The Metropolitan Police, backed by the National Gendarmerie evicted hundreds of families and bulldozed the area last week. (Photo by Patricio Murphy)
The Buenos Aires government has accused the Federal Police and National Gendarmerie of failing to respond to calls for help made by the city’s police force during a shootout in Villa Lugano this weekend.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, a group of around 100 people, some armed with guns and others with rocks and molotov cocktails, clashed with Metropolitan Police near the site where Villa Papa Francisco was cleared a week earlier.
Today, the city government has said that security forces under the authority of the federal government did not respond to calls for support during the clashes, in which seven city police officers were injured.
“The confrontation lasted around an hour,” said Deputy Mayor María Eugenia Vidal in an interview with Radio Mitre earlier today. “The Federal Police arrived when it was all over. The Gendarmerie was not there. They asked for help, and none came.
“It’s a miracle that none of the officers were killed,” added Vidal, who claimed that the occupiers were led by mafia groups that sell plots to impoverished people. “This was not a group of families trying to retake the land,” she said.
After the incident, which began late Friday night and continued into Saturday morning, National Security Secretary Sergio Berni said it marked the “inevitable and predictable consequences of a terribly managed eviction by the city government”.
Berni questioned the city government for not evicting groups suspected of belonging to drug gangs from the area near Villa 20 at the same time as the families occupying the territory.
The land in Villa Lugano, south Buenos Aires, had been occupied by informal settlers since 24th February, was cleared in a joint operation by the Metropolitan Police and National Gendarmerie. Around 700 families were evicted and their precarious homes demolished by bulldozers.
Various political and human rights organisations have denounced the eviction, calling it a form of collective punishment, and saying that the operation – which has left around 1,800 homeless – would not resolve the city’s social housing crisis, which sees 163,000 living in the capital’s shantytowns.
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