The last part of this story was told all yesterday by Virginia Messi in Clarín, but it is worth repeating it because it is still as incredible as it is symbolic. It happens that this Monday, between 9.30 and 14, the Riccheri highway, one of the main accesses to the City and the only way to the most important airport in the country, was cut at the height of the Central Market, in La Matanza, by about twenty residents of Villa Madero.
However, in this Argentina of endless astonishment, that barely twenty people cut, for more than four hours, the two hands of an essential highway where tens of thousands of vehicles circulate without any authority throwing them out, much less stopping them, is not the main nonsense.
The really astonishing thing is that the neighbors protested, with a flag that said "robber policemen", because in a raid a group of agents would have stolen $ 2,800 from one of them, known as the Loquillo Shamán, investigated for carrying and possible sale of weapons.
Loquillo has a striking trade: he offers services as a seer for horse racing. Extraordinary.
He would also sell illegal weapons on Facebook, the activity that put him under the crosshairs of Justice, which led to the search of his home. There were kidnapped three cell phones and an amount of money that, according to the raided, was greater than that recorded in the minutes and that does not appear anywhere.
The May 11 blockade on the Riccheri highway with an unusual demand: that three detainees for robbery be released.
But Loquillo and his friends are not pioneers in setting up a picket line to protest for very particular reasons.
Four days earlier, a group of no more than thirty people had blocked the same highway, at the same height, to demand the release of three robbery detainees who, according to them, were innocent. The line of hostage cars that generated the blockade, which lasted two hours, exceeded three kilometers.
Like the neighbors of Loquillo, they burned tires to make the protest more colorful, although in this case they had the delicacy to prevent circulation only in the hand to Capital.
The detainees for whom the improvised piqueteros were asking had fallen on May 7, in Villa Celina. That day, three young people reported having been victims of a "piranha" attack and that five people were beaten to steal their clothes, money and cell phones. After a while, the police arrested the suspects with part of the stolen on top. As two of the five were minors, they were released. The other three became, for their friends, "parsleys", and therefore claimed in the Riccheri.
Compared with such peculiar motives, the causes that had prompted a third group of neighbors to block the same highway, a couple of weeks earlier, seem commendable. They are inhabitants of a settlement at kilometer 19 and made intermittent cuts in both hands, on April 25, to ask for electricity service and the urbanization of the area. The traffic disturbance exceeded ten kilometers.
On April 25, a group of neighbors cut the Riccheri to install electricity in their settlement. Photo: Luciano Thieberger.
The refusal that they gave from the municipality to these neighbors does not clash in this compendium of, to put it in some way, eccentricities: it maintains that it does not give place to the request because there is land of an aboriginal community, which considers them sacred because there is a cemetery.
Anyway.
Don't get confused. This story does not address the problem of lawless pickets and courts, nor the customary police and political inaction on the issue. Much less the semi-permanent nervous breakdown with which motorists who usually circulate on the Riccheri motorway live.
It reveals, looked at with a certain perspective, the depth of the pit where this society continues to sink. And how complicated it will be to find a ladder to get out.
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