leer en castellano más abajo
Gunfire, tear gas and threatening hordes mounted on ATVs
By Claudia Rafael and Silvana Melo Posted on Oct 31, 2020
(APe) .- Minutes before four in the morning it was black night. The dreams of the inhabitants of the Guernica estate were violently interrupted: some girls and boys were ran outside, in a race against time, against the inevitable.
Hundreds of families had been living in shacks on the land in the area of Guernica for more than three months, in a reflection of the growing poverty and lack of housing for many people in Argentina. The pandemic and lockdowns aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19 have aggravated the country’s economic problems.
A warning of what would come shortly after allowed some to escape. Others, the majority, had to stay there. The images of horror will be tattooed by fire in her memories. Of the human hunt. “They entered at 4 in the morning, the boys were sleeping, people running with the boys. They left us stranded, the children were crying and running.
Alternative Media Network from the testimony of a woman in the territory. The succession of photographs of flesh and blood will accompany them for all their lives. The burning of boxes at the steady pace of the police that swept everything away.
Far back in time, trampled, buried, shattered, remains the hope of a promise of paradise.
On August 13, the children said – for the judicial presentation of the lawyers Laura Taffetani and Carolina Vilchez, from the Lawyers’ Union – that “this land means hope for us, to stop changing all the time and know that we are going to sleep there every day without anyone kicking us out.
We also want a beautiful neighborhood, with places to play, with streets as our mothers and fathers wanted ”.
And the parents – with the wisdom of the historically overwhelmed experience of childhood – “we come to say that we want a place to live and we also want it for all the boys and girls who live on the land where we are.”
Today the experiential photo is another. It is dressed in gunshots. Tear gas. Of menacing hordes mounted on quadricycles. Of 7, 8, 10 policemen surrounding each detainee in a long line, simulated army in action.
Girls and boys keep crying. There is no way to sweeten tears and fears. The terror of the screams. The terror that broke in, as terror tends to break, during the early morning. When darkness rules. When nightmares, real, concrete, all-consuming, feed with panic.
Hope stripped 4,400 people of utopia, in numbers that have been oscillating since that July 20, when a group of families settled in the July 20 sector. And that was completed with the arrival in the sectors called “San Martín”, “La Lucha” and “La Unión”.
And with what happened to the history of these months as “the taking of Guernica” they dared to do the forbidden. Their mere presence outraged the real estate trades of large financial operators and certain political powers that negotiate under the table.
