Claudio Savoia
04/27/2020 - 19:37
- Clarín.com
- Politics
Night does not fall without each day adding a screw or adjusting a piece. With the speed with which the coronavirus spreads suffering and fear, a powerful social bomb grows under the inert shadow of quarantine . Your fuel? The drive of thousands of prisoners who have been led to believe that freedom -or something very similar- is at your fingertips, while the judges throw the responsibility on them like a hot towel, the accomplices and promoters of the corrupt take advantage of the bewilderment to open the cells of the few former officials who were detained, the victims of the criminals turn on the alarm and the politicians accommodate his speech according to the direction of the wind. The Villa Devoto federal prison was the scene of the first ignition. There will be others.
The pandemic found the world and Argentina without preparation, but neither did makeup : greatness and misery were left in the air. The threat of massive deaths like those we witness in Europe and the United States circumstantially calmed the Argentine self-destructive reflex, but man is an animal of customs. And the overcrowded prisons offered a propitious theater to show them.
It is difficult to trace a sequence in the fast-paced sequence of events that accumulated dynamite in the Santa Barbara. At first, as on the entire planet, prisons were the center of attention in the event of a possible tsunami of infections, with the same degree of concern as the arching of beds and respirators in hospitals, for example. Then, the first stone on the road: old, overflowing with detainees and without the infrastructure or personnel to face a serious emergency, the desirability of emptying prisoner jails began to be evaluated. First powder keg.
This possibility replicates what happens in other underdeveloped countries, but it is by no means a rule, or even a majority option on the world menu. Officials and specialists brandished it as the only possible vaccine to replicate the necessary social distancing in places where overcrowding rather occurs.
The Federal Chamber of Federal Cassation and its counterpart from Buenos Aires took the wheel, and requested reports on the numbers and characteristics of the prison population belonging to "risk groups" for the coronavirus, by age or previous illnesses. Those reports accounted for 1,279 detainees under the responsibility of the Federal Penitentiary Service - which houses 14,000 inmates - and some 2,300 in the cells of the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service. By then, requests for defense attorneys were raining down on the courts. Hundreds in a few weeks.
But justice had already folded into government-ordered quarantine with an extraordinary judicial fair, which left magistrates working online from their homes, with minimal face-to-face guards in court. Second barrel.
The Federal Cassation, the highest criminal court in the country, signed two agreements advising to release or moderate - soapy verb that the judges love to use - the conditions of detention of as many prisoners as possible, of course without ceasing to control them, guaranteeing their integrity and without sending dangerous convicts home: squaring the circle.
This "council" must be implemented by hundreds of execution judges and oral courts under whose signature the detainees are, who have the obligation to comply with those conditions. Second stone: are there resources to guarantee the control of the eventual released? Not even remotely . There would only be electronic anklets for two out of ten - hopefully - and there is no Patronage of the Liberated with enough personnel for that mission to the stars.
At this crossroads, in turn, three key actors entered the scene, each with a new powder keg under his arm. Civil organizations that understand the defense of the rights of those incarcerated with the sole objective of achieving their freedom as soon as possible, for which the coronavirus is nothing more than the most useful of keys to open cells ; the militant lawyers of Kirchnerism -and some officials, such as the Secretary for Human Rights-, who multiplied their piletazos to try to remove from the shade the old cumpas that miraculously still remained prisoners ; and officials genuinely concerned about the fate of those arrested, such as prison attorney Francisco Mugnolo, and Judge Gustavo Hornos, head of the Interinstitutional System for Control of Prisons.
The crossfire of all of them has caused so far more than a thousand home prisons, among which some famous prisoners like Luis D'Elía - with various physical ailments - and Amado Boudou, who has the health of a bull , sneaked in . Meanwhile, some elderly people detained for causes of humanity remain behind bars, and others such as the corrupt Ricardo Jaime started a hunger strike to force their departure. Explosive trucks.
The prospect of imminent freedom - without controls and quarantined, a home prison is equal to the freedom of the rest of the Argentines - encouraged the spirits. The wick was already steaming. And it was short. In the latest episode of several, Devoto prison inmates took the prison, burned it, were injured and reached an agreement that guarantees them exits and benefits.
The counterattack took no time: relatives and associations of crime victims released a statement on Sunday rejecting "the policy of release and search for impunity for detainees by judges who use the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext . " Hours later, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Sergio Massa, warned the judges to release prisoners that "they may be impeached." Another contribution to the general confusion. Without makeups or shaves that hide the Argentine entropy, in which everyone attends their game. And nothing more.