Missing activist
Where is Santiago Maldonado?
BUENOs AIREs: The case of an Argentine activist for indigenous rights, whose family says he disappeared while in police custody, is raising dark memories of the country’s years of dictatorship.
Everywhere, from hospitals and bus stations to football grounds, signs have appeared reading: “Where is Santiago Maldonado? The state is responsible.”
Campaign groups say Maldonado, 27, was detained by state forces on Aug 1 after joining a protest march by the Mapuche indigenous group.
On Friday, marking a month since his disappearance, mothers with babies, retirees and students joined a rally for Maldonado in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo – the symbolic site of protests for victims of the dictatorship.
“This transcends the issue of political affiliation,” said demonstrator Aepa Espinoza, 45.
“This case shows there are deep divisions in the country because we should all be here,” he added.
For decades, relatives have been rallying on the square for the thousands of people killed or “disappeared” by the military regime from 1976 to 1983.
Campaigners say 30,000 people were victims of forced “disappearances” under the dictatorship – and hundreds of others afterwards.
The Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression, a non-government campaign group, says 210 people have disappeared while in police custody since the dictatorship ended.
But the case of Maldonado is the first one where state institutions, rather than individual officers, have been seriously accused of involvement in a disappearance.
He is said to have last been seen being put into a military police vehicle by officers who broke up a protest in the Chubut province.
“Santiago was taken to the Gendarmerie,” said Stella Maris Peloso, Maldonado’s mother, who dismissed the notion of her son being a political militant.
The accusations of state responsibility in Maldonado’s disappearance have been vociferously backed by campaign groups, including the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have campaigned for decades for the victims of the country’s 19761983 dictatorship.
“It is tragic that in this, our country’s longest ever period of democracy, we should have to report the forced disappearance of a person,” the president of the Grandmothers, Estela de Carlotto, told a news conference last month.
In a polarised country still haunted by the military dictatorship, backers of President Mauricio Macri accuse supporters of the previous government of Cristina Kirchner of putting together a cam- paign to discredit the government by comparing its actions with that of the dictatorship.
The lack of answers and the defence of the paramilitary Gendarmerie’s actions in breaking up the protest by Security Minister Patricia Bullrich have added to the atmosphere of injustice surrounding Maldonado’s disappearance.
Bullrich maintains that tracking of the missing activist could not be done in time and accused the Mapuche community of putting obstacles in the way of the security forces’ efforts to find him.
Maldonado moved from Buenos Aires to Chubut last year. He arrived in Patagonia as a backpacker and joined the demonstration purely out of a sense of social justice, his family and friends say.
It is tragic that in this, our country’s longest period of democracy, we should have to report the forced disappearance of a person.
Estela de Carlotto