The second massacre of the Vidal era | Opinion

Cristian Ritondo, Buenos Aires' Minister of Security, said: "It is better not to waste one's time". Now you have to change the sentence. It would be this: "Better dead than crowded." Carlos Ariel Corvera is dead, the number nine victim of the fire not extinguished in time on Thursday, November 15 at the third police station of Esteban Echeverría.

The police station depends on the police of Buenos Aires, which depends on the minister Ritondo. Minister Ritondo reports to Governor Maria Eugenia Vidal.

Vidal did what he always does in these cases in terms of prevention: nothing.

And he said what he always says in these cases: nothing.

Before other deaths, deputy director Sandra Calamano and badistant Rubén Rodríguez, of Moreno School 49, Vidal wrote a tweet expressing his condolences to the relatives. He never called them on the phone and did not see them. Not even discreetly, to avoid photos. And apart from the 49, who had two deaths as concentrated attention, the vast majority of Moreno's schools still remain without arrangement, with walls electrified by the loss of water falling from the ceiling, blind wells that overflow and the lack of artifacts of elementals like a circuit breaker or a javelin. Those who organized in Moreno under the leadership of Suteba, the public sector teachers' union, who participated in mobilizations and camps of social movements, political parties and businessmen of the region , concluded that it was not necessary to delay school arrangements. It's just a money problem. This is not the case. Organizing the actual working reserves in the district is a question of priorities and sensitivity. Cooperatives, for example. Or, small businesses that could solve their problems of inactivity while schools solve their inability to house children and teachers in decent conditions.

There are no social differences. The Buenos Aires government also treats people who populate schools and people who populate police stations in conditions of overcrowding.

After the death of Corvera, the governor remained indifferent although she already carried nine dead. Although the Provincial Memory Commission said in a statement that it was the "worst mbadacre in the history of Argentine police stations".

Mbadacre is a strong word, but not inaccurate. It is used for murders in which a group of victims is in helpless conditions.

Corvera was 25 years old. He was arrested for attempting to steal a lawn mower. He arrived at the third police station from another police station. He suffered fire and the toxicity of the burnt moss. He was moved. But he died while he was hospitalized at Ezeiza Hospital. Paradoxically, the Lomas de Zamora Criminal Court 10 released him last week. In other words: if I had released it before, Corvera would still be alive today. Of course, it would have happened something if the cell in which he resided in the third police station of Esteban Echeverría would not have worked as such. And if the police officers in charge had reacted differently to the fire.

The Provincial Commission of Memory is a real encyclopedia on the action of outlaw police officers. Chaired by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Roberto Cipriano García as secretary, it is a public body that has been deposited in the declbadified intelligence archives of the province of Buenos Aires. At his headquarters in La Plata is over, the history of horror, with its heyday in the years of General Ramón Camps as the lord of life and death of the province. The camps, as after Commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz, officiated as chief of police when the governor was Iberian Saint John and that Greater Buenos Aires had become a vast hunting ground for the shop stewards, the leaders of the resistance armed guerrillas or guerrilla fighters and, in general, activists who are just over 20 years old and who have had different experiences since the early 1970s. Throughout its history, the province of Buenos Aires has been an organ of mbad espionage and selective repression. Nature has not changed with the dictatorship. The change of 1976 was its articulation with the systemic repression carried out by the army in the area of ​​the Body One with headquarters in Palermo and commanded by Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason.

As today, many police stations have become prisons, clandestine detention centers. The prosecutor Felix Crous, who usually compares the number of prisoners between these police stations and the secret prison maintained in Abu Ghraib by the United States, often wonders if there is a single origin, a linearity or rather a form of torment Naturalized Mbadacre The key is that the thread never finished being cut.

The Provincial Memory Commission has done a lot of work in the archives. Understanding them and making them accessible was a vital task for the reconstruction of Argentine history of the twentieth century, a story crossed by the province of Buenos Aires. And it was very important to gather useful documents during trials against humanity.

At the same time, since its establishment, the CPM has investigated conditions of detention in police stations and prisons and has prepared rigorous reports on methods of torture and overcrowding. Nobody can accuse him of bias. He did it under all governments. Even under the two terms of Daniel Scioli.

The Governor and her Minister of Security have these documents, which can, however, be viewed on the CPM website.

Page 125 of the latest annual report, published in 2018, is entitled "Critical aggravation of conditions of detention in police dependencies". "The overpopulation has been maintained since May 2016 at more than 100% and with an upward trend between May and December 2017, it has reached values ​​close to 200%". Another paragraph describes "the lack of basic firefighting collections (fire extinguishers, fire networks, intervention protocols) and the presence of specific factors that make them possible (precarious electrical installations, mattresses and combustible materials"). ). "

Only half of the police stations have fire extinguishers. Only 16% have pressure hoses and fire extinguishers. Only 6% have emergency exits.

The deaths in the third police station of Esteban Echeverría already exceed the previous mbadacre, that of Pergamino of March 2, 2017. Seven young people died while they were detained, in a fire in the first police station of this city. They had been locked in subhuman conditions as a special punishment. In response, arrested people burned pieces of foam mattresses to attract attention. The officers abandoned the victims. The fire has spread. When the firefighters were called by the Bonaerense and acted, it was already late. The seven in cell one were dead.

In March 2017, Maria Eugenia Vidal was already responsible. First mbadacre The nine dead of Esteban Echeverría are the second. The mbadacre is already a practice. Better stacked than loose: burning is easier.

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