Milagra Sala during an interview in her home on June 12, 2022. Credit: Ari Gutman/Kawsachun News

Lawfare is a war waged through judicial means and negative media portrayals to eliminate political adversaries. When it comes to eliminating women, this expulsion is more violent and explicit, because from a traditional perspective, women in politics are usually considered “intruders” or “usurpers” of a space that “does not belong to them.”

The case of Milagro Sala is an example of this cruelty and no holds barred approach when it comes to women in politics. She was arrested on January 16, 2016, for having organized and participated in a popular mobilization that culminated in a camp located in San Salvador de Jujuy. In other words, she was arrested, persecuted and harassed for exercising the legitimate right to social protest. Moreover, she denied her right to organize politically. Despite her political status as a deputy member of the Mercosur Parliament, thus, holding immunity as a legislator protected by Law 27,120, her rights were still violated. Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice simply dismissed Sala’s political status.

Since then, a fierce process of criminalization has been unleashed against Sala through the use of the Judicial Power. This unlawful campaign has been accompanied by a coordinated media smear campaign where judges and prosecutors involved in her conviction speak publicly against her. During Sala’s more than three thousand days of detention, various episodes of repression and criminalization have targeted Tupac Amaru, the organization to which the leader belongs, as well as other social movements, political parties and unions.

This demonstrates that the persecution of Sala is part of a broader political objective. By imprisoning one of the most powerful social leaders in Jujuy, Argentina’s government seeks to demobilize oppressed sectors of Jujuy and eliminate their right to protest. They’ve witnessed gross manipulations by the judicial system under former governor Gerardo Morales. Aligned with a large part of the provincial and national political class, he worked to concentrate their power and rule over the levers of justice. Their objective was to ban any and all dissent to a political project that excludes historically marginalized communities, especially indigenous peoples and workers.

This systematic harassment and persecution against Sala has involved the active participation of and intervention by international organizations, such as the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The criminalizing of Sala persists, despite the exacerbated repression against social protests, as observed by the provincial constitutional reform of 2023.

Background

Morales ordered Sala’s arrest on January 16, 2016, while the social leader was protesting anti-social policies with members of her community group called Tupac Amaru. She was subsequently convicted to 13 years in prison for alleged crimes of illicit association, fraud against the state and extortion. Sala’s defense team denounced irregularities during the course of the trial.

According to some human rights organizations, her case was one of the first examples of lawfare in Argentina, a strategy of judicial persecution against opposition and social leaders, which has metastasized as a model at the national level.

Former Argentine congresswoman Juliana Marino described what has happened to Sala as a “legal aberration,” designed to proscribe and punish popular organizations.

Meanwhile, the director of Litigation at the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), Diego Morales, stressed that Sala’s conviction has been reported to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for violations of due process.

This article has been translated from Spanish by Kawsachun News. Read the original on Observatorio Lawfare.