Rally! Hands Off Argentine Workers Party & Piqueteros Movement Drop the Charges!

As part of an international day of action to defend the Workers Party in Argentina and the Piqueteros movement rallies will be held in the US and around the world to demand that the false criminal charges against the PO and Piqueteros leaders be dropped

Rally on Monday September 23 at 5PM At Oakland Federal Building
1301 Clay St.
Oakland


Global Day Of Action!
Hands Off Argentine Workers Party & Piqueteros Movement
Drop The Charges Against The PO NOW!
Victory To Argentina Working Class

The US supported Javier Milei Argentina government is trying to crush all opposition to its policies of privatization, union busting, and massive austerity and starvation. As part of this agenda, they are seeking to jail the leadership of the Workers Party PO in Argentina and leaders of the Piqueteros unemployed movement.

The Workers Party and the Piqueteros were the first organizations to publicly protest the Milei government when the government tried to ban all protests with emergency regulations. Milei and the fascists who are in his government want the working class to pay for the crisis of capitalism and have raided their offices and filed false corruption charges against their leaders and supporters and leaders of the Piqueteros movement.

The government has laid off tens of thousands of public workers, teachers, and are destroying the public services by contracting them out to private looters. It is privatization on steroids and these policies are on the agenda here as well.

The rise of fascism in Argentina, in Europe, and around the world is connected to the rise of fascism in the US.

The growing repression directed against students and workers who are protesting on campuses against the US supported genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is part and parcel of what working people face. The US and the AFL-CIO leadership, the the CIA funded AIFLD also organized and supported a military coup in Argentina in 1976 that led to the kidnapping and deaths of thousands of workers and activists. They have blood on their hands and they are now working in Argentina to set in the same agenda including building a US military base in the country.

Join this global united front campaign to defend the PO and Piqueteros movement and call out the US and Argentinian government which are working together to carry out the policies of capitalism and imperialism.

Sponsored by: United Front Committee for A Labor Party, Speak Out Now

To endorse & for more information, contact: UFCLP info [at] ufclp.org


Down the persecution of the piquetero movement and the Polo Obrero
https://prensaobrera.com/english/down-the-persecution-of-the-piquetero-movement-and-the-polo-obrero
To Chamber 1 of the Federal Court of Appeal


We refute the accusations against Polo Obrero and the piquetero movement

Polo Obrero
Seguir


Movilización piquetera
WE PRESENT THE EVIDENCE THAT PROVES POLITICAL PERSECUTION

Down with the cases that criminalize social protest

The justice system, the government and the pro-government media have made the criminalization process against piquetero movement in general and particularly against Polo Obrero and Eduardo Belliboni a central part of the country’s political agenda. This dossier is a plea against this process. In the first place, it shows their objective of pushing for the liquidation of the independent organization of the most exploited neighborhoods in the country, in order to discipline Argentinian working class. Secondly, because it is a process that could only go forward by trampling on the right to defense through of all kinds of arbitrariness. Thirdly, because the arguments of the Judge and the Prosecutor are based on lies and obvious falsehoods.

It is a process organized from the top of political power, which turn all the resources of the intelligence services, an assembly of pseudo journalists in the pay of the government and a judiciary into a battering ram against the organizations that have been at the forefront of the fight against hunger in the last two decades.

But all lies sooner or later fall under their own weight. In this case, the struggle for the dismissal of the cases against all the comrades goes hand in hand with the struggle to confront a government that is aggravating hunger, misery and the subjugation of the country to the interests of a clique of financial capital and imperialism, against national majorities.

THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE OF DISMANTLING PIQUETERO MOVEMENT

Milei’s objective of dismantling the piquetero movement is explicit. Since December 20th, 2023, when the independent piquetero movement, together with the left parties and combative unions and activists, took the streets to confront the government, Milei and Bullrich developed a systematic initiative to break this movement. This policy was the continuity of their electoral campaign, attacking the right to social protest. An attack which manifests today in Roberto de la Cruz Gomez still being in jail for participating in the demonstration against the voting of the reactionary Foundations Law on June 12th.

