By Carlos Aznárez on February 3, 2024 from Buenos Aires
photo: Diego Martinez
What happened on Friday evening in Congress was to be expected with the new law of infamy being passed in Congress 144-109. Meanwhile Milei’s “sergeant” Patricia Bullrich is very upset that the people of Buenos Aires do not comply with her authoritarian ordinances. And when she says: “I don’t want people in the street, nobody off the sidewalk”, that becomes an order for her subordinates in uniform. Entangled in her tremendous arrogance, the “sergeant” must think to herself that anyone who sets foot on the street is an “enemy to be killed”. It is not about “the good people” for whom Milei governs, but about those “dangerous subversives”.
That is why, on Friday, when the aggressive and armed police came upon the retirees who were peacefully chanting slogans on the sidewalk and attacked them with pepper spray, many who until that moment had reluctantly complied with the “anti-protest protocol”, took to the streets shouting: “not with the old men and women”, and “”get out” referring to those cowards who for a salary beat up whoever gets in front of them. The old men and women, those “insurgent retirees”, could be our mothers or grandparents, and there they were setting an example in front of many who should be mobilizing as well, but who continue to speculate or to weave in their offices of “digentes”.
Those retirees who receive a pittance, were attacked for protesting, and as they could, they rubbed their eyes or vomited from the effects of pepper gas, while from some office of her ministry, Patricia Bullrich was thinking that this is the correction to be applied, so that these “old fucks” learn that authority must be respected.
Paragraph apart is that gas that leaves you blind for hours and burns your skin generating sharp pains. It is the same one that Bullrich acquired for this same ministry that she headed during Macri’s time, when she made a “business trip” to her beloved “Israel”. There she invested in armaments of all kinds and even put on the uniform of the Zionist army to accompany her genocidal peers in training in the territories stolen from Palestine.
Imbued with the teachings she received in Tel Aviv, now the minister is dedicated to fight retirees, workers, students and also groups of neighbors outraged by the destructive policies of the Milei grouping. That is why, this Friday, when the people took to the streets, the sergeant ordered the “punishment operation”. It was the exact moment when police, gendarmes, Prefecture personnel and even port police began to advance violently, hundreds of uniformed and non-uniformed personnel that the minister likes to expose, began spectacularizing the repression. The motorcycles with the bloodthirsty members of the Federal Police began to ride everywhere, sometimes on the street and sometimes on the sidewalk, while the “rifleman” sitting on the back seat unloaded rubber bullets at the bodies of the youths, while the infantry guard was also savaging the photographers, cameramen and reporters, who perfectly identified were covering the events.
The minister does not want images of their savagery, and the henchmen fulfill her mandate to pulverize them. Zero tolerance to the press, as in the times of the genocidal General Videla.
Finally, arrests were made, first of journalists, then of anyone who looked like they had been at the rally, and finally, at random. Thus fell media members and young people who were only passing by when the minister imposed her own state of siege.
photo: Diego Martinez
Numerous detainees were the result of these “operations” typical of any authoritarian government. Some were taken to police stations and in the early hours of the morning they were taken out of the precinct to another facility far away from the center but before that they were taken for almost three hours, causing uncertainty among the relatives and comrades who had come to these police centers to make the “glove”. Three hours where they were literally disappeared (the same happened days before with three other girls detained hours before). These “walks” seek to intimidate and are similar to those that these same (in)security forces practiced in the 70’s, and which are known to have left a balance of 30 thousand victims.
The important thing is that in spite of all this repressive savagery, little by little a new resistance is being born, approached by the militancy, but also by the ordinary people, who can no longer pay the increases of all the basic necessities, or by the dismissed, or by the pensioners, or the families of the poor neighborhoods who are literally starving to death. All of them are taking to the streets and fighting. They organize themselves in assemblies, discuss and fight for the rights that this “task force” that assaulted the Casa Rosada (presidential hous), wants to take away from them. “It’s a matter of self-defense,” said a woman in her 80s Friday, in front of a giant police officer, while showing him a sign painted by herself which read: “I’m here, fighting, not for me, but for the future of my grandchildren”. That is what irritates the Milei and Bullrich. That in small gestures they begin to glimpse the night of their collapse, and that this will happen when they least imagine it, in spite of the tear gases, the bullets, the prisoners, and all the repression they can think of applying. They will not be able to defeat this people, and they know it.
Carlos Aznárez is a long time fighter for social justice and is the Editor of Resumen Latinoamericano – Buenos Aires
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano