Latest update: 11/12/2010 

- Argentina - immigration


Buenos Aires residents stage deadly attacks on migrant squatters

Buenos Aires residents stage deadly attacks on migrant squatters

Residents of Buenos Aires attacked a camp of some 1,000 migrants Friday, leaving one man dead from a gunshot wound and the slum burnt to the ground in the latest of several such incidents aimed at the homeless immigrant community in the capital.

By News Wires (text)
 

AFP – Angry residents armed with guns turned a city park into a battlefield Friday, attacking migrant squatters and setting their tents on fire in the latest of weeklong clashes that have left four dead.

The squatters, about 1,000 migrants mostly from neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay, had set up tents in the city's second-largest park in southern Buenos Aires to protest the lack of "decent housing" in the city.

After police gave up trying to clear the park, people from the middle class neighborhood in the vicinity took matters into their own hands earlier this week and began attacking the squatters, some of them with guns.

             
"We don't want a villa miseria (slum) in the park," shouted some of the angry neighbors as they rushed into the park, while others blocked nearby avenues as part of the protest.
             
Friday's violence, caught on national television, left a 19-year-old dead from a shot to the head and about a dozen other people injured, the city's medical emergency service told the C5N news channel. The nationality of the victim was not given.
             
On Tuesday, a Bolivian and a Paraguayan were killed during a brief police incursion -- their last -- in the park, and another Bolivian was killed in clashes Thursday.
             
Argentina's relatively good economy has attracted an estimated 1.8 million people from Bolivia and Paraguay, two of Latin America's poorest nations.

 

Date created : 11/12/2010 
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