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CASE CLOSED ON THE ATTACK OF THE TOBA COMMUNITY OF FORMOSA
Por translation: mark -
Tuesday, Sep. 21, 2004 at 2:22 PM
Friday 17 of September - Torturing and raping indigenous people is not a crime? The judge Rubén Spessot closed the judicial case of a police attack on the Nam Qom community, which took place two years ago and in which high officials of the Formosa State were implicated, such as the General Proxy of the Upper Court of Justice (Procurador General del Superior Tribunal de Justicia), Carlos Ontivero, and the Judge of Instruction (Juez de Instrucción ) Ricardo Shur. With this failure of justice all the police and officials which took part in the attack have been acquitted. The representatives of the community will carry the case before international human rights agencies.
August 16, 2002 more than a hundred police officers – with the complicity of judicial authorities that accompanied them – burst into the Nam Qom community, located 10 km from the capital of Formosa. They were looking for the presumed perpetrator of a homicide registered far off on the same day. Equiped with fire arms and the darkness of night, the police entered the houses of numerous families of the community and arrested dozens of people. The operation lasted 12 hours, during which time the indigenous people received blows, insults and threats. The tortures continued in the police stations where - as reported later- a minor was raped.
Two years later, the judge Rubén Spessot considered that there was not sufficient proof of the crimes and ordered the filing of the case. The dropping of the case was passed on the 25th of August but was only made public at the beginning of September.
The initial accusation, presented September 19th, 2002, involved high officials of State that witnessed and supported the operation. The General Proxy of the Upper Court of Justice (Procurador General del Superior Tribunal de Justicia), Carlos Ontivero, and the Judge of Instruction (Juez de Instrucción) Ricardo Shur, for example.
As the lawyer Roxana Forest explained in statements to Aire Libre community radio of Rosario, “the main people responsable, namely the leader of the police of the province, as well as other police high up in the hierarchy were kept out of the investigation”. Later, the public prosecutor took the case of one of them to court: Ricardo Shur, who put forward ‘moral violence’. And so the accusation was passed to Juzgado de Instrucción y Correccional nº 4, run by Rubén Spessot, who after two years ended up absolving the lower rank police officers who were still implicated.
Roxana Silva emphasized that neither the police’s actions nor the failure of the case that left them unpunished are isolated events in the province. “Here the illegal pressures and abuses to our citizens, like that which occurred in Nam Qom in hours of the early morning, leaving women and children, even elderly people arrested and submitted to all types of evil, are not always reported and when they are, we have this kind of response from the Judicial Power, that is totally addicted to the reigning political system in Formosa”, affirmed the programme La Señal de la Paloma (The Sign of the Dove) Of Aire Libre.
As was announced by the lawyer, the next steps will be to present the accusation before the Inter-american Commission of Human Rights. The lawyer also ruled out the possibility of putting pressure on the Upper Court of Justice: “The five ministers of the Upper Court had knowledge of how the case was being dealt with, what were the results. (…) They had knowledge and are endorsing it totally”.
The legal representative of the toba also reported constant police hostility toward those who support the claim of the aboriginal communities. “This happens to me (...), and happens to all the people that are working with aboriginal communities. We are permanently bothered at work, threatened and followed".