Pocho Lepratti
Claudio Hugo Lepratti (27 February 1966 – 19 December 2001), popularly known as Pocho Lepratti, was an Argentine political activist volunteer who worked in a poor neighbourhood in the city of Rosario (province of Santa Fe, Argentina), and who was shot and killed by the Santa Fe Provincial Police during the December 2001 riots, when he tried to stop police agents from firing at a children's school.
[1][2] Lepratti was born in Concepción del Uruguay, Entre Ríos, and studied Law between 1983 and 1985, while at the same time serving as a cooperator of the Salesians of Don Bosco.
Lepratti eventually asked to extend this practice to constant work among the poor, but his superiors told him that he needed to take vows of obedience and keep studying.
In the parish led by Father Edgardo Montaldo, he created and coordinated a number of child and youth groups, organizing camping excursions, workshops, etc.
He worked as a kitchen assistant in the associated facilities that provided food for the poor children in the villa, and taught philosophy and theology in the parochial school.
On 18 December, riots and looting of supermarkets and stores, initiated by activists who requested food, broke out in Rosario and Greater Buenos Aires.
President Fernando de la Rúa dictated a state of emergency, suspending constitutional guarantees, and violent repression ensued.Lepratti lived in the villa miseria in Ludueña but was doing daily volunteer work in a school located in Barrio Las Flores, a poor neighbourhood in southern Rosario.
On 19 December, the Santa Fe Provincial Police raided the area of the school to suffocate an evolving protest, with people picketing and blocking a nearby major avenue.
[12] In 2003, the municipality of Rosario opened a public primary healthcare center in Barrio Las Flores, with the name of Pocho Lepratti, besides the school where he was killed.
[15] It was shown in the Congreso de laS LenguaS (a counter-cultural meeting held in parallel with the Third International Congress of the Spanish Language), and in public theaters and culture centers in Rosario and Buenos Aires.
It received the Best Short Subject Film on Human Rights Award at the Third FEISAL Festival in Buenos Aires in June 2005, an accomplishment that earned it more international coverage.
A statement, read in part by Lepratti's sister Celeste, claimed that there was a defined operational scheme coordinated by the national government to repress protests with lethal force.
They laid down the blame for Santa Fe's murders on then-governor Carlos Reutemann, and criticized the workings of the Judicial Branch, which let many policemen and officials free and slowed down or paralyzed the investigations.
