The most beautiful mountains I have seen in Latin America are those of north-western Argentina. It is a landscape tinged with the voices of Atahualpa Yupanqui and Mercedes Sosa, with its rugged and monumental geography of the lyrics of their songs, where the real colours of the hills surpass the capacity of any photoshop for tourist guides. The colourful Andean earth is not an ornament for contemplative dreamers (although that too), but a sign of the enormous mineral wealth of a territory where there is still much poverty, especially among the people who were the first to inhabit these beautiful places. Iron, lead, silver, zinc, copper and gold are some of the treasures that, including the lithium in its salt flats, make these lands an extremely attractive prey for large-scale international mining, which distributes corruption, promises, climate disasters and misery on a global scale.
Jujuy province, the northernmost and most indigenous province in the country, is now at war. A war of the government of this province against the poor. Argentina is a federal state and the governors in their local politics have a high level of independence from the central power in Buenos Aires. The right-wing governor Gerardo Morales has been in power in Jujuy since December 2015. Since the beginning of his administration, still during the neoliberal government of Mauricio Macri, Morales already started to turn Jujuy into an extremely repressive and intolerant police fiefdom towards any organised popular expression.
In June of this year this government policy reached its peak, carrying out a constitutional reform of Jujuy that definitively restricted the legal possibilities of social protest, applied an extractivist logic of natural resources and threatened the rights of indigenous peoples with an article that states that “the law will regulate the administration, disposition and destination of fiscal lands susceptible of productive use, establishing for this purpose development regimes that promote territorial development and the socio-economic interest of the Province”. Eight per cent of Jujuy’s population is indigenous, more than three times the national average; there are at least nine peoples living in some 300 communities, several of which occupy the territories legally designated as “fiscal”.
In addition, the new Constitution removes from the previous one a part that ensured that the exercise of the right to private property “may not be carried out in opposition to the social function or to the detriment of human health, security, freedom or dignity”, and also Article 50, which guaranteed that “the State is responsible for recognising both the legal status of the communities within the provincial territory and the communal possession and ownership of the lands they traditionally occupy”. With good reason, the indigenous organisations saw these new laws as a trap that enabled the privatisation of their communities’ lands, with the aim of handing them over to private owners and corporations to exploit their resources, as is the case in much of the continent.
The indigenous people were joined by teachers, professors, health workers and other rural and urban workers. The response from the Jujuy government was brutal, with dozens injured and hundreds arrested of non-violent and initially quite conciliatory protesters. This is how Carolina Moisés, national deputy for Frente de Todos, describes it: “The President of the Nation himself called on Governor Gerardo Morales to reflect and to open a space for institutional dialogue to overcome the crisis. In response, the governor has stepped up his repressive actions, which in the last week went so far as to order the State Prosecutor to aggravate the criminal cases against demonstrators, to levy fines of millions of dollars and even to seize the property of the already impoverished native communities. The provincial police chief himself went beyond all limits by announcing that he will send people to jail without the intervention of a judge. More fear is being spread about the reborn social panic after the hunt for people in unmarked vehicles, the raids on private homes without warrants, the illegal arrests of detainees, the shooting of demonstrators in the eyes. This is the Jujuy of the 21st century, a throwback to the dark and sinister 1976”. The year 1976 was the year of the military coup that established one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the history of the continent, which cost the Argentinean people at least 30,000 disappeared detainees and the indelible horror stories of their collective memory.
In the provincial capital, San Salvador de Jujuy, lives a person whose name is already a symbol of dignity and resistance to the abuses of power. Although very little is said about her in the international media, so sensitive to human rights issues in other parts of the world, in Argentina she is known to everyone. The political, social and indigenous leader and Mercosur parliamentarian Milagro Sala was arrested on 16 January 2016 and since then has not had a single day of freedom, only exchanging prison for house arrest.
Argentina’s historically powerful right-wing press juggled to accuse Milagro of being corrupt and a murderer, which is what its owners specialise in. Several international organisations along with several leaders of the Argentinean government many times pleaded for her innocence, demanding her immediate release, but the Jujuy regime of Morales continues to put together one set-up after another, all to keep her imprisoned. A few days ago she, confined in her house with her husband and partner, the seriously ill Argentinean humanist Raúl Noro, lived through another police raid with new accusations of “leading” all the protests. The brutal police operation, in its degree of violence, had all the characteristics of the repression of the times of the dictatorship before torturing, murdering and “disappearing” its victims.
Governor Gerardo Morales is not wrong. He knows who his main enemy really is. It is she, an indigenous woman, a girl who grew up on the streets, who as a young woman stole, trafficked and, like many poor people, spent several years in prison, where she formed a political consciousness of the world and her country. On her release, she dedicated herself to the struggle, organising the most marginalised, dispossessed and discarded by the system. Apart from having children of her own, she adopted twelve street children. In the 1990s, she participated in the founding of the Tupac Amaru Neighbourhood Organisation, one of the most combative and best coordinated forces in the country, especially in the northwest.
Unlike many parties or organisations that claim to be left-wing, Tupac Amaru has achieved real roots in the most marginalised areas of the country and was not afraid to work with the neediest and despised by all. It dedicated itself to obtaining and distributing products, medicines and basic necessities, providing housing solutions, creating cultural centres, defending citizens’ rights to health, education and carrying out preventive medical campaigns. Helping people to solve their most urgent problems, the Neighbourhood Organisation Tupac Amaru never stopped being a popular school of political participation, creating instruments and generating experiences of autonomous organisation of workers for a real struggle for their rights, seeing education and culture as a total priority. The images of Tupac Amaru, Ernesto Che Guevara and Evita Perón in the organisation’s symbology reflect the syncretism of Argentina from below and of course it presents itself as a threat to the power of the usual ones.
The hegemonic media that continue to format the world according to the criteria of their owners will never put “We are all Milagro Sala” in their headlines, nor will they show the scandalous figures of the private business of Gerardo Morales’ partners with the lithium from Jujuy. But this struggle is not just Milagro Sala’s and Raúl Noro’s, and it is not just Jujuy’s or Argentina’s or Latin America’s: it will continue on a global scale, on the same scale of lies, harassment and dispossession.
We are sure that on this path towards a more just and humane future for all, many Milagros and many miracles await us.