At dawn on Monday November 14, the central offices of the Partido Obrero —located right in the center of Buenos Aires-- suffered a criminal attack. Unknown persons entered the building through the roofs, forcing and destroying the security railings, in order to set a fire, at three separate points, which destroyed the central office on the ground floor, where computers, archives and work materials were to be found. Also verified, apart from other damage, was the robbery of a hard drive from a computer. This was no mere attack on a building, then, but also a search for information on the PO, that is, an operation of espionage.
The attack was the culmination of an escalating series of attacks, provocations and false denunciations of Kirchner's government against the PO.
Four days prior to the important anti-imperialist marches against the presence of Bush in Argentina and against the Summit of the Amercias in Mar del Plata —which had the strong participation of the Partido and Polo Obrero-- the Minister of the Interior had criminal charges against the PO with the motive of the violent protests of users against the (bad) privatized railway service at a train station in the Greater Buenos Aires. In the face of a legal brief presented by the PO, minister Fernandez had to retract his statement, although he did not do so publicly.
The same official provocations were repeated after the big anti-Bush-Kirchner-FMI march, which ended with brutal police repression.
The attack coincided with a central political event in the Argentine capital: the chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Anibal Ibarra (strongly supported by Kirchner), confronted that Monday 14 the vote which was to impeach him for his responsibility in the death of 194 persons in fire which occurred in the Cromañon discoteque on the night of December 30, 2004. From the first, the Partido Obrero stood by the relatives of the victims in all their mobilizations. On the night prior to the vote (and the attack), on Sunday the 13th, on one of the most watched political “talk shows” on TV, a pro-Ibarra legislator (Alicia Caruso) accused the Partido Obrero leader Marcelo Ramal, of being an “instigator” of the incidents which two days before had shipwrecked the attempt to bury Ibarra's impeachment.
Three weeks after the attack, neither the national government, nor the City of Buenos Aires has uttered a word in rejection or in condemnation of the act. They have not even tried to find out the facts of a criminal act which, because of its seriousness, affects people's safety (the fire could have spread to adjacent buildings) and Argentine political life. The Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires qualified as “objective complicity” with the attackers the lack of solidarity and also the lack of interest on the part of the government of the City (and, by extension, to the national government) in the face of the attack.
On the days following the attack, other regional offices of the PO suffered attacks. In the days prior to the attack against the PO, other “unkown persons” had entered the offices of the Serpai (Servicio Paz y Justicia), led by the Nobel prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, to steal computers and documentation. In the days following, the office of the ATE (public employees union) in Esteban Echeverría was the object of an intentional arson attempt.
The Partido Obrero thanks the innumerable messages of solidarity received, both on a national as well as international level, and reaffirms the need for a systematic campaign, also of international scope, for the complete investigation of the attack.
