Rosario & San Juan Province, Argentina: Political Prisoners - Seeing is Believing
Action
Through an attorney I met, I was invited to attend meetings of a newly formed, Rosario-based commission in support of political prisoners. Curious, I went a few meetings. When I learned that they were planning a luncheon where the only veggie option would be plain noodles without sauce, I heeded the call. This group needed not only my solidarity, but my vegetarian cooking skills. Needless to say, I volunteered to make a tomato sauce. I also helped put up flyers around town advertising the luncheon.
I remained involved with this group because they made me feel welcome and useful, though I didn’t feel totally aligned with their mission. I was sure that there were many activists in jail unjustly, but I wasn’t prepared to call them all political prisoners.
In June, shortly after the luncheon in support of political prisoners, we went to San Juan province to do an action against some mining companies. We pretended to be rich North Americans in favor of the mines and handed out leaflets that looked like fake money, pretending that they were bribes from the mining company. Our first night, we went to the small town of Barreal. We passed our leaflets to people walking down the street and went into a couple of shops to drop off stacks of our fake money. Our friend from California, David, decided to enter the headquarters of the Justicialista party, the party of the pro-mining governor of San Juan. There happened to be a meeting inside and, confused by David’s “Billionaires for Barrick” badge, they invited him in. Within a short period of time, the party members realized that David wasn’t on their side and they ejected him. We continued leafleting and then called it a night.
When we returned to town the next day, a police officer approached us. A party hack had filed a complaint against David for disorder. David spent a couple hours inside the local police precinct, while we waited outside. Because it was a small town of 8,000 where everyone knew each other, anyone who saw us waiting outside the police headquarters would know that we were probably facing some negative consequences for speaking out against the mining industry. While I was pondering the chilling effect on freedom of speech that the complaint was having, Hugo, one of our hosts in Barreal, continued distributing our fake money in front of the precinct. David left the station with a court date a week away.
Reflection
A lot of times terms get thrown around on which I only have a loose grasp of their meaning. “Political prisoner” is one of those terms. I tried asking the members of the Commission for Political Prisoners several times what they meant by “political prisoners” and they would tell stories of police coming into the homes of activists after peaceful demonstrations and arresting them. I couldn’t quite get myself to believe these stories when I first heard them. I always thought there was some detail being left out.
David’s detention by the police made a deep impression on me. While even David admits that entering the headquarters of the party that supported the mines was stupid, it was in no way a criminal act. People who have political power and opinions different than David’s are, at the least, trying to make it inconvenient for David to express himself and, at the most, preventing him entirely. This is exactly what the members of the Commission were trying to tell me happens on a regular basis in Argentina.
Question
What have you had to see, or experience first hand, to believe or understand?
Through an attorney I met, I was invited to attend meetings of a newly formed, Rosario-based commission in support of political prisoners. Curious, I went a few meetings. When I learned that they were planning a luncheon where the only veggie option would be plain noodles without sauce, I heeded the call. This group needed not only my solidarity, but my vegetarian cooking skills. Needless to say, I volunteered to make a tomato sauce. I also helped put up flyers around town advertising the luncheon.
I remained involved with this group because they made me feel welcome and useful, though I didn’t feel totally aligned with their mission. I was sure that there were many activists in jail unjustly, but I wasn’t prepared to call them all political prisoners.
In June, shortly after the luncheon in support of political prisoners, we went to San Juan province to do an action against some mining companies. We pretended to be rich North Americans in favor of the mines and handed out leaflets that looked like fake money, pretending that they were bribes from the mining company. Our first night, we went to the small town of Barreal. We passed our leaflets to people walking down the street and went into a couple of shops to drop off stacks of our fake money. Our friend from California, David, decided to enter the headquarters of the Justicialista party, the party of the pro-mining governor of San Juan. There happened to be a meeting inside and, confused by David’s “Billionaires for Barrick” badge, they invited him in. Within a short period of time, the party members realized that David wasn’t on their side and they ejected him. We continued leafleting and then called it a night.
When we returned to town the next day, a police officer approached us. A party hack had filed a complaint against David for disorder. David spent a couple hours inside the local police precinct, while we waited outside. Because it was a small town of 8,000 where everyone knew each other, anyone who saw us waiting outside the police headquarters would know that we were probably facing some negative consequences for speaking out against the mining industry. While I was pondering the chilling effect on freedom of speech that the complaint was having, Hugo, one of our hosts in Barreal, continued distributing our fake money in front of the precinct. David left the station with a court date a week away.
Reflection
A lot of times terms get thrown around on which I only have a loose grasp of their meaning. “Political prisoner” is one of those terms. I tried asking the members of the Commission for Political Prisoners several times what they meant by “political prisoners” and they would tell stories of police coming into the homes of activists after peaceful demonstrations and arresting them. I couldn’t quite get myself to believe these stories when I first heard them. I always thought there was some detail being left out.
David’s detention by the police made a deep impression on me. While even David admits that entering the headquarters of the party that supported the mines was stupid, it was in no way a criminal act. People who have political power and opinions different than David’s are, at the least, trying to make it inconvenient for David to express himself and, at the most, preventing him entirely. This is exactly what the members of the Commission were trying to tell me happens on a regular basis in Argentina.
Question
What have you had to see, or experience first hand, to believe or understand?
2 Comments:
At 5:16 PM, Anonymous said…
It really is strange to think of this happening. Like, you can see it in a movie or something, but it's not real until it happens to you.
Jen
At 6:42 PM, Christopher Hapka said…
The ambiguity and discomfort with the term "political prisoners" are reasonable reactions, but they are themselves products of the system that creates political prisoners.
If an authoritarian state jails someone for "dissent," then that's clearly a political prisoner. But if the system doing the jailing is totalitarian, or corrupt, or otherwise unaccountable, then it can just as easily say "conspiracy to assassinate the president" or "drunk and disorderly" or whatever else it pleases, just as American courts in the thirties took advantage of vague laws to book union organizers and other undesirables for "vagrancy" or "loitering."
In other words, there may be a system that jails people for political reasons, but it's hard to tell because there's a second layer of injustice at work; an unaccountable court system that makes it impossible to know why the people are really in jail in the first place.
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