Death of Santiago Maldonado
[1][2] In November, a commission of 55 forensic experts asserted that Maldonado died by asphyxia and hypothermia, and that there were no evidence of blows or injuries to his body.
[3][4] Santiago Andrés Maldonado (born 25 July 1989) was a craftsman and tattoo artist from the town of Veinticinco de Mayo, province of Buenos Aires.
A few months before his disappearance he had moved to El Bolsón, province of Río Negro, about 70 kilometers north of a Mapuche settlement named Cushamen.
The location was the Pu Lof de la Resistencia of Cushamen, a mapuche establishment built in territories seized from the Italian clothing company Benetton Group by Facundo Jones Huala.
Judge Guido Otranto instructed the Argentine National Gendarmerie to clear the blockade and disperse the protesters, who escaped.
[16] The Maldonado family and the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) accused the judge Otranto of not being an impartial jury.
The federal chamber of appeals of Comodoro Rivadavia recused him from the case, but clarified in the sentence that they found no reason to doubt his intellectual honesty and respect to the procedures.
He was recused instead because of an interview with the newspaper La Nación, where he made an extrajudicial commentary about the accuracy of the theories, before formally closing the case.
[3] On August 7, 2017, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances expressed its "concern about the physical and psychological integrity" of Maldonado and requested the Argentine state to adopt "a comprehensive search strategy", taking "all the urgent measures that are necessary to search for him and find him, taking into account the information provided by the members of the Pu Lof Mapuche community that were present at the moment of the repression".
[25] On October 6, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances published a document addressed to the Argentine national government in which the former expresses its concern about the lack of progress in the clarification of what happened to Santiago Maldonado.
It finally pointed out that there are officials of the Macri administration that continue to stigmatize the members of the Pu Lof by portraying them as a threat to national security, when the government should be instead offering protection to the Mapuche community.
Either Maldonado was waiting for the Gendarmerie to leave the area when the ground below him collapsed into the body of water or he presumably jumped into the river trying to rejoin with the others on the other side.
[33] Despite the recovery of the body, the results of the autopsy[3] and the lack of any evidence of foul play the Maldonado family insisted that the case was one of forced disappearance.
This theory also could not provide an explanation as to how the body could have been dump without being immediately detected by local mapuches who were living on the adjacent areas.
According to alleged witnesses, after the Lof protesters clashed with the Argentine National Gendarmerie, government agents were seen carrying somebody to a truck.
One of the files, sent by a member of the gendarmeria, stated that a sergeant had "Maldonado in a truck"[40] but further analysis revealed that the comment was made on August 16, several weeks after the protests, and was only a joke between members of the Gendarmerie [41] Under court order over 70 cell phones from Gendarmerie officers were analyse during the investigation, none of them had been used to discuss any actual forced disappearance operation or provided any proof of wrongdoing.
[42] An engineer from the National Technological University, claimed he could triangulate the location where the phone was answered but needed a court order.
The Maldonado family reported that he was a quiet and peaceful man, which would make it unlikely that he would take part in a violent protest in a road.
The mapuches Beatriz Garay Neri, Soraya Noemí Guitart and Nicolás Jones Huala reported that they talked with him on August 1, in the morning, but did not provide further details about his presence at the protest, the topics the discussed together and admitted they did not know his full name.
[51] According to Argentinian sociologist Marcos Novaro,[52] Kirchnerism and human rights organizations exploited the case to advance a political discourse against Macri.
Treating the case like a forced disappearance allowed to draw comparisons between his government and the Dirty War that took place during the National Reorganization Process, in the 1970s.
[54] This, however, undermined their legitimacy in the Argentine society, as an increasingly portion of the population loses interest in the events of the 1970s, and their public image got tied to that of Cristina Kirchner.
[57] In Buenos Aires, La Plata, Bariloche, Mar del Plata, Bahía Blanca, General Madariaga, Mendoza, Malargüe, El Bolsón, Rawson, Viedma, Gualeguaychú, Rosario and Neuquen thousands of people marched in demonstrations demanding that Maldonado appears alive and the resignation of Bullrich.
On August 21, during the 49th ordinary session of PARLASUR, in Montevideo, Argentine representatives condemned the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado.
[65] August 30 is the International Day of the Disappeared, and several teachers affiliated to the CTERA union mentioned the event during school classes.
[67] On September 1, 2017, a month after Santiago Maldonado's disappearance, thousands of people expressed themselves through rallies and demonstrations asking for his appearance alive.
[70][71] There were also protests in Spain, Brazil, France, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, Austria and the United States which were organized through social media.
[72][73] In London,[74] São Paulo and Madrid, groups of people expressed their solidarity with the demand for the appearance of Santiago Maldonado alive.
