ARGENTINA:
Invisible fiefdoms

Fernanda Sández

Reproduced from Latinamerica Press, www.latinamericapress.org

Families entrenched in power for decades impose medieval regimes.

With the slogan “we don’t trust the police, we don’t believe in justice” and carrying photos of disappeared, tortured or murdered relatives, a group of women known as the Mothers of Grief have marched in total silence every Tuesday for the last six years outside the courts in the northern Argentine province of Santiago de Estero.

They denounce all kinds of violations of human rights and demand justice in the province where almost without interruption since 1946 Carlos Juárez and his wife, the current governor Mercedes “Nina” Aragonés de Juárez represent a single, undisputed power.

Over decades, the Juárez have been cementing a complex network of allegiances, obedience and impunity which assured their permanence in power. They manage each and every one of the media of the province, censure the opposition, administrate public employment at their discretion and have the police at their disposition to pursue not only political rivals but anyone who puts their regime in question.

All of the provincial jobs as well as plans of social assistance are distributed at will only among their followers. The names of Nina and Carlos Juárez are stamped on each brick destined for public works, they are described as “Illustrious Protectors of the Province” and anyone who aspires to occupy a public post must first openly express support for their regime.

“Santiago de Estero is not a dictatorship. It is much worse,” said journalist Jorge Vidal, who with his wife Teresa Prola founded the group Mothers of Grief in 1997 after their adolescent son Pablo was murdered in May of that year by police, who later tried to cover up the crime pretending it was an accident.

“During the dictatorship (1976-83) there were 82 disappearances here but today there is torture, mistreatment and mutilated corpses appear,” Vidal said. “We have received 169 complaints (from 1997 to the present) while the bishopric received 400 (from 1983 until the present). The people go to the Church or to us because they know that the police and courts answer to political power.”

Nevertheless, it was not until the brutal assassination of two young people — Leyla Bshier Nazar, 22, and Patricia Villalba, 26 — at the start of this year that provincial residents shook off their indifference. Bshier Nazar appears to have died from consumption of drugs and alcohol in a party in which people linked to power took part, while Villalba appears to have been murdered for having overheard — from one of the protagonists — of the bloodcurdling details of the episode.

“Santiago de Estero brings shame to the nation,” Justice Minister Gustavo Béliz said in late September as he asked the courts to rapidly clear up the murder of the young women. As a result, the vice governor, a secretary and sub-secretary, together with the commander and vice commander of the police of Santiago de Estero have resigned.

Besides, the judge currently in charge of the case, María del Carmen Bravo, ordered nine arrests, including the first judge in the case, and that of once powerful chief of provincial intelligence, commissary Antonio Muza Azar, who is suspected of heading the band that covered up both deaths.

Alejandro Isla, social anthropologist and member of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), said “although the situation of Santiago de Estero appears to be an extreme, the situation is repeated in several places where people are subjected to the authority of the families who manage the state at their whim.”

“There is a political culture that accepts this ‘private’ management of what is public. Thus, the separation of powers is a chimera and the leaders see the state as something that belongs to them and not as a public good. It is patrimony — personal and private — of those who exercise an almost absolute power and which is transmitted from one person to another within the same ‘clan,’” he added.

The powerful surname, a manipulated judiciary and police brutality as a way of staying in power is repeated — to name just a few examples and with slight variations — in La Rioja with the Menem and Yoma families; Rodríguez Saa in San Luis; in Neuquén with the Sapag “clan,” and in Corrientes with Romero Feris. Another extreme case is that Catamarca, where the Saadi family has been managing the destiny of the province for more than 50 years.

According to lawyer Andrea Pochack, head of the legal area of the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS) and co-author of the document “Justice in the provinces of Argentina,” the replication of the phenomenon is not a coincidence.

“If people are demobilized, the media are gagged, the scarce provincial resources are concentrated in a very few hands and there are no strong civilian entities, this ends up being taken as “normal” since democracy is nothing more than a mere formality and power is always in the same hands,” she said.

Together with the overlapping of justice and political power, poverty appears to be another central component in the survival of these authoritarian and feudal regimes.

“With the regional economic crises, the state is transformed in the only possibility of work,” Isla said. “Thus political patronage, favors and deals proliferate.”