Corner of Carlos Casares and Lavadero.
The slaughter.
A group of militants from the "Evita Movement" paint on the walls opposition slogans to the local mayor, Fernando Espinoza.
“Those walls are ours,” a very angry man yells at them.
"Get out of here."
They ignored him.
Everything went bad
.
Three vans, five, six, quickly parked in the area.
More men came down, angrier.
They surrounded the bold "opponents" of the same Peronism.
They identified themselves as members of “Los Búhos”, a political SME that writes the name of Espinoza and the last name of Kirchner in giant letters on each “Matanza” wall.
They drew weapons.
They forced “rivals” to their knees.
They hit them on the floor.
They fired shots into the air and into the ground.
Three kids from "Evita" ran out in the direction of Polledo street.
They were followed by five "Owls"
triggering their weapons wildly
.
The bullets traveled through the air and did not hit anyone.
Most of the attackers had their faces covered.
Some even wore bulletproof vests.
Then appeared the one who claimed to be the head of the violent: “I'm 'El Loco Play', from the barra brava of Almirante Brown!
Don't ever come back."
In the background shots continued to be heard breaking the sidewalks.
This confrontation occurred last October.
The "Evita Movement", led by Emilio Pérsico and Fernando "Chino" Navarro,
was encouraged to dispute the leadership of the communal chief of La Matanza
by postulating Patricia Cubría, Pérsico's partner, as an internal opponent for the mayor.
The fact remains unpunished.
The inmate of Peronism in the most populous town in the country, the electoral heart of the PJ, La Matanza,
with an electoral roll of more than a million souls,
the electoral campaign that had not yet begun was beginning to beat.
The event was taken seriously by the Bishop of San Justo, Eduardo García, close to Pope Francis.
He then organized a mass “For Peace”.
Different opposition political parties sent referents to listen to the head of the local Church.
No one from the municipality was there.
Cubría, which has the support of the social movements that manage the most budget of the plans distributed by Social Development of the Nation, continues in the Peronist campaign against the Peronist Espinoza.
There is no peace.
Last Monday, the inmate of the PJ and its variables of diverse thickness,
became a national uproar.
The Buenos Aires Secretary of Security, Sergio Berni, was beaten by protesters who were demanding the death of a colleague from the 620 bus line, killed by an inexplicable gunshot wound to the chest that same morning.
At least two men boarded the bus that he had been driving years ago as if they were passengers, stole almost nothing, and shot him dead before leaving.
Berni arrived at the place of the demonstration a few hours later, where another Buenos Aires minister, the Minister of Transportation, Jorge D'onofrio, was already present.
He was almost lynched in surprise fashion
.
The official received several pineapples in the face.
Stones.
He was bleeding.
When Berni, wounded, fell, he tried to support himself with the high wall that was behind him, one of those that raised General Paz Avenue, a place where minutes later he used to watch his back.
On that wall, paradox, chance, the slogan “Everyone with Cristina.
Fernando (for Espinoza) Mayor”.
And smaller, the signature of the authors of that propaganda: “Los Búhos”.
From that moment on, La Matanza, its insecurity, its daily deaths, the lack of patrols, the advance of drug trafficking, became controversial and a national debate.
The details of the judicial case to elucidate the crime of the bus driver Daniel Barrientos, the political consequences of an extraordinary event that mobilized the Buenos Aires Peronism and its territorial leaders, including Vice President Cristina Kirchner, Governor Axel Kiciloff, are expanded in other articles of this edition.
In La Matanza, as was said, more than a million people vote.
Next December will mark an anniversary that coincides with the return of democracy in 1983. For 40 years the mayors of this vast district,
with 130 slums that are more in unofficial numbers,
had uninterruptedly in these four decades mayors peronists.
But never, like today, has La Matanza been at the center of the discussion due to its growing misery, the loss of presence of the State, the poverty generated by super inflation, and the division of a PJ that for the first time in
decades seems to go to an election to dispute power with all or nothing
.
Internal disputes shake the heart of the victorious elections of the PJ apparatus of Buenos Aires.
Espinoza was silent
as La Matanza made national news.
Even international.
