Monday, December 24, 2012

Looting and death in Argentina

The economic crisis is hitting hard again in the South American country and that has resulted in generalized looting these last days, maybe triggered by the Christian holidays' typical consumerism. 

The riots began at Bariloche, remote Andean town of Mapuche substrate, where the authorities rejected on the 20th to mediate between the angry people and the supermarkets and essentially told them to start looting. Therefore some 150 people attacked several shops of large supermarket chains. The subsequent clashes with police resulted in a 5-years-old girl and a pregnant woman injured and 60 people arrested.


Rosario

The incident however caused many replicas through the many impoverished urban areas of the country, with lootings reported on the 21st in Rosario (where many people had lost all in the recent floods), and spontaneous squads of some 100-150 people each assaulted some 35 small supermarkets. Police intervened shooting rubber and live bullets, killing two and injuring several, two of then seriously. Also 120 people were arrested and two girls have been reported missing.

The mortal victims are Silvia Barnechea, 36, who suffered an mortal injury while breaking a commercial window apparently, and Luciano Carrizo, 22 who was shot dead by police according to all witness accounts. 

Later on the looting began again.

Witnesses also reported how the ill-paid and corrupt police force collected the goods that looters lost in their flight.


Buenos Aires urban area

The incidents also reached the metropolis of Buenos Aires, which concentrates 1/4 of the inhabitants of the country. The number of arrested people reached almost the 500 hundred only in the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, with another near-hundredth arrested in Zárate-Campana (the industrial suburbs up the estuary). Without more data these figures alone give idea of the dimensions of the looting maybe. 

In San Fernando there were rumors of manipulation and deceit about supermarkets giving away food and accusations of gratuitous violence of the police against the people who believed that. 

In La Plata some 800 people looted two Chinese shops and a Spanish supermarket barely avoided following suit.


Government and dissident unions exchange accusations

The government blamed dissident sectors of the unions CGT (Moyano or trucker faction) and CTA (Micheli or dockworker and farmhand faction). In turn these replied that it was organized by the government in order to present themselves as victim and get a pretext to arrest these controversial union leaders. They said: if Moyano is arrested, we stop the country.

Source: La Haine[es].

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