The ruling of the Oral Criminal Court No. 25 that sentenced the murderers of Lucas González gave a name and surname to the tragedy: racial hate. The easy trigger, also called institutional violence or state repression, has among its main causes and motivations, racism. This situation is systematically denied by the system in general and by the judicial system in particular. Even many ordinary people, well-meaning people, have a hard time accepting it. Unfortunately, even if it hurts, we must understand that wearing a face is a euphemism, a way of saying racism without saying racism.
On August 23, the foundations of the sentence will be announced, only then will we know what the judges understand by “racial hatred”. On the other hand, it is a ruling in the first instance, which can easily be revoked in another instance. Hence the need to deepen this line of action and continue building the critical mass that once and for all breaks the pact of silence around racism in our reality. Even so, this ruling marks a milestone in the course of denial of racism in our justice system.
The Argentine State, since it was established, has systematically killed non-white people. And also in a systematic way, he denies it. The state kills us. From the so-called conquest of the desert, the conquest of Chaco, the Napalpí Massacre, the bombing of the Plaza de Mayo in 1955, the persecution of workers and union leaders and workers in the last dictatorship, until the arrival of democracy in the 83, despite which nor has the machine to kill black men and women in racialized and impoverished neighborhoods across the country ceased. Our State, moreover, has hundreds of thousands of racialized people crammed into a collapsed prison system, which seems to have as its only reason to put blacks in cages. This is the action of the State, from the beginning of our history as a Nation. Alberdi, Sarmiento and company established a story that is still alive today: that we were a backward and empty country, a desert, and as such we should be filled with whites from Europe.
That lie, the one that says that Argentina is the whitest country in Latin America, after being repeated so often appears as the truth, with constitutional status. Article 25 of our National Constitution says: “The federal government will encourage European immigration”. The Magna Carta was reformed in 1994, at the end of the 20th century, but the lie had to continue running and they left that article intact. To those who are not convinced that we have a racist Constitution, I ask what is the point of encouraging European migration, which barely represents 11% of the world’s population, to the detriment of the remaining 89%? Why not encourage the immigration of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and the Caribbean in the text of our National Constitution? The hierarchization of human groups continues as valid as this infamous article. In other words, this article is still valid because the hierarchy of human groups that supports it is still valid.
Given things like this, this first instance ruling would be a band-aid trying to contain a hemorrhage. Because the State continues to persecute, imprison and shoot. It did not end with the end of the dictatorship. While the right yearns for the last civil-military dictatorship and its candidates propose “more police” (the one that killed Lucas), “more security” (to make sure they keep killing us), white progressivism is still so inclined to deny the racial question and to play the monopoly of suffering as always. They usually call the dictatorship “the worst tragedy in Argentina.” Of course it was a tragedy, now, how is it that it was worse than the genocide that the Argentine State thought, planned, financed and executed, with the help of Winchester rifles, to kill hundreds of thousands of indigenous people? How do you establish that one was worse than the other? This racist bias in the analysis of tragedies tells us that it can happen again. The only guarantee that it will not be repeated is that we feel all the tragedies equally. For this we must work on living memory and break the spiral of silence around the pain of racialized majorities.
