Fiercely human angels
By Oscar Taffetani

The remake of the fall of the Berlin Wall which was carried out at the Brandenburg Gate last Monday had all the immorality the political show requires these days: an exultant Sarkozy, invited to talk among the first speakers, said that “the men and women who fought against the Wall had a dream for the whole of Europe that materialized in countries such as France or Germany”. “Its disappearance (that of the Wall) brought families back together”, said Russian President Medvedev very creatively. “Berliners changed the world with their courage”, was what the English Prime Minister demagogically uttered. And Merkel, oh, Merkel, she fulfilled the dream of each and every German kid: “It’s up to us to bring down every wall from the 21st Century like we did in this divided city.”

Two unquestionable protagonists in the real socialism debacle, Russian Mihail Gorbachov and Polish Lech Walesa, began with the domino piece show: they had to throw out simile parts of a simile wall for the televised world to really buy the fraud. And so the Berlin Wall fell, once again, twenty years later.

A few days before the remake, moved by public denouncing, Buenos Aires City Mayor Mauricio Macri decided to neutralize the UCEP (Public Space Control Unit, an anti-homeless gang he had created together with Minister of Environment and Public Space Juan Pablo Piccardo) and move the involved agents to the orbit of the Ministry of Social Development. Now the men in black will dress in gray and exercise another type of violence against the poor.

Past seeds of current horrors

The international organization Human Rights Watch has been insisting since 2004 that the international tractor manufacturer Caterpillar should not sell its bulldozers to the Israeli army because they use them to demolish the schools, hospitals and homes that belong to the Palestinian civilian population, in times of peace (because in times of war they bomb them from their planes). But Caterpillar has not yet come up with a decision (the company’s social responsibility, we all know, does not go so far).

Recent studies about very old history which took place in Ireland (1649-1653) reveal that the British occupation of the island, responsibility given by the Tory Parliament to bloodthirsty Oliver Cromwell, took the lives of 618 thousand Irish people. Nearly half of the entire population. Those who did not die in combat were randomly executed. The cultivable land was sterilized with salt (hundreds of thousands of Irish starved to death). The rest died in the hands of the bubonic plague or exile.

The autonomy of the Basque in times of the brief Republic of Spain lasted for nine months. To put an end to it, Francisco Franco sought the aid of the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists. Guernica was the first air bombing rehearsal on the civil population. Children, women, elderly, without distinction, all fell under the bombs. After the surrender of Santoña in 1937, the leader of Spain decreed that Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa were “traitorous provinces” and “they did not deserve to have privileges.” People from these provinces were not even allowed to use their mother tongue in schools (and there are people who still wonder where the violence in the Basque Country comes from).

The Americas? What can we say about the Americas that we have not written or repeated with sadness throughout all these years? Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, known as Tupac Amaru, had his tongue cut out and was later dismembered in front of his wife and children. Each one of his body parts was sent to the four cardinal points of the Empire for all Children of the Sun to learn the lesson. That was the Spanish sweetness in America.

Nestor Segovia: the intimidation of a worker

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo found not long ago their grandchild number 98. But there are nearly other 300 -- they say -- who still need to recover their identity. These are the consequences and heritage of our country’s last genocide. The Argentine society --despite its great advances which make it stand out in the whole of Latin America -- has not been able yet to recover from these wounds. Nor has it been able to find Justice. Or learn from that great teacher History is.

These are the conditions in which the brutal, devious, inhuman violence on a Buenos Aires Metro workers’ delegate finds it. Around the same time the union Segovia works for (curiously not recognized by the State) was launching a strike and other union measures protesting for his rights, a Buenos Aires police gang, with the consent of the political power and the support of a judge, charged against Segovia’s humble house in Moreno.

The attackers violently forced Noemi Segovia’s ex partner and mother of his children out of the house -- the place in which she also had run a children’s soup kitchen for more than a decade as part of the Teresa Vive Movement; they hurt Segovia’s little children --who tried to resist the attack -- and, eventually tore down, with drop hammers, the precarious house, sending the metro delegate a gangster message difficult to ignore: “whatever you do, it will cost the health or life of your loved ones.”

The response to this aggression from the metro workers, some left wing associations and the Argentine Workers Central (CTA) was clever: a press conference, a claim for constitutional rights and a metro strike last November 10 to denounce the intimidation and protest against it.

At the beginning of the year there was a rehearsal for the blockade and militarization of a town in Corcovado, Province of Chubut. Months later, there was a rehearsal for militarization in the Kraft-Terrabusi factory. Now they are trying the effects of demolishing a house before the helpless eyes of its inhabitants.

We said in a previous article that it would be suicidal to think that the Kraft workers’ struggle is not our struggle. Now we say, without fearing to be wrong, that it would be suicidal to think that the metro workers’ struggle and that of their delegate Segovia is not our struggle.

They are coming for more. And there is no cry, sigh or right that can move them. Let’s show them that on this side of the frontier -- this is how Blas de Otero would have written it -- there are fiercely human angels.

   Print Version     |        Back    |     Send To Friend