The objectives of political attack on the piquetero movement are obvious. In only 6 months Milei’s government has carried out the following measures against the unemployed:

1 – The interruption of food distribution to soup kitchens, which Minister Petovello is carrying out disregarding court rulings.

2 – The freezing of Potenciar Trabajo program payments (78,000 Argentine pesos), which ceased to be automatically updated with the variation of the minimum wage, generating a loss of purchasing power of 55% of the programs.

3 – The massive cancellation of payments to unemployed workers for traveling outside the country, which affected thousands of migrants and led to an appeal for legal protection filed in court by the Polo Obrero.

4 – The non-inclusion of the additional “nexus” and “essential” in the “Back to Work” program and in the “Acompañar” program, generating the reduction of additional benefits that affected thousands of beneficiaries.

5 – The interruption of socio-productive and socio-community inclusion agreements that ended labor inclusion programs.

LET’S DEFEND ORGANIZATION OF THE NEIGHBORHOODS

As serious as these cuts already are, the objectives of the government go much further. It seeks to eliminate the independent organization that in the last 20 years played an essential role in leading the struggles of the workers and popular movement, attacking the only means working class has to place a limit to the offensives carried out against all its rights. This offensive seeks to alter the balance of forces by annulling the capacity of resistance of the most exploited sector of the working class: the unemployed.

CONTROL OF NEIGHBORHOODS BY DRUG DEALERS

The first beneficiary of this attack is drug trafficking. The objective of eliminating social and piquetero organizations from the map benefits the advance of drug trafficking in neighborhoods that have been organized for years by piquetero movement. Without any doubt, soup kitchens, social programs and popular organization are a wall against the advance of drug dealers in neighborhoods while repressive forces and Judges pact or turn a blind eye against drug mafias. 70% of Argentinian youth have been thrown into poverty and that can only lead to the reinforcing narco gangs’ cooptation. After the offensive against piquetero movement, the future of popular neighborhoods of the whole country will see itself, more and more, in the mirror of the greater Rosario area, dominated by drug cartels and their assassinations.

THE CASES AND THE CONTEXT OF PERSECUTION

The case against the Polo Obrero is a central part of this attempt to dismantle the piquetero movement. It begun with the promotion of an ad hoc channel set up by the State to encourage accusations against piquetero organizations: line 134. The promotion of this line was part of the Ministry of Security and the national government’s policy to prevent the mobilization announced for December 20, 2023 and to condition future mobilizations against political measures carried out by the government.

Bullrich’s Ministry of Security measures against the mobilization:

1 – The implementation of an unconstitutional protocol that seeks to prevent social protest.

2 – Repressive threats, prior to mobilization, in order to avoid people from protesting.

3 – The threat to terminate social programs against those beneficiaries who participate in protests. This threat was transmitted in a message from the national government through different media channels and put on loudspeakers in all train stations and also on the “Mi Argentina” app which manages official state documentation of each person.

4 – Subsequently, a clause was included in the regulation of the new “Back to Work” program to withdraw the plan from those who participate in protests which block transit.

The government moves forward with direct repression; arbitrary imprisonment of those who participated in the mobilization that took place when Foundations Law was voted in the Congress, also with judicial cases against participants in the mobilizations of December 20 and with restrictions and attacks on the right of workers to strike and organize. The criminal complaint filed by the National State through officials of the Ministry of Security is a further link of all these elements.

TRUMPED-UP CHARGES WITH THE FEDERAL POLICE LOOKING FOR PLAINTIFFS

Polo Obrero’s defense attorneys filed a motion for the nullity of the prosecution due to manifest irregularities and the violation of the principles of innocence, legality, due process, defense at trial, non-discrimination and equality before the law.

