there were no cuts. During those hours, the relatives did not know his whereabouts. The mental examination is not required for this judicial instance and could have been carried out in Humahuaca, so everything indicates that the transfer was a form of anticipated punishment.
During yesterday’s press conference, prosecutors did not point out these facts. They said that the arrests are the product of an investigation of the protest based on analysis of public photos, security cameras, the media and even social networks. “There were a large number of people arrested on June 20 for flagrante delicto,” said one. “From then on we started a case and as the investigation went on we did an analysis of the cameras” and “24 (in San Salvador) could be identified throwing stones, damaging and hurting.” And he added: “It must be clear that he is not criminalized for his political affiliation, he is persecuted when he is identified in a criminal act.”
The charges are from serious to more serious. Sedition against the constitutional order, illegal deprivation of liberty in Humahuaca and attack and resistance to authority, minor injuries, damages, havoc, functional hindrance and obstruction of land transportation in San Salvador, with the aggravating circumstance of being part of an organization. “Each one did a part,” the prosecutor clarified what the figure of the illicit association really hides and the certainty, then, of an effective prison, which he also advanced. Today will be the inquiries and the prosecutor’s office said they will ask for the preventive ones.
Of course, they clarified, there are no disappeared: they are all housed in a special sector of the Alto Comedero prison. It will be seen.
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