Bulletins and News Discussion from June 10th to June 16th, 2024 - Havana Derangement Syndrome - COTW: Cuba

The end is near, KKKavier:

Omnibus bill: Argentine police crack down on protesters outside Congress

The demonstrators were protesting for a second night against President Javier Milei's reform package, which proposes massive privatizations and delegating legislative powers to the president

Argentina’s security forces cracked down hard on demonstrators outside Congress protesting President Javier Milei’s reform package known as the omnibus bill on Thursday evening. Police used water cannon, rubber bullets, and tear gas to clear the protesters, hitting demonstrators, journalists, and deputies. Members of the Military Police, Naval Prefecture, Federal Police, and City Police participated in the operation.

Photojournalist Nicolás Ramos, from the Anred news outlet, showed TV channel C5N a wound on his calf where he had been hit with a rubber bullet. Over 25 journalists were injured in the crackdown, according to journalists’ union SiPreBA.

Martín Vega, a 50-year-old photojournalist working for Crisis magazine, was hit by two rubber bullets — one in his finger and the other in the leg. “Everything was calm,” he said. “Nobody was trying to block the road, or insulting anyone, or anything.” He said that the situation at the protest did not seem particularly tense when Federal Police officers started to shoot people, both in the square in front of Congress and on the sidewalks. “It’s like, at a given moment, they made the decision to shoot.”

He saw some children among the protestors, he added.

The crackdown started when a large group of people left, Vega said. “[The Federal Police] started to do a dance with their motorbikes, then they started to shoot anyone on sight — they shot a lot of people, one in the head.” Vega hid behind a trash container, trying to take photographs, and then he felt the bullets in his leg and finger. He thinks they ricocheted off the floor.

The advance of the security forces, including the use of fire trucks, took place in two stages in the late afternoon.

Inside Congress, Romina del Pla, a deputy from the left-wing party Frente de Izquierda called for the session to be suspended because of the violence outside. The head of the Unión por la Patria bloc, Germán Martínez, endorsed the proposal and also asked for a recess, but the motion was rejected.

Thursday’s events marked the second night of protests outside Congress, as demonstrators demanded that lawmakers reject the omnibus bill, which proposes giving Milei some legislative powers, declaring a state of emergency in some issues, the mass privatization of Argentina’s state companies, and wholesale economic deregulation.

At least six people were arrested during Wednesday’s protests. Four women were released on Thursday morning after spending the night in a police station. Ivana Bunge, a Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) activist whose arrest was shown on TV, said as she was escorted to a police SUV that she and her friends “were just sitting on the street, singing the National Anthem.”

Photographs taken at the scene showed that security forces were using a U.S.-made combination of OC gas (pepper spray) and CS gas (tear gas) to disperse the crowd. Franco Capone, a doctor and activist with the Socialist Workers’ Party who assisted over 150 people who were sprayed with it, said that the gas is new in Argentina. “It generates an acute pain when in contact with the skin,” Capone said in a post on X. “Press freedom is a fundamental pillar of democracy, which must be defended, guaranteed and respected by all powers of the state and by all political and economic sectors that make up our society,” SiPreBA wrote in a statement condemning the repression.

The police crackdown is taking place after Security Minister Patricia Bullrich launched a new anti-protest protocol that bans protesters from blocking roads, among other provisions. Three United Nations special rapporteurs warned last week that the protocol does not comply with international human rights standards.

Photographs of a Federal Police officer with a Gandsen rattlesnake sewn to his uniform, a symbol of the U.S. far right adopted by Milei followers, were circulated on social media on Wednesday.

That day, people also shared pictures showing officers of the Naval Prefecture throwing tear gas at a group of protestors, including left-wing deputy Alejandro Vilca. The leader of the Polo Obrero social organization, Eduardo Belliboni, said to media outlets in the streets that the police hit him when he was protesting peacefully by sitting down in the street.

IN DEVELOPMENT.

There are rumours, still very early and unconfirmed, of very important cracks within milei's government (which is already cracked tbh). There has been a massive flight of personnel working on Sandra Pettovello's Ministry of Human Capital (I will forever hate this name) after she refused to distribute food to soup kitchens when +50% of the population fell under the poverty line in recent months, while she is also under heavy fire from critics and cornered by social movements. On the other hand, foreign minister Diana Mondino (the one who made racist remarks about the chinese not long ago) appears to be on the list of either purges or resignations. Meanwhile, milei's Martin Bormann, his wif- sorry, sister, is accumulating more and more power within his cabinet. Let me remind everyone that milei's sister has ZERO and I mean ZERO, NOTHING, NADA, IT'S COMPLETELY DEVOID of any political knowledge or background, she's into tarot and is said to be a medium -- able to communicate with the dead. She's as if you take a random dude from the streets and make him Head of the State Department or something.

I am convinced that, if his law is not approved by the Senate, and things continue to deteriorate on the streets and the economic front, we might be at the gates of at least a soft coup carried out by capital.