As a result of the complaint filed by the Ministry of Social Development, the courts proceeded to identify the complaints, which in principle were anonymous, reports from the government’s 134 phone line.

Out of a total of 13,000 complaints reported by Patricia Bullrich, (yellow portion on the graph), in the city of Buenos Aires only 7 testimonies were identified against different organizations. Only 3 of these were against the Polo Obrero

It must be stated that these complainants were incited to testify personally by sending Federal Police to their homes. The Prosecutor’s Office and the police forces carried out an intelligence work on the organizations, and pressured and searched out to collect testimonies.

Prosecution dismisses testimonies that do not fit its story (Pictures of cell phone messages).

Judge Casanello and Prosecutor Pollicita limited the investigation to the city of Buenos Aires and transferred the rest of the complaints to other courts, that explains the proliferation of cases against popular organizations, which shows a true “State policy” of criminalization.

INTELLIGENCE AND RAIDS

Based on the testimonies of a handful of complaints, the justice system and the Organized Crime Division of the Federal Police proceeded to tap more than 20 telephones. From these phone taps and the intelligence work carried out on soup kitchens, they identified 33 locations to move forward with raids.

Judge Casanello ordered 33 raids that were later extended to around 100 from different courts in different parts of the country, putting in evidence a long term persecution of all social and piquetero organizations around the country.

In the raid on the headquarters of Polo Obrero on Monteagudo Street, where much of the original “evidence” was found, the cameras were turned off, the witnesses did not enter on time and, in addition, being the headquarters of an association, no prior notice was given. This is the reason why the defense requested for legal nullity.

Subsequently, Judge Casanello proceeded to illegally raid the headquarters of the Partido Obrero (Worker’s Party), saying that he was looking for the headquarters of Editorial Rumbos publishing company, which had already been raided and whose owner had appeared in the case and was in good standing. Although Editorial Rumbos was not found there, the entire premises were searched, taking film and photographic records.

A complaint was filed before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for this fact, as it is an evident act of political persecution and violation of democratic freedoms in a context of increasing repression and attacks on public freedom, as described above.

A CASE THAT DENIES THE RIGHT TO A DEFENSE AT TRIAL

From the beginning, the case was processed in violation of all constitutional guarantees and fundamentally the right to defense:

1 – In the process, the defense was prevented from participating in the testimonial statements, even taking pertinent measures to preserve their identity, depriving attorneys from asking questions and participating in the process in accordance with the law.

2 – The Judge called for hearings without individualizing accusations against each of the accused, and refused to show the evidence supporting the accusation before the hearing, preventing the accused the right to defend themselves.

3 – At the same time, it denied the defense’s request to postpone the hearings in order to guarantee access to evidence.

4 – On the other hand, he denied the request to extend the interviews of Eduardo Belliboni and María Isolda Dotti, requested to show the evidence and explain the work carried out by Polo Obrero based on the agreements with the former Ministry of Social Development. The evidence that the Judge refused to receive, contemplates the completion of 43 construction, refurbishment and improvement works in soup kitchens; training courses, cell phone repair, music, art, sports, Integral Sexual Education, prevention of dengue and covid-19, among others; sanitation of several neighborhoods; productive projects; etc.

5 – After the interviews, the judge proceeded with prosecution of the comrades using the statements of “repentant” witnesses who testified under pressure from the prosecution to initiate criminal proceedings against them. Those testimonies were concealed from the defense until after the deadline for appeals against the indictment, clearly violating the right to defense and constituting a reason for nullity of the prosecutions.

Finally, the judge issued the prosecutions ignoring key evidence: the expertise reports on cell phones and on cameras of the headquarters of Polo Obrero.

The Judge even acknowledges that the Ministry of Social Development did not send him the report of the audits carried out to verify compliance with agreements. The Judge affirms that Polo Obrero did not comply with this work even though he recognizes that the Ministry, which is a plaintiff in the case, hides the evidence from him. However, he also advances in the prosecutions saying that Polo Obrero did not comply with the foreseen work requirements.

