By Sebastián Lacunza
Editor-in-Chief
With Milagro Sala’s case,
Macri faced an early wake-up call to tackle an issue he had disregarded.
A year later, the Pink House moves pieces to calm the international
waters.
The international calls for the release of Jujuy social leader
Milagro Sala have brought Mauricio Macri face-to-face with one of his
weak points at an early stage in his presidency — namely, his disdain
for the world of human rights, an element underpinning Argentine
democracy. In almost two decades of political career, Macri never
bothered to build up any links with human rights representatives in
Argentina but the arrest of Sala in Jujuy, a province where
pre-democratic logic reigns, has forced the national government to
deploy an emergency strategy to confront the international demands.
The Argentine president took it upon himself 13 months ago to start pointing fingers at his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro for the conviction of opposition politician Leopoldo López, only to find himself soon in the dock facing the criticisms of the international organisms who also called for the release of López but equally of Sala.
Before reaching the Pink House, Macri had shown attitudes between indifference and annoyance towards the struggle to deliver Memory, Truth and Justice for the victims of the dictatorship.
“The human rights scam,” he went so far as to say on one of those occasions when his spin doctors did not warn him of the risks. The Argentine centre-right leader only took note of the international dimensions of the Grandmothers and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo when foreign visitors to Buenos Aires like presidents François Hollande or Barack Obama showed him the way. It then became necessary to concede a meeting with the human rights organisations and set up a photo op in front of the River Plate. “Missing” and “never again” were universal words which, until a year ago, were far removed from Macri’s vocabulary.
Before Sala put him in a spot, Macri found himself being ticked off by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH in its Spanish acronym) over the changes which he decreed to the broadcasting law favouring media concentration. The circle of Macri’s first human rights year is closing with question-marks over his bid to authorise the express expulsions of foreigners and the report of the Coordinadora contra la Represión Policial e Institucional police watchdog, which quantified the security forces as killing one person every 25 hours, a record under Argentine democracy.
Last October, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions demanded the “immediate” release of Sala. Weeks later the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, the Uruguayan socialist Luis Almagro, denounced the “political” nature of the trials against the Túpac Amaru leader (which include charges of sedition, incitement to crime, defrauding the state and even murder) as well as certain media operations backing the Macri government. Private international voices with more weight in this sphere like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Centre for Justice and International Law have been equally uncompromising with the government.
Given this scenario, Pink House spokesmen leaked a few months ago that Macri himself had asked his ally Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales to free Sala. If this is true, those movements behind the scenes clash outright with Macri’s public statements of unrestricted support for Morales, a veteran Radical leader who won big in the 2015 elections, breaking a streak of over three decades of Peronist rule in the province, one of the keys to the groundswell of votes permitting Let’s Change to reach the Pink House.
Macri’s dilemma is whether to pay the cost of international discredit and deepen the gap with the human rights entities or annoy Morales, whose considerable popularity in Jujuy is in large measure due to his tough line against the founder of the Túpac Amaru organisation.
Macri and his officials are formally committed to a narrative impossible to sustain — the independence of powers which supposedly prevents the Pink House from interfering in the decisions of Jujuy courthouse. Fine words which clash with the fact that four of the nine judges in Jujuy’s High Court were previously Radical provincial deputies, quite apart from the family links of the magistrates and the political establishment of the province, without even going into the witnesses against Sala presented by Morales who have since seen themselves enriched by state contracts.
In any case the international challenge is there. While Morales and the most conservative wing of the national government accuse the international organisms of being infiltrated by Kirchnerism, another sector, headed by the Foreign Ministry, is trying out a more civilised strategy to avoid more ringing condemnations by, for example, the CIDH.
Since nobody in his inner circle is suitable in this area, Macri has appealed to two men with long experience in the human rights field — Buenos Aires province Human Rights Secretary Santiago Cantón and the Foreign Ministry’s special representative for human rights, Leandro Despouy. Cantón is an expert with over 10 years experience on the CIDH who in 2013 joined Sergio Massa and then in 2015, to the surprise of some, Buenos Aires province Governor María Eugenia Vidal, Despouy is a former national auditor-general who still maintains warm ties with groupings like the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, something unusual within his UCR party, with which he has had severely tense moments in the past.
Cantón and Despouy face a delicate balancing-act because they find themselves under fire from the more extreme wing of the national government, especially from Gerardo Morales, who does not accept lukewarm stances. As it happens, Despouy joined Morales at a Jujuy rally in 2009 which was broken up by aggressive social activists. Testifying at the trial on this event, Despouy said that Milagro Sala did not participate and nor did he hear at the time any of the assailants invoking her name, despite which the Túpac leader was given a three-year suspended sentence.
Pink House rhetoric says that Jujuy’s courts are independent but that story was further challenged two weeks ago when Horacio Verbitsky published in Página 12 a series of emails which explained how a lawyer of Governor Morales acted as an intermediary between the chief justice of the provincial supreme court, the state attorney (a former Radical trustee) and Despouy himself with the aim of co-ordinating a strategy “to justify the arrest of Milagro Sala” to the CIDH. Despouy’s office admits that the lawyer’s email might have reached them but not that there was any interaction to fabricate a spurious strategy favouring Morales.
The CIDH has fixed up a tentative date to visit in May. In these months there will be some arm-wrestling to avoid the Commission ruling in favour of Sala. As for the UN working group’s demand, the national government affirms that “it is clearly not binding.” On the spot, the Commission members will be able to see that in Jujuy street protests are virtually prohibited because they are promptly crushed by
the provincial police, as a special Herald correspondent in the province reported a couple of months ago. They will also be able to check out if “Jujuy is human and right”, as the monolithic provincial press hammers away unceasingly. But in May the campaign posters will start appearing and the pragmatic wing of the government will doubtless reason that Macri cannot afford to abandon his Northern ally.
