Seven people were detained in a protest outside Congress after the Lower House confirmed President Javier Milei’s veto against increasing the budget of national universities, a spokesperson for the City Police confirmed to the Herald. One of the detainees was a 16-year-old teenager, who was released from the police station within an hour of being detained.
“It was an excessively large operation, with special forces and groups from the Federal Police, the Navy Police, Gendarmerie, Airport Police, and City Police,” said Roberto Cipriano, the lead of the Provincial Commission for Memory, a Buenos Aires province public human rights organization.
The police had fenced off Congress, and the protest was peaceful until the deputies voted to uphold the veto on university financing. When the news broke, most organizations and political parties vacated the area where the demonstrations against Milei were being held outside the legislative building.
A libertarian influencer, Fran Fijap, arrived on the scene to celebrate the vote and ask provocative questions to remaining demonstrators. Some demonstrators threw drinks in his direction and physically assaulted him, and he ran and hid in a pizzeria, escorted by plainclothes police officers.
Those officers then threw pepper spray at the demonstrators, Cipriano told the Herald outside Congress, just minutes after the detentions. “They were doing illegal intelligence work,” he added.
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At 5:30 p.m., a group of three City Police officers grabbed a 16-year-old boy and dragged him across Rivadavia Avenue. School supplies spilled from his backpack as he shouted his name and ID card number at the behest of a journalist recording the scene. City Police told the Herald that he was not taken to a police station and promptly released on the spot.
Another one of the detainees had been previously arrested in June near Congress, during a demonstration against the government’s sweeping Ley Bases reform package.
Five of the detainees of legal age were charged with resisting arrest, and a sixth got an additional property damage charge, a spokesperson for the City Police told to the Herald, claiming that a Security Ministry truck had been damaged. The source added that two police officers were injured.
A spokesperson for SAME, the City’s emergency care agency, said that they treated five patients. Fijap had mild head trauma and was transferred to the Ramos Mejia Hospital, a young woman had a panic attack on the streets, and a 74-year-old man fainted.
Cipriano said they counted 18 people who had been affected by the Police’s pepper spray or beatings, including three journalists and a member of the commission he presides over.
“Everything was normal until all the organizations left the area, and there were very few people left, then these characters appeared to provoke this situation,” he said.