TWO NARRATIVES IN LINE WITH CRIMINALIZATION

Judge Casanello ordered the prosecution of the comrades of Polo Obrero, accusing them of “fraudulent administration”. And, in the case of María Isolda Dotti and Gianna Puppo, he added “coercive threats”. In order to reach these conclusions, the Judge affirms that Polo Obrero defunded the management units and that it did not organize the counterpart work for Potenciar Trabajo program. According to the Judge, instead of this program, only party political activities were required.

Against this framework, Prosecutor Pollicita appealed the indictment, arguing that the comrades should also be prosecuted for extortion. With the extortion charges, the Prosecutor intends to raise the sentences up to 20 years and criticizes the Judge for establishing crimes for which “it is possible to get off with probation”. This statement reveals that the central point of the Prosecutor is to establish a conviction and that criminal types adopted must be adapted to this political need.

Prosecutor Pollicita starts by saying that prison sentences must be applied and then adapts the focus of the case to this political objective (arriba fotos de informes jurídicos).

The Prosecutor also requests that Social Development Ministry Officials who signed the agreements with the Polo be summoned for questioning, based on the idea that there was some pact with the Polo Obrero. He ignores that all achievements of the independent piquetero movement were achieved through mobilization and struggle.

In both cases these are narratives that omit an enormous amount of evidence in the service of the needs of the Milei government and their policy of criminalizing protests.

Both of them invert reality, presenting popular mobilization as “a denaturalization of aid by the State”, when historically it was the mobilization for social demands that later translated into conquests of the unemployed workers.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE POLO OBRERO AGAINST THE CHARGES OF FRAUD

In order to defend his thesis of the Polo Obrero not carrying out the working hours required for payment of the Potenciar Trabajo program, the Judge affirms that work in soup kitchens was not part of the work covered by the program. This falsification of reality is aimed to denigrate the work in soup kitchens carried out by the Polo Obrero all over the country.

In the Mariano Ferreyra soup kitchen, rations were cooked daily for 600 diners.

In addition, the Judge did not bother to analyze the evidence of the work carried out by the Polo Obrero in accordance with the agreements signed with the Ministry of Social Development. Agreements that covered, during four years, 6,651 of the almost 65,000 beneficiaries of Potenciar Trabajo that were organized in Polo Obrero. That is to say, a minimum portion of the comrades.

With the funds provided by those agreements, the Polo Obrero carried out the following activities:

CONSTRUCTION OF 43 COMMUNITY CENTERS

In these community centers soup kitchens and centers of social activity, productive projects and organization operate in poor neighborhoods throughout the country.

MASSIVE TRAINING COURSES

Polo Obrero carried out massive training courses on Integral Sexual Education, on the rights of working women, and training courses for neighborhood leaders on community issues, such as access to water. At the end of 2020, in the middle of pandemic, certificates were awarded in a massive event in Parque Lezama for hundreds of attendees.

Water courses were a very important resource to organize demands for access to water in dozens of neighborhoods that do not have drinking water, such as in the Villas (slums) of the city of Buenos Aires, in Inflamable in Avellaneda or in Villa Celina in La Matanza, among others.

The ESI training courses were very important to open the debate for comrades hard hit by poverty and violence against women and that suffer a huge neglect by the State on this matter. Based on these debates, Polo Obrero consciously joined the green wave of the women’s movement, demanding safe and free legal abortion.

JOB TRAINING COURSES

Job training courses in different trades were organized throughout the country. Courses were organized in cell phone repair, computers, vegetable gardens in different parts of the country, and workshops to teach textile, sublimation, graphic and printing activities, among others.

HEALTH CAMPAIGNS

Dissemination centers were set up throughout the country to address vital issues neglected by the state. For example, a national campaign against dengue fever was carried out, with the publication of thousands of informative leaflets and house-to-house campaigns.