Just last Friday, more than four days after the death of Barrientos, the attack on Berni, the arrest of other groups accused of committing a crime for hitting the Minister of Security, and the lifting of a passenger transport strike that crosses the thousand impossible paths of an infinite locality, he spoke.
Of another thing.
He celebrated his visit to a retirement center under the control of his militancy on Twitter.
"For this Holy Week we have delivered Easter donuts and eggs to our feeders and picnic areas so that our children and their families can enjoy this celebration," he reported, with photos in which he is seen smiling with a different shade of hair than the one that he used to have in the immediate past.
Nothing about the death of Barrientos.
La Matanza is in crisis and
that baffles the heads of the national and district PJ.
The discontent, the loss of fear of the municipal authority, is beginning to be replicated in the media like never before.
This occurs in parallel to the territorial growth of the PJ opposition pre-candidate to Espinoza, "La Colo" Cubría.
Uncertainty is rampant among the leaders of a political party that used to boast of its affinity with the workers as those who savagely beat Berni.
The residents of Virrey del Pino, Laferrere, Villa Madero, Villa Celina, many more neighborhoods, Saint Petersburg, Puerta de Hierro, come out to complain about the lack of everything.
Above all, security, and the lack and difficulty of earning money more or less legally.
The quickest path is no longer even to immerse yourself in working in the client apparatus of the leaders of the PJ.
It is to join the drug trade, or the gangs that devastate the poor to take whatever it is.
The addicts are army in the night of Matanza.
Espinoza, Clarín
knows
, it was
impossible for him to communicate with Berni.
The relationship between them is bad.
The one who raised his voice, as he did on other occasions, was once again Bishop Eduardo García.
He issued a statement with the bishop of Laferrere, Jorge Torres Carbonell.
It is a flat, simple, hurtful text.
It is worth stopping at each of his words to understand it in its magnitude.
It is written with the pen never not exempt from deep messages habitual of the prelates: “The feeling of the neighbors
is that we live in liberated or negotiated territory.
Released because he turns a blind eye unless the fact comes upon him and there is no choice but to act;
negotiated because behind this insecurity we know that the big drug mafias operate that have invaded our neighborhoods with their business and have our kids as soldiers or as consumers who go out to steal whatever it takes to be able to go buy the 'mercada' that They need to continue living."
More: “A war of the poor against the poor is being generated.
Those who go to work at 5 in the morning are poor.
Bus drivers are poor.
Housewives are poor.
The teachers are poor.
No one is left out of insecurity and fear for their lives.”
The statement points to the "silence of the authorities", calls for a "deep dialogue" on politics and, contrary to Espinoza, expresses solidarity with the family of the murdered Barrientos.
The Peronist inmates mix in La Matanza in a thousand ways.
The transport union, the UTA, which pressed for greater security in the groups, has its general secretary of the district in a relevant municipal position: Marcelo Barreiro is Director of Traffic Control.
He had to ensure that the millions destined to install cameras and GPS in the local buses were actually used for that.
I do not pass.
Everything happens in parallel to the growth of the candidacy of Patricia Cubría, who
would have the endorsement of Máximo Kirchner
to dispute Espinoza's candidacy for Mayor in the PASO.
Between the last two elections, Peronism lost 200,000 votes in La Matanza.
The candidates for Together for Change in La Matanza agree on the diagnosis.
Alejandro Finocchiaro laments because in his district, he says, "it is the sample of all the frustrations of Argentina."
Héctor “Toty” Flores, also a candidate, is amazed by “the break that exists in Peronism.
The violence of the 70s is replicated.
Lalo Creus analyzes the same fracture: it is unprecedented and opens up unique electoral opportunities.
Meanwhile, the municipality's lack of transparency is the norm: How much does the money deposited in fixed terms and invested in commune dollar bonds amount to?
37 billion?
Why is it not used for daily management?
Most of the official budget, to top it off, is under-executed.
The “K story” on the well-being of Matanzas culminated.
Neighborhood weariness, the facts, caused in this case to be fulfilled one of the "Proverbs of Hell, by William Blake: "What is evident today, was once imaginary."
