ARGENTINA: ‘Feudal’ Regime Collapses in Northeastern Province

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 1 2004 (IPS) - The crisis unleashed by the murders of two young women a little over a year ago in the northeastern Argentine province of Santiago del Estero led to intervention Thursday by the federal government, which will directly rule the province for the next six months.

The government of President Néstor Kirchner is attempting to dismantle the local power structure in the impoverished province, which has been ruled for 50 years by a family accused of corruption, brutal persecution of opponents, and human rights violations.

The Kirchner administration designated Justice Minister Pablo Lanusse to govern the province, immediately after Congress voted in the early hours of Thursday morning for the central government to take over the executive, legislative and judicial branches in the province for six months, extendable by another six months.

Lanusse is not a member of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, which rules both the country and the provincial government of Santiago del Estero.

He has long been involved in investigations of cases of state corruption.

Santiago del Estero Governor Mercedes Aragonés and her husband Carlos Juárez are now under house arrest in the province that they have controlled either directly or through proxies since 1948, when Juárez was elected governor for the first time.

The courts ordered their arrest on a number of charges.

Santiago del Estero is one of the poorest provinces in this South American country of 37 million. Fifty-eight percent of the provincial population of 720,000 live below the poverty line, and the illiteracy rate stands at 8.6 percent, three times the national rate.

Over half of the population of the province depends on jobs in the public administration or on government assistance, a phenomenon seen as forming the basis of the clientilism that enabled Juárez and his wife to dominate local politics for so many decades, including the seven years of Argentina’s bloody 1976-1983 dictatorship.

The feudal-style regime had already collapsed once in 1993 when in the midst of a profound economic crisis that led to delays in the payment of public administration salaries, furious protesters set fire to local government, legislative and justice system offices and homes of local officials accused of corruption, including the governor’s residence.

But after a two-year intervention by the central government of then-president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), Juárez was re-elected as governor.

Cases of similar all-powerful local family-based regimes can be seen in other provinces as well, most of them associated with the Peronists, like in the case of Santiago del Estero, and all of them backed by the successive dictatorships that this South American country experienced in the 20th century.

The cases include the Saadi family in the province of Catamarca, which was hit hard by a similar corruption and murder scandal in the 1990s, the Rodríguez Saá family in San Luis, where the local government is facing increasingly loud social demands and protests, the Romeros in Salta, the Sapags in Neuquén, the Romero Feris family in Corrientes, the Bravos in San Juan and the Menem and Yoma families in La Rioja.

For the past two years, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has received constant reports from poor farmers in the province of Santiago del Estero who complain of intimidation and even torture by paramilitary groups pressuring them to hand over the land that they have lived on for decades to large landowners.

But it was not until the February 2003 murders of two young women, Leyla Nazar and Patricia Villalba, that a key investigation was launched to determine whether relatives of local political leaders were involved in the killings and other acts of violence.

The investigation led to the imprisonment of former provincial intelligence chief Musa Azar. Finding himself on his own, Azar began to accuse the Juárez family in connection with a number of crimes.

As a result of the information arising from the investigation, Justice Ministry and Secretariat of Human Rights officials made a number of visits to the province.

In October 2003, they produced a report documenting more than 500 complaints of judicial delays, arbitrary and illegal acts, human rights violations, and unlawful coercion, even against children as young as nine years old.

”The only methods used by provincial police to combat crime are arbitrary detentions and the systematic use of torture, with the complicity of a judicial system that stands by and does not intervene,” the National Human Rights Secretary Eduardo Luis Duhalde and Minister Lanusse said in the report.

Their report triggered a flood of denunciations by judicial functionaries, lawmakers, journalists, peasant farmers, and church workers, who revealed the authoritarian practices and terror that reigned in Santiago del Estero.

Delegates of the Kirchner administration found a warehouse containing detailed files on around 40,000 political figures, judicial system employees, church workers and others who were spied on and persecuted by the police and the local intelligence service.

Among the loudest accusers of the Juárez family are the relatives of Bishop Gerardo Sueldo, who died in a car crash in 1998.

The bishop’s family believes he was murdered. Sueldo had received numerous threats for criticising the Juárez family’s authoritarian tactics and denouncing the local regime’s abuses in his homilies and even to Pope John Paul II.

The family of former governor César Iturre (1987-1991) has also provided information on the suspicious circumstances of the death of the former governor, who was a Juárez ally but switched over to the ranks of the opposition.

In 1996, Iturre was found dead in an apartment in Asunción, Paraguay, where he was living in ”self-exile” according to his son Carlos.

Carlos said an informant had revealed that members of the local Santiago del Estero police and intelligence service had travelled to Paraguay in 1996 on Aragonés’s orders, to kill his father.

The former governor’s alleged murderer, who is now in prison in connection with another case, has boasted of having evidence of expenses made in the Paraguayan capital during that mission, according to Carlos Iturre.

Reports of the ”disappearance” of four people on the eve of the 1976 coup d’etat, when Juárez was governor, have also emerged.

The former governor was to testify in relation to the disappearances in March, but his wife named him local economy minister in a move aimed at granting him immunity from prosecution. He will now have to appear in court, however.

Aragonés also faces several accusations. She is accused, for instance, of instigating an attack on the residence of local opposition lawmaker José Figueroa.

The delegate of the national social security office in Santiago del Estero, Juan Baracat, says she received a pension while holding various posts in the local government.

Aragonés described Baracat as a ”Bedouin SOB” (an allusion to the fact that he is of Arab descent), and on Tuesday he asked for protection from the national authorities for fear of an attempt on his life or against his family.