TEXTILE PRODUCTION WORKSHOPS

GRAPHIC PRODUCTION WORKSHOPS

SUBLIMATION AND PRINTING WORKSHOPS

CULTURAL AND SPORTS ACTIVITIES

COMMUNITY MEDIA: POLO OBRERO SUPPLEMENT

As part of the training of community media, more than 50 issues of the Polo Obrero supplement of Prensa Obrera were published, which represented the opportunity for hundreds of comrades to publish for the first-time denunciations of the conditions in their neighborhoods, campaigns on living conditions, demands and the situation of popular neighborhoods throughout the country.

WHO FINANCES WHOM?

The accusation of fraud is based on a first trick: far from social organizations defrauding the State, it is the effort of the piqueteros’ organizations that are carrying out the tasks that the State should attend to but doesn’t.

For example, a soup kitchen in the City of Buenos Aires costs 6 million pesos to open and equip. This effort falls almost entirely on popular organizations, because the State does not finance the rents, the pots, the carafes or the ovens. The food, in the case of the one provided by National State, arrives to places that are very far from the points where the soup kitchens are established and it is necessary to pay for them to be carried in trucks.

INPUTS PRICES AS OF AUGUST 2024

FIRE EXTINGUISHER 5 KG $ 111.000,00 (all prices in Argentine pesos)

REFRIGERATOR $ 591,476.00

INDUSTRIAL STOVE WITH 2 BURNERS $ 122.000,00

INDUSTRIAL SCALE 80KG $ 1.320.000,00

INDUSTRIAL KITCHEN HOOD $ 88.966,00

STAINLESS STEEL SHELVING $ 522.000,00

FURNACE $ 1,305,949.00

STAINLESS STEEL TABLE $ 166.840,00

FREZZER OF 402 LTS $ 847,099.00

ALUMINUM GASTRONOMIC PAN 100 LTS. x2 $ 687,213.00

GASTRONOMIC STRAINER $ 21,882.00

25 LITER CAPACITY BOWL x2 $ 121,270.00

GARRAFA x2 $ 120.000,00

KITCHEN SCALE 10KG $ 13.380,00

chopping boards x3 $ 28,563.00

SPOONS x3 $ 27.900,00

IRON FRYING PAN N*30 $ 17,750.00

SPICE RACKS $ 11.056,00

KITCHEN AXE $ 17,099.00

KITCHEN KNIVES SET $ 48.100,00

INITIAL EQUIPMENT COST $ 6,226,923.00

MONTHLY EXPENSES

RENT $ 250,000.00

WATER $ 20,000.00

LIGHT $ 29,194.00

ABL $ 4,784.00

GAS GARRAFE CHARGE (1X APPROX. DAY) x20 $ 200.000,00

MONTHLY CLEANING SUPPLIES

BLEACH x 5LTS x4 $ 12.664,00

DETERGENT 5LTS x4 $ 36.000,00

SPONGE x2 $ 1.274,00

SHOVEL AND BROOM KIT $ 11.122,00

FLOOR RUG x2 $ 2,774.00

BOX OF REMOVABLE GLOVES x2 $ 20.000,00

FIXED MONTHLY EXPENSE $ 587,812.00

All these costs, which stem from the non-delegable responsibility of the State to guarantee the right to food, are covered on a daily basis with the efforts of popular organizations. These organizations are now being criminalized for asking for voluntary contributions that allow this minimum subsistence.

The State has ignored the task of providing assistance to the most impoverished population. When the organizations came out to complain, it gave partial and insufficient answers and unloaded the responsibility of organizing the distribution of food to the organizations themselves. Now to those who put the effort to fulfill the task that legally and constitutionally corresponds to them.

WHAT IS EDITORIAL RUMBOS?

As the Judge was able to verify, none of the accused members of Polo Obrero became rich and all of them live humbly and make a living from their work. Even so, he maintains that Polo defrauded the State through apocryphal invoices. In order to prove this, he distorts reality: he affirms that Editorial Rumbos is a ghost company.

