On Monday, February 7, Sergio Cuestas trotted 26 kilometers of mountain. It took him five and a half hours to get from the Los Laguitos refuge to Wharton, in Río Negro. He left after 6 in the morning, without weight, and traveled rocky paths with steep ascents and descents. He urged her to get to the El Bolsón police station to denounce what was happening with his companions from the March for the Sovereignty of Lago Escondido who had been stranded at the southern headwaters of Lake Soberanía since the previous day. The group had spent Sunday night under the intimidation of more than forty people on horseback who answer to the English tycoon Joe Lewis, owner of 12 hectares within which the lake is located.
Cuestas is a mountaineer and is also the lawyer for the Interactive Foundation to Promote the Culture of Water (FIPCA). That is why he decided to return alone, to warn what was happening. On Sunday, after walking for three hours, he arrived at the first shelter, but he did not find the stallholder and he had no way of giving notice. He asked the Mountain Police for help, but was told that he had no instructions to move anyone. He darkened and rested there until sunrise. “While he was jogging, he had the image of the companions who were left alone in that place and exposed to any type of aggression. He had the need and the urgency to make the complaint and cover them in this way, “he told Tiempo Argentino.
What happened on Sunday as they crossed Lake Soberanía to reach Lago Escondido?
It was very violent. We were a group of twenty and we took five inflatable kayaks so as not to carry weight on the mountain. In that part of the path passes a kind of very dangerous ravine that has landslides. That’s why you have to go for water. When we reached the only piece of coast that allows landing, we saw a group of people, one next to the other, right on the edge of the water, leaving no free space to get off. A man named Pucci, who is the owner of a store in a very distant place, was the spokesman. He informed us that the road was closed, that we had reached that far and that we were not going to pass, that we were foreigners. Then the threats began: that we were going to sink in the water, that they were going to visit us at night and that they were going to make a Viking roast. That is the nickname of Alejandro Meyer, the one who led the column. When we approached to talk, we saw Nicolás Van Ditmar, the manager of Hidden Lake, the foreman of Joe Lewis, behind the group. One of the kayaks got punctured and we had to use a pump to get back to the other shore. They provoked us, insulted us and filmed us.
How did you spend Sunday night?
At night firearms were fired from the other shore, shotguns, they illuminated with powerful searchlights, they screamed. All acts of intimidation. That night I decided to go back because communication there is very difficult, we had a satellite phone with which it was very difficult to communicate. You had to go to the middle of the lake to get a signal. We were cut every time. This deployment had to be done quickly. The feeling, when I arrived at the shelter and had no means to be able to go down with a team so that Jorge Rachid could return, nor a means to get to Wharton or El Bolsón to report what was happening, was quite desperate. Jorge broke down on Sunday in the water, the next day he was more stable. That’s why I came out this way.
In your role as a lawyer for the Foundation, how do you evaluate the actions of the Río Negro justice system?
This is the sixth march, in the third and fourth we entered the Escondido Lake, through judicial presentations to which justice gave rise. In one we presented an amparo and got the judge to agree that the police accompany us. We walked in and had problems. The second time, the judge issued the measure and ordered that they allow us access and we entered. That judge, Erika Fontela, was impeached and dismissed after giving us that protection. At the next march, the local judge stepped aside because he said that he had been involved in another lawsuit with Hidden Lake. It is absurd because no judge or lawyer from El Bolsón may not have had any link with the owner of everything. What we did in this case was go directly to the Bariloche justice to avoid the usual delay that we have here: we file an appeal and the judges excuse themselves, declare themselves incompetent and refer it to Bariloche.
How do you rate this repeated situation of judges who excuse themselves? Is it fear, complicity?
I’d say it’s both. I do not know the mood or the spirit of each judge, but there is no doubt that none has the courage to assert the right. About the right there is no doubt. The National Constitution, the provincial laws, the national laws, the judge’s sentence, are harmonious, however with an absurd excuse the file has been stagnant for fifteen years. He has not been executed for all these years because he has two sentences: one in the main trial and one in the executive trial. In both cases, the provincial government disobeys the obligation to open the road and signpost it. The sentence is against the Government of Río Negro to open the two roads, the mountain one and the other. All watercourses are for public use. The Constitution cannot be circumvented there. They have the cause in a drawer because there is only one way to solve it: that the road be opened and that Argentine citizens can access the lake without asking an Englishman for permission.
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