Alone, without receiving visitors, in a cell at Police Station 36 of Dina Huapi, a small and peaceful tourist town near Bariloche, in the west of Río Negro. Thus he spent his first hours in detention from Monday afternoon until Tuesday morning Facundo Jones Huala, the 36-year-old Mapuche activist, a fugitive from Chilean justice for a yearwho was arrested yesterday morning in El Bolsón by the Río Negro Police, after being denounced for entering a private home breaking a window.
Police Station 36 is a relatively new, large building, but it usually has the service of few uniformed personnel, according to the demand of the town.
However, since yesterday afternoon the summer serenity has changed due to the mobilization of police mobiles and the increase in the police force, reinforced with the COER, an elite body of the Río Negro police, for the security required by the unexpected visitor.
It may interest you: Interpol issued the red alert so that Jones Huala remains in prison and the Government awaits the extradition request to Chile
The arrest for a minor crime, such as damage and violation of the residence, triggered two very important legal actions: the claim of the Chilean justice system, which wants the extradition so that he can finish serving his 9-year prison sentence for setting fire to a rural establishment, and the Argentine federal justice system, which are requesting the detainee to be extradited.
By action of the Río Negro prosecutor Marcos Sosa Luckman, Jones Huala was discreetly transferred from El Bolsón to Dina Huapi Police Station 36, for a distance of 150 kilometers.
The head of the provincial prosecutors, Martín Lozada, anticipated infobae which from today will be “at the disposal of federal justice.”
In Dina Huapi he was housed in the custody of provincial police personnel, awaiting his transfer to the Federal Court of Bariloche or Esquel, which decided last night which will be in charge of processing the extradition to Chile, whose courts have already requested it.
“The extradition process has already begun, and it will lead to a new trial. The steps to follow are those detailed in Law 24,767 on International Cooperation in Criminal Matters and by the specific Treaty on the matter that Argentina has with Chile,” the federal prosecutor of Bariloche, María Cándida Etchepare, explained to Infobae.
The same thing happened in 2018, when Jones Huala fell during a routine control by the National Gendarmerie. in the province of Río Negro, and months later his extradition was decided in an oral and public trial in Bariloche, to appear for the fire at the Pisú Pisué farm, in southern Chile.
He was sentenced to 9 years in prison. Upon serving half of his sentence, he was benefited from house arrest and failed the first control ordered by the Chilean justice, which on February 11, 2022 declared him a fugitive, asking Interpol for a Blue alert, to identify him and determine his whereabouts.
After the new arrest on Monday in El Bolsón, the Government of Chile asked to raise the alert to Rojo, which includes the request for extradition.
In the past, Jones Huala claimed responsibility for his leadership of the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance (RAM) group, which in turn signed responsibility for dozens of arson attacks, personal assaults, and vandalism in Chubut and Río Negro.
When he left prison in Chile, he himself offered a press conference in which he called to “set Patagonia on fire to recover the Mapuche territory”, and then disappear.
That rebellious and combative figure was very different from the one exhibited by the same activist in his arrest on Monday morning, in which he was seen with a lost look, with a striking black blouse with gold trim, a jean skirt and the bare legs shod in red slippers.
A video showed a breathalyzer test carried out by the police (which marked 1.32 grams of alcohol per liter of blood) and some photos, which generated controversy, and an expression of repudiation from the “werken” (spokesperson) of the Mapuche Parliament of Rio Black, Orlando Carriqueo.
In dialogue with Infobae, the indigenous leader affirmed that the police procedure “demonstrates the stigmatization, criminalization and racism in this detention.”
“They exhibited him with a skirt and there is a photo in which he is seen with pants. That is stigmatization and racism, they seek to muddy the field, “said Carriqueo.
He said that the case is not part of the agenda of the Parliament that he represents, which is committed to the “rupture of the dialogue on the part of the national Government, which had been compromised by the President himself (Alberto Fernández)”, due to the eviction of the property that the Lafken Winkul Mapu community (led by Jones Huala) ordered by the federal court last October.
“This does not happen only in Argentina, it is a drama in Latin America, where indigenous movements are permanently persecuted and criminalized,” he concluded.
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