But Rumbos is a publishing house that published dozens of books, 62 editions of the magazine En defensa del Marxismo and 1620 issues of the newspaper Prensa Obrera. It is a company with real activity, not a political “fund”.

The accusation of diversion of funds to Rumbos is based on a captious interpretation of the invoicing. In fact, Rumbos invoiced the Civil Association and the Cooperative El Resplandor as is done in any current purchase, where first the goods are received and the payments are made and finally the invoice is made. The generic invoices that served to feed the media campaign were specified in the remittances.

The other lye is to say that Editorial Rumbos does not exist is that they did not find “the printing house”. But… A publishing house is not a printing house! A publishing house publishes publications that are then printed by different printers. In the case of Rumbos, most of the sales were for brochures for the courses mentioned above.

THE INVOICES WERE VALIDATED BY THE AFIP (TAX OFFICE)

The other accusation that supports the accusation is that of having used apocryphal invoices of the company Coxtex. But at the time of submitting such invoices, for the purchase of computers, they were valid, as stated in the request made to the AFIP. Then, the Ministry of Social Development approved the disbursement reporting and audited in person the activity of the first disbursement of the agreements of the Asociación Civil Polo Obrero and Cooperativa El Resplandor. The Ministry’s approval enabled the second disbursements to be released.

The judge ignores the machinery that is in front of his face. In the raid on the warehouse he was able to verify the existence of the Heidelberg printing press, however, he doubts its existence.

The Judge incorporates as part of the accusation the study of who cashed the checks. However, he omits that the program established the possibility of paying with bearer checks. These checks are frequently exchanged for cash or used to cancel previous debts and end up being cashed by third parties as part of a normal payment circuit.

EXTORTION OR MOBILIZATION FOR DEMANDS?

The other aspect of the attack on the Polo Obrero is the accusation of extortion, which is made at length by Prosecutor Pollicita. By saying that mobilizations against hunger are the result of a desire to extort money from those who mobilize, the judge and the prosecutor invert what was really happening, which is that a large number of unemployed people from different neighborhoods chose to mobilize with the Polo Obrero in order to obtain from the State a minimum assistance that it would never have given them if they had asked for it individually.

The reasoning of the judge and the prosecutor assumes that those who attended the mobilizations did so because if they did not, they would be dismissed from the plan. In fact, it is not true that organizations could cancel payments (the Ministry could!) and much less that Polo relied on cancellations or sanctions to mobilize: in fact, as the delegate’s manual and the practice of the organization show, mobilizations were the only method of extending and defending the conquests of those who really intended to cancel payments or cut off the supply of food, which was the Ministry.

The Judge and the Prosecutor consider that the organization “demanded” to mobilize in order to access a plan.

VS

The reality is that without mobilizing, THE STATE did not respond to the demand for inscribing people in social programs.

Judge and Prosecutor argue that the organizations were canceling payment of subsidies for not mobilizing

Vs

The reality is that the STATE was arbitrarily dismissing workers month after month. For this reason, the Polo Obrero and its technical team had to, month after month, carry out hundreds of claims so that comrades would continue to be paid.

Finally, the Judge and the Prosecutor argue that the organizations did not “let those who did not mobilize eat”.

Vs

The reality is that food assistance works with the efforts of the organizations. And that if they didn’t struggle for them, the state would indefinitely delay food deliveries at the cost of the food of hundreds of thousands of families.

This is what Minister Petovello is currently doing.

THE FAKE EVIDENCE OF THE EXTORTION

In order to prove that comrades of Polo Obrero were extorted to attend to mobilizations or to carry out any collaboration, fragmentary evidence and statements are used, taken out of context and even forged. For example:

What is quoted from Witness 1: “that he had to go to march”, because if he did not, “he could lose the program”. A phrase extracted from a context where he relates a political awareness talk about the need to march to maintain the program and the food, in the face of the clear threat of the governments in power to take them away. As indeed this government did when it took office, which immediately stopped providing food aid to soup kitchens.

