The case of Lucas González became a paradigmatic case in the fight against racist institutional violence. Given the repetition of cases of institutional violence against racialized majorities and the null convictions with aggravation for racial hatred, the case of Lucas and the conviction in first instance of his murderers have turned him into a witness case. On the other hand, Argentina is a tragic example at the regional level, the first ruling in the history of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CourtHR) where the racist motivation of police violence and racist judicial bias is made explicit, is a case of the year 2020 against our country. At the same time that cases of racist institutional violence occur systematically, they are not recognized as such by justice. The exceptional nature of Lucas’s case is proof of the judicial system’s denial of an objective reality. The result is a spiral of silence that must be broken in order to turn around this scourge that affects popular majorities throughout the country.
The founder and president of the VEI Foundation, Lilia Saavedra, who lost her son in a case of racist institutional violence in 1999, has been fighting for a change in security policies for more than two decades. After the first instance ruling against the murderers of Lucas González was known, she stated:
«Justice has been done. This is the claim that I have been making and demanding for 24 years because my son was murdered by a gendarme who, before shooting and pointing at his head, said «Don’t mess around, black shit», in circumstances that Gendarmerie Corporal Juan Sebastián Acosta I was beating a teenager who was in a street situation and my son SUGUS came out to defend and demand his rights. Acosta shot him in the face on June 6, 1999. From that moment on I went out to fight for justice with the tools that democracy gives us and I began to talk about the racial profiling that the murders committed by the state security forces.
Lilia is convinced that this ruling not only brings a little «of calm to so much immeasurable pain that is the death of a son», but «It will also set a precedent and hope for the next trials to be carried out on this issue.» In any case, it will not be a single case, nor a ruling in the first instance that radically modifies the tragedy that means the death by dripping, constant and resounding, of our young people. The phenomenon is structural, and deserves a comprehensive approach. In this regard, the president of the VEI Foundation points out:
“These are not isolated cases, there are systematic practices directed generally against young blacks, poor and from popular neighborhoods.. It is a violence with racial profiling, made invisible, naturalized and rarely discussed. They are practices that violate Human Rights that, due to their seriousness, extent and massiveness, affect the full validity of the democratic rule of law. We must consider that policies have not yet been achieved that make it possible to articulate the necessary resources to give an effective response to such a complex problem, all of this framed in a process that places Human Rights as an absolute priority in the actions of the State security forces. .
Despite the fact that the Argentine State is burdened with the condemnatory ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2020, which forces it to make structural changes that include constant training and the participation of organized civil society as guarantor of compliance; Despite the multiplicity of cases with similar characteristics that became paradigmatic from 1983 to date, such as the Budge Massacre, the judicial system continues to deny the phenomenon. In this regard, Lilia points out:
“At this point, a law against institutional violence that includes racial profiling is crucial and necessary. since a large part of the difficulties are found in the disparity of criteria that different intervening institutions maintain around this scourge that is racism”.
Lilia emphasizes the judicial bias and the denial of the phenomenon of racism. Which is undoubtedly evident, and the case of Baez Sosa can be cited as an example, which, although it was not a case of institutional violence, the justice system dismissed the racist motivation of the crime despite abundant evidence in this regard. As the ruling of the Inter-American Court indicates, racial profiling is not reduced to a problem of judicial bias, arbitrary arrests for wearing a face are forms of social control shared by all the country’s security forces. To this we must add the corporate attitude, with illegal actions, which they assume when one of their «items» engages in criminal acts linked to racist motivations. We consulted a member of a security force with postgraduate training in Human Rights on this issue:
“The terrible situation that Lucas González and his friends experienced became a paradigmatic case to analyze how the City Police works structurally, and to study how much of it we find in other security forces. We have an aberrational crime committed by a Brigade, by low-level officers. And what we find in the upper chain of command is not a limit to rights violations, nor an indication of how to proceed according to procedural law; but, quite the contrary, a corporatist attitude -strongly rooted within the security forces- that endorses the fact and is criminally involved to cover it up. The police corporatist position, planted in its members from the idea of esprit de corps that should unite everyone under the same interests, It always entails protecting those in uniform, even participating in the crime or covering it up. The main idea that prevails is camaraderie, when in reality it is plain and simple police complicity, sometimes exercised with discernment, and other times under due obedience to the functional structure of the force, always at the disposal of the Executive Power on duty.» :
The solution certainly cannot be inaction. There is a debate about whether an effective, fair and equitable control of security agencies is possible, which guarantees the proportional use of force. In any case, to even try, structural measures and political decision are needed. In this regard, the public servant points out:
“It is essential that the decision to assume the civilian government of the security forces, started in 2011, be quickly renewed. and a new stage is planned where its members are summoned to work under the human rights approach, not only in the discursive, but from their practices. It is time to recognize their rights as workers and involve them in public policies not as objects to be controlled, but as subjects of rights that make up the security forces, whose mission must be redirected to the service of popular causes, and not to subdue their rights at the disposal of the state ideological apparatus”.
Regarding the training of security forces in relation to racism in our country and its implications as a structural phenomenon, the expert points out the importance of a new approach to police control, which is taught systematically and throughout the territory. :
“If the economy has to close with the people inside, in terms of security it is time that it also be with the people inside, with the police inside. Awakening their class consciousness and identifying their role in the racialized society we live in will allow their personnel to be deconstructed and from there achieve their leadership to operate as modern institutions, accompanying and promoting democratic life”.
Despite the hope that is reserved to see changes in the future, it also presents certain reservations when it comes to the justification of the ruling that will be announced at the end of August:
«For the moment, until we know the arguments of the sentence that summons us for next August 23, It remains to continue promoting this cause, to highlight the genealogy of the City Police, and see if its structure is at the disposal of the protection of Human Rights, or if it was designed as a functional executing arm of the ideological apparatus of the Local state, which also already has the mass media at its mercy and a judiciary subordinated to its interests. Because there are no doubts that Lucas’s crime was not an excess, and that lone wolves were not the ones who acted, what remains is to put on the agenda as a society what security forces we have and what we want from them in the future.»