Landless Movement Regional Leader Jailed

2004 August 12, Thursday

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA - At 11:55 a.m. today a district judge further criminalized the social movements of Bolivia when he ordered that a regional leader of the landless movement be held in preventative detention for the killing of a mayor, despite the failure of prosecutors to offer any physical evidence connecting him to the crime. The national leader of the landless movement said his group would fight back.

Gabriel Pinto, a leader of the Landless Movement (MST in its Spanish initials) in the Ayo Ayo region, faces four charges relating to the June 14 killing of the mayor of Ayo Ayo, Benjamín Altamirano.

Pinto was not in Ayo Ayo on June 14, said Andrez Suñya, the lead defense attorney, but in Viache with Angel Duran, the national leader of the MST.

Prosecutors did not try to place Pinto at the scene of the crime. Accusing him of, at the least, intellectual authorship, they charged him with illegal detention, kidnapping, coercion, and assassination. These relate to the facts of the crime as generally known: on June 14, eight people in two cars forcibly took Altamirano from his residence in La Paz, where he had moved shortly after becoming mayor of Ayo Ayo, and took the absentee mayor 75 kilometers south to Ayo Ayo where a very large group of people participated in his execution and the burning, dragging through the streets, and hanging of his body.

"There is only one justice, the justice of the state, of the law, there cannot be another justice," said the prosecution. Once attempts to gain justice through the government failed, some in Ayo Ayo had said, traditional Aymara justice was meted out against Altamirano for corruption and dereliction of duty.

Many people in Bolivia disagree that the government has a lock on justice, the defense was forced to imply. There will be social convulsions if Pinto is jailed, said the defense. The national leader of the MST has promised to mobilize the MST, they said. After the three-hour proceeding ended with Pinto being sent to the San Pedro jail, Duran confirmed this commitment.

The MST will answer with a war against the government and the latifundias, he said. The MST will destroy every large landed estate that is still in Bolivia, Duran said. "These actions have been prepared a long time, and now we are definitively decided to declare this frontal war against this injustice. The results we'll see on the road."

The judge apparently chose this risk over any risk of Pinto going into hiding, despite never endorsing the prosecution's case. The elements of conviction outlined for the judge by the Public Ministry relied heavily on the prosecution's claim that Pinto is part of a criminal organization, a claim they repeated over and over. The defense disagreed.

"Gabriel Pinto is a social leader," said Suñya. "He is a representative of the Landless Movement." Simply saying something is a criminal organization doesn't make it so, said the defense. Under the law, reasons and proof must be offered and specific roles of the people involved must be described.

Instead, the Public Ministry based its assertion that Pinto is part of a criminal organization on the assertion that Pinto is a criminal. The prosecution listed a large number of accusations and pending charges against Pinto. One of the major charges, from prior to June 14, the defense suggested was a motivating force for this prosecution.

"There was no impartiality in the investigation," the defense team said, and impartiality is required by law in this stage. Allies of ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, the defense said, want to imprison Pinto for allegedly leading the invasion of hacienda Collana, an unreformed giant estate that is the property of Sánchez's niece, Pankara Iturralde. "This is the revenge of the family of Sánchez de Lozada."

In another major charge, the prosecution said a woman accused Pinto and the local MST of Munaypata of killing her brother.

Prosecutors also constantly referred to a statement made by Pinto that "we must take justice into our own hands." Prosecutors said Pinto made this statement at a public hearing on the mayor's administration when the hearing failed to get results. The next day, prosecutors said, Altamirano's house was burnt down. Defense attorneys questioned the interpretation and said the statement was made in Pinto's role as community leader.

Finally, prosecutors accused Pinto of making threats, including, they said, threats to Altamirano to assassinate him. "Only a person in a criminal organization," said the prosecution, "would threaten people."

The Public Ministry also said there had been threats to Public Ministry workers. Lead prosecutor Milton Mendoza held up a pocket knife and shook it in the air, shouting. It was taken from someone in the audience, he said, and showed what kind of people supported Gabriel Pinto. This reporter's swiss army knife could have been part of that evidence on the prosecution's table if this reporter hadn't said the wrong word in Spanish, accidentally telling courthouse security of the front pocket 'naranja', orange, instead of knife, 'navaje'. Although the wand metal detector buzzed, this reporter was waved through.

Pinto was arrested in La Paz on Tuesday, August 10, when he came to do some business at a government ministry. This broke, said the defense, an agreement the government had made not to go after MST leaders. Though the judge did not validate any of the arguments of the prosecutors as to Pinto's guilt, he ordered Pinto detained until he is tried, citing the possibility of flight. The defense said they would appeal the decision within the next 24 hours.

Many social movement leaders who attended the hearing, including Duran of the MST and Felipe Quispe, the senior Aymara leader in Congress, declared in a signed statement: "This is an intent to criminalize social protest." Said Quispe outside the Superior Court building, "The war has begun."

Additional background information and translation came from Luis Gómez, Tigran Feiler, Teo Ballvé, Manuela Aldabe, and Pablo Francischelli. All information and quotations were originally in Spanish and were provided to this reporter by co-reporter Vladimir Costés and these journalists.