What the judge and the prosecutor hide. The witness says: “I signed up in a lot of places, I signed up with a lot of political people, I gave them all my data, I never received anything and I said that the Polo Obrero is the only one that got me on a program” and about the talk, he says “They explained to us everything about the Polo Obrero, that we were going to fight for our benefits, to fight for our programs, to increase them and all those things. That if we didn’t go we could lose the program.” This should be analyzed precisely in the context in which the witness himself states that “we marched until we were included on the program”. In fact, the witness here is a witness to that reality in which only with mobilization did he obtain his inclusion in the program, which was clear from his statement.

What the Judge and the Prosecutor quote from Witness 2: “if you miss three marches, they will take you out, they told me”.

What he actually said: Question: If you were absent when you were called to the soup kitchen area or when you were called to bring goods up or down, if you did not go, was there any kind of sanction? no no, when I went I was absent because sometimes I felt bad or (…) it was not like that. Question: If you did not go to a march or mobilization, was there any sanction? no, no.

THE GOVERNMENT, NOT THE ORGANIZATIONS, DECIDES DISMISSALS FROM THE PROGRAMS.

After pressuring witnesses in interrogations where the defense did not participate and forcing “repentance” by threatening rank and file delegates with jail if they do not denounce their own comrades, the Judge and the Prosecutor, in order to sustain their accusation, distort the evidence and must ignore what the witnesses really said.

The same action was carried out by the judge and the Prosecutor with the spreadsheet that states: Dismissals of Potenciar Trabajo program for not marching. A spreadsheet that was part of the profuse media campaign against the Polo Obrero. Crossing the data of this spreadsheet with the beneficiaries of Potenciar Trabajo program at present, a totally different picture emerges: most of them, far from being dismissed, are still active, and many of them are still in the Polo Obrero:

The judge does the same with the notebooks that say “sanctions”. These “sanctions” consisted in giving back the days worked in the soup kitchen when someone was absent for work. As María Isolda Dotti explained in her deposition, the work regime in soup kitchens did not establish labor rights or any justification for absences. Against this orientation of precariousness, Polo Obrero had a regime to justified leaves and permissions, but that could not go against the need to cook the soup kitchen rations, because if they are not cooked, the City Government withdraws the assistance.

That is why the assemblies had voted for a system of recuperation of days in case of absenteeism. Far from being “hunger notebooks”, the notebooks show an organization that responds on the basis of a debate and collective action to defend the right to food in the face of a State that ignores it.

THE REALITY OF THE “POTENCIAR TRABAJO” PROGRAM CONTRADICTS THE JUDGE AND THE PROSECUTOR

In spite of the Judge’s and the Prosecutor’s assertions, piquetero organizations could not dismiss anyone from the “Potenciar Trabajo” program. What is more, the beneficiaries were free to leave. If they did not want to continue carry out work in one management unit, they had the right to go to another. What the Management Units (the organizations) had to do was to report absentees. But upon reporting absenteeism, the comrade was paid 50% and had the opportunity to be reinstated, to make the corresponding claims to the Ministry or to change Management Units. The final decision on the leave of absence was always made by the Ministry. Therefore, it is false that the organizations had the capacity to extort money on the basis of sick leave.

But there is more: since there was a freedom of transfer, each beneficiary could choose a management unit, that is to say, an organization. This freedom of transfering was defended by the Polo Obrero and the Unidad Piquetera, when Minister Zabaleta wanted to eliminate it.

With this free pass, 30,000 beneficiaries requested to transfer to the Polo Obrero between 2020 and 2023.

This can only be explained by the fact that far from being a gang of extortionists, the Polo Obrero stood out for its internal democracy and its unconditional defense of the demands of comrades.

