Discovery of dead youth’s body raises specter of forced disappearances in Argentina
By
Andrea Lobo
23 October 2017
The recovery of a body last Tuesday in the Chubut river in the southern Argentine province of the same name has sparked mass protests across the country and demonstrations internationally.
Eleven weeks after a crackdown by the Gendarmerie against the indigenous Mapuche community led to the disappearance of a young demonstrator, search operations in the area located remains carrying his ID. As the forensic tests began Friday morning, the country waits anxiously to know whether this is the 28-year-old Santiago Maldonado.
The case has created a sense of deep distrust towards the conservative government of President Mauricio Macri and all the official institutions of the capitalist state involved. Not only was the corpse found 1,000 feet upstream from where he was last seen, but three previous searches in the same area had not found the body, which could suggest it was dumped at a later date.
Amid growing social opposition and anticipation that social cuts, price hikes or tarifazos, and attacks against jobs and wages will escalate after Sunday’s mid-term elections, this case has raised the prospect of a return to the methods of brutal state repression when tens of thousands of workers and youth were disappeared during the US-backed military juntas of the 1970s and 1980s across Latin America.
At the same time, the official opposition against Macri, led by the Peronist parties and the pseudo-left Left and Workers’ Front (FIT) have responded by turning the image of Maldonado into an electoral ad and a cover for a shift to the right of the entire political establishment, a maneuver made more explicit by the electoral context.
In Cushamen, located in the…