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Argentinian Journalist and Activist Facundo Molares Murdered by Buenos Aires Police

Yesterday, Facundo Molares, a political activist and journalist was suffocated to death by Buenos Aires police, echoing the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Today, social and political organizations across Argentina are mobilizing in response and calling for justice for Facundo Molares.

La Izquierda Diario Argentina

August 11, 2023
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Yesterday, Facundo Molares, a journalist and political prisoner of the Bolivian coup regime, was murdered by police officers who were repressing a political demonstration in the center of Buenos Aires. The images show how police officers tried to revive him after causing him to go into cardiac arrest.

Molares was together with dozens of people holding an assembly that took place in the Obelisk, in the center of Buenos Aires. The protesters were gathered in a small square when the police began to repress them. There are still at least six people in custody.

The repression took place against an assembly of the organizations MTR Votamos Luchar and Rebelión Popular. It was carried out in the Obelisk, as part of the actions called by those organizations. According to testimonials that La Izquierda Diario collected after the repression, the protesters were finishing the assembly when they were attacked by the police.

Molares was assassinated by the police force of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, the current chief of government of the city of Buenos Aires and candidate for president for the right-wing coalition Together for Change, in the presidential primary elections that will take place this Sunday, August 13, in Argentina.

Images, which have been circulating widely across social media, show the moment Molares was murdered, after having suffered cardiac arrest. Police brutality in Argentina and around the world is fueled daily by law and order speeches, calling for more repression against anyone who protests or is simply working class and poor.

The images of Molares’s murder are shocking. A knee is put on his body, a journalist then asks the police to stop the attack because Molares was turning purple. There is no denying that Facundo Molares died as a result of police repression.

It’s impossible not to draw a parallel between Molares’s murder and the racist police murder of George Floyd who was suffocated in Minneapolis byDerek Chauvin, while dozens of people filmed him and asked him to stop. Floyd’s brutal murder triggered the international mass movement Black Lives Matter against racism and police brutality. 

Police brutality runs rampant under capitalism which uses police to repress workers and the popular sectors that disrupt bourgeois “order.” While the Buenos Aires city government is trying to pin Facundo’s death on “heart problems” as a result of various “risk factors,” like they did with George Floyd, it is clear, as Molares’s comrades insist, that he was intentionally targeted by the police, and that Molares died under the knee of a police officer. 

In response to Molares’s murder, today on Friday August 11, social and political organizations across Argentina, including the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), are calling for a day of national mobilization to repudiate this brutal murder and to demand justice. 

Justice for Facundo Morales!

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La Izquierda Diario Argentina

Our Argentinian sister site, part of the international network of La Izquierda Diario

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