THE POLO OBRERO DELEGATE’S MANUAL ALSO CONTRADICTS THE JUDGE AND THE PROSECUTOR

The Judge and the Prosecutor maintain that the basis for the extortion was the possibility of the organizations to leave and that the “consideration” of the program was fulfilled in party political activities. This is already refuted in the “delegate’s manual” of Polo Obrero which was seized in different raids, a proof that it was widely spread, and that it was in daily use by its delegates and leaders. But in order to defend its misrepresentation, the judiciary ignores everything it says. In relation to the mobilizations and the consideration for the program, the delegate’s handbook denies the thesis of Casanello and Pollicita in a resounding way when it argues:

“Each member of our organization has to know that the conquests are thanks to the struggle. Therefore, the mobilizations and days of struggle ARE NOT A MANDATORY OBLIGATION but a way of being able to wrest the demands from the state.”

The delegate’s manual is centered on the debate against “clientelism”, which is a typical and historical way of managing social assistance, through extortion and threats, by the mayors. Therefore it is a tool for the formation of a fighting organization, which was collectively debated in the VII Congresses of the Polo Obrero and was updated with contributions from the organization as a whole.

THE ATTACK ON THE SELF-FINANCING OF PIQUETERO ORGANIZATIONS

Under the accusation of extortion, the court case constitutes an attack on the self-financing of the piquetero organizations. The Polo Obrero takes the criterion of establishing a ceiling of 2% of the income for dues. This percentage is taken from the criteria of the trade union organizations. As in the case of the first unions, which did not have state recognition, each comrade voluntarily makes a contribution. This contribution goes mainly to finance everything that the state does not finance: the rent of the dining rooms, supplies, ovens, refrigerators, transportation and logistic costs of an organization that has a national scope.

The Polo Obrero debates in assembly the rendering of expenses and incomes. The contributions are voluntary and are based on the common understanding of the need to finance the expenses of the organization. The congresses of the Polo Obrero debated the issue and set these criteria, which are established in the delegate’s manual. The accusation of the prosecution is based on forging evidence, because not even the witnesses and repentants are totally clear in the fact that there were no sanctions for not paying dues.

The criminalization of the paying of dues to the Polo Obrero is completely arbitrary, because any club or association has the capacity to fix dues for its affiliates as a condition for belonging to such a grouping. The objective of this attack is, once again, to dismantle the piquetero movement in order to attack its capacity for struggle and mobilization against the government.

CONCLUSION

As we can see, the whole case is built on the basis of a misrepresentation of evidence, the denial of the right to defense in order to strike and dismantle a movement of struggle. Now, the appeal chamber will have to rule on the prosecutions. We demand the dismissal of all the comrades, as part of the campaign to stop the repression and criminalization of social protest that this government has been carrying out.

We will mobilize massively against this persecution and ensure the right to protest to confront the governments of hunger and misery.

En esta nota
To Chamber 1 of the Federal Court of Appeal:
https://prensaobrera.com/english/we-refute-the-accusations-against-polo-obrero-and-the-piquetero-movement

We hereby call for an immediate end to the persecution against different social organizations, and fundamentally against all comrades prosecuted in case 4489/2023, who belong to Polo Obrero and other organizations. This persecution began as a result of a Patricia Bullrich’s complaint against the call for a mobilization on last 20 December, which was against the national government’s policies. It then led to dozens of raids, wiretaps, prosecutions and court cases.

The government is promoting these complaints in order to intimidate the entire popular movement and avoid a response in the streets to the dramatic situation that the Argentinean people are going through as a result of the adjustment policies.

The attack against social organizations is part of an agenda of persecution that we view with great concern and that includes the denial of the right to protest through repression, the restriction of the right to strike and the conditioning and curtailment of all democratic freedoms.

Therefore, we demand an end to the persecution and the dismissal of the cases against those who are being prosecuted with these unjust allegations.

cncrimcorrfed.sala1 [at] pjn.gov.ar

En esta nota