Argentina is obsessed with missing activist

Officials say he drowned or escaped; critics fear coverup

The government is behind this is “the only hypothesis there is because there aren’t witnesses to support other hypotheses.”

Andrea Antico, Santiago Maldonado’s sister-in-law

For two months, a shaggy, solemn face has been plastered on the front pages of Argentina’s newspapers, printed on T-shirts and spray-painted on murals across the country, all with the same line of text: “Where is Santiago Maldonado?”

The 28-year-old activist went missing Aug. 1 during a protest for indigenous rights in Patagonia on the southern tip of South America. Law enforcement officials, who broke up the protest, claimed Maldonado drowned in a nearby river or escaped over the border to Chile.

The lack of a body or DNA evidence has created a frenzy among Argentinians, who are obsessed with the case, and for good reason, given the country’s recent past: They fear the government made him “disappear.”

That is a chilling prospect in a country where as many as 30,000 political opponents of the ruling military dictatorship were grabbed off the streets in the

1970s and ’80s and “disappeared.” They often were interrogated by the military regime, tortured, then dropped into the Atlantic Ocean from an airplane.

That the government is behind Maldonado’s vanishing is “the only hypothesis there is because there aren’t witnesses to support other hypotheses,” said Andrea Antico, Maldonado’s sister-inlaw.

Antico and other critics said it is not coincidental that Maldonado’s disappearance happened during the rule of President Mauricio Macri, the first conservative to hold the top office since the military regime ended in

1983.

They’ve tried to show that Macri, who took office in 2015, has a history of authoritarianism, showing low tolerance for public demonstrations and an indifference to human rights, especially when it comes to indigenous communities obstructing completion of infrastructure and energy projects intended to jump-start the country’s struggling economy.

The day he went missing, Maldonado, a craftsman and tattoo artist, was attending a Mapuche protest in the province of Chubut, where the indigenous community of Pu Lof fights for land owned by Italian fashion billionaire Luciano Benetton.

The Argentine Gendarmerie — a federal border enforcement agency — intervened when Maldonado and other activists tried blocking a road. Officers forcibly broke up the demonstration, but no one determined where Maldonado went after the chaos.

One of the demonstrators, Maxi Goldschmidt, reported seeing Maldonado at the bank of the Chubut River that other protesters had begun crossing, but his family said he doesn’t know how to swim. Maldonado’s brother said protesters told him they saw Maldonado being loaded into a government vehicle — an arrest that would have been ordered from as high up as National Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.

Attention has turned to the eight Gendarmerie officers who may have acted outside of protocol in breaking up the demonstration. After initially denying foul play, one officer confessed to throwing a rock in frustration. Another, whose jaw was broken, said he fired a rubber bullet at an unidentified protester.

In an audio recording on the message app WhatsApp that was leaked, an officer said Maldonado was in the back of a truck. Another recording mentions a body in a river, and a third discusses hiding law enforcement vehicles.

Despite what many Argentinians consider to be overwhelming evidence against the Gendarmerie, the federal judge overseeing the investigation insisted that Maldonado drowned while crossing the river.