@sebalacunza
The Argentine president took it upon himself 13 months ago to start pointing fingers at his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro for the conviction of opposition politician Leopoldo López, only to find himself soon in the dock facing the criticisms of the international organisms who also called for the release of López but equally of Sala.
Before reaching the Pink House, Macri had shown attitudes between indifference and annoyance towards the struggle to deliver Memory, Truth and Justice for the victims of the dictatorship.
“The human rights scam,” he went so far as to say on one of those occasions when his spin doctors did not warn him of the risks. The Argentine centre-right leader only took note of the international dimensions of the Grandmothers and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo when foreign visitors to Buenos Aires like presidents François Hollande or Barack Obama showed him the way. It then became necessary to concede a meeting with the human rights organisations and set up a photo op in front of the River Plate. “Missing” and “never again” were universal words which, until a year ago, were far removed from Macri’s vocabulary.
Before Sala put him in a spot, Macri found himself being ticked off by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH in its Spanish acronym) over the changes which he decreed to the broadcasting law favouring media concentration. The circle of Macri’s first human rights year is closing with question-marks over his bid to authorise the express expulsions of foreigners and the report of the Coordinadora contra la Represión Policial e Institucional police watchdog, which quantified the security forces as killing one person every 25 hours, a record under Argentine democracy.
Last October, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions demanded the “immediate” release of Sala. Weeks later the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, the Uruguayan socialist Luis Almagro, denounced the “political” nature of the trials against the Túpac Amaru leader (which include charges of sedition, incitement to crime, defrauding the state and even murder) as well as certain media operations backing the Macri government. Private international voices with more weight in this sphere like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Centre for Justice and International Law have been equally uncompromising with the government.
Given this scenario, Pink House spokesmen leaked a few months ago that Macri himself had asked his ally Jujuy Governor Gerardo Morales to free Sala. If this is true, those movements behind the scenes clash outright with Macri’s public statements of unrestricted support for Morales, a veteran Radical leader who won big in the 2015 elections, breaking a streak of over three decades of Peronist rule in the province, one of the keys to the groundswell of votes permitting Let’s Change to reach the Pink House.
Macri’s dilemma is whether to pay the cost of international discredit and deepen the gap with the human rights entities or annoy Morales, whose considerable popularity in Jujuy is in large measure due to his tough line against the founder of the Túpac Amaru organisation.
Macri and his officials are formally committed to a narrative impossible to sustain — the independence of powers which supposedly prevents the Pink House from interfering in the decisions of Jujuy courthouse. Fine words which clash with the fact that four of the nine judges in Jujuy’s High Court were previously Radical provincial deputies, quite apart from the family links of the magistrates and the political establishment of the province, without even going into the witnesses against Sala presented by Morales who have since seen themselves enriched by state contracts.
In any case the international challenge is there. While Morales and the most conservative wing of the national government accuse the international organisms of being infiltrated by Kirchnerism, another sector, headed by the Foreign Ministry, is trying out a more civilised strategy to avoid more ringing condemnations by, for example, the CIDH.
Since nobody in his inner circle is suitable in this area, Macri has appealed to two men with long experience in the human rights field — Buenos Aires province Human Rights Secretary Santiago Cantón and the Foreign Ministry’s special representative for human rights, Leandro Despouy. Cantón is an expert with over 10 years experience on the CIDH who in 2013 joined Sergio Massa and then in 2015, to the surprise of some, Buenos Aires province Governor María Eugenia Vidal, Despouy is a former national auditor-general who still maintains warm ties with groupings like the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, something unusual within his UCR party, with which he has had severely tense moments in the past.
Cantón and Despouy face a delicate balancing-act because they find themselves under fire from the more extreme wing of the national government, especially from Gerardo Morales, who does not accept lukewarm stances. As it happens, Despouy joined Morales at a Jujuy rally in 2009 which was broken up by aggressive social activists. Testifying at the trial on this event, Despouy said that Milagro Sala did not participate and nor did he hear at the time any of the assailants invoking her name, despite which the Túpac leader was given a three-year suspended sentence.
Pink House rhetoric says that Jujuy’s courts are independent but that story was further challenged two weeks ago when Horacio Verbitsky published in Página 12 a series of emails which explained how a lawyer of Governor Morales acted as an intermediary between the chief justice of the provincial supreme court, the state attorney (a former Radical trustee) and Despouy himself with the aim of co-ordinating a strategy “to justify the arrest of Milagro Sala” to the CIDH. Despouy’s office admits that the lawyer’s email might have reached them but not that there was any interaction to fabricate a spurious strategy favouring Morales.
The CIDH has fixed up a tentative date to visit in May. In these months there will be some arm-wrestling to avoid the Commission ruling in favour of Sala. As for the UN working group’s demand, the national government affirms that “it is clearly not binding.” On the spot, the Commission members will be able to see that in Jujuy street protests are virtually prohibited because they are promptly crushed by
the provincial police, as a special Herald correspondent in the province reported a couple of months ago. They will also be able to check out if “Jujuy is human and right”, as the monolithic provincial press hammers away unceasingly. But in May the campaign posters will start appearing and the pragmatic wing of the government will doubtless reason that Macri cannot afford to abandon his Northern ally.
@sebalacunza