Morales accuses government of financing ‘violent sectors’ in Jujuy

The opposition vice-presidential hopeful said the national administration is ‘organizing the chaos’

Jujuy governor Gerardo Morales at his campaign launch event. Source: Télam.

Jujuy governor Gerardo Morales accused the national government of “organizing the chaos” in his province in an open letter published online on Thursday morning, referring to a series of recent protests over teachers’ salaries and the reform of the province’s constitution. 

Provincial police responded to the demonstrations with a violent crackdown that was repudiated by human rights organizations.

The governor is a vice presidential primary candidate, sharing a ticket with Buenos Aires City Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta for opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio (JxC).

“They seek to alter peace and order by trying to stigmatize the leaders of the opposition as the ones responsible for the ills suffered by Argentine men and women,” Morales wrote. He also accused Kirchnerism of using the “extreme left” as “cheap labor” to foment social discontent in the province.

According to Morales, the national administration finances these “organized violent sectors” which seek to “condition democracy” through state funds. He also accused the government of sending “lawyers, officials, and intelligence agents” to Indigenous communities with the goal of unsettling them, claiming the government had established a “dictatorship of minorities”.

After the letter was published, Human Rights Secretary Horacio Pietragalla Corti said that Morales is “radicalizing his position” and using violence to gain “mileage in his political campaign.” Morales and Larreta’s rival in the JxC primaries is Patricia Bullrich, who defines herself as a hardliner.

“[Bullrich and Morales] are fighting over who is more of an authoritarian. Morales is not going to recognize anything, he can be cataloged as one of the most fascist governors of this country,” Pietragalla said in an interview with AM750 radio.

“They came to disturb the peace achieved because, in Jujuy, the [provincial government] does not recognize the roadblocks as a form of protest, but as a crime,” Morales wrote, referring to the new constitution. The reformed text has been heavily criticized as it limits the right to protest and contains language that Indigenous groups say will hinder them in land rights disputes.

Morales said that the center-left sector of Peronism led by Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is behind the demonstrations. “In Argentina, chaos is being organized. Guess by whom?” he asked. “You are not mistaken: by Kirchnerism.”

The Human Rights Secretariat announced a week after the crackdowns that it would file a lawsuit against the provincial government over the security forces’ response to the protests. Last Thursday, it filed a preventive habeas corpus specifically on behalf of Jujuy lawyers who were detained after defending arrested protesters. Alberto Nallar, a criminal defense attorney, was arrested by the provincial government on charges of “treason.”

“Lawyers in Jujuy are terrified,” Mariana Katz, a lawyer at the Peace and Justice Service (SERPAJ, its Spanish acronym), an NGO led by Nobel-prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, told the Herald last week.

After Morales published the letter, Patricia Bullrich tweeted that “order is the starting point.” “We do not negotiate with the violent ones,” she wrote in a tweet with her campaign video.

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