In December 2021, workers at Argentina’s Federal Intelligence Agency reported in a criminal complaint that they had discovered a video on an old hard drive. Warped at the edges, as if taken through a fisheye lens, the security camera-style footage showed a meeting that took place between Buenos Aires province politicians, intelligence agents and businessmen in a boardroom of a central Buenos Aires bank in June 2017.

In the footage, the men are seen discussing how to send Juan Pablo Medina, head of the La Plata city branch of the Union of Construction Workers of Argentina (UOCRA), to prison. One comment in particular immediately made headlines across Argentina when the video became public: “Believe me, if I could have – and I’ll deny I said this if anyone asks – if I could have a Gestapo, a shock force to end the unions, I’d do it,” Marcelo Villegas, Buenos Aires province labour minister at the time, was seen saying in the video.

The co-ordinated effort to jail Medina is far from the only instance of politicians and the intelligence services allegedly collaborating during the presidency of Mauricio Macri, who led the country from 2015 to 2019. The country’s federal intelligence agency is currently subject to a major investigation after it was found to have conducted a series of illegal operations against targets ranging from Argentina’s political elite and families of the crew of the lost navy submarine ARA San Juan, to journalists applying to cover the 2017 World Trade Organization conference in Buenos Aires and truckers’ union leader Pablo Moyano. Two intelligence agents in the video have also been implicated in some of these cases. Macri himself has been charged in the submarine case, although he claims the case against him is politically motivated.

Macri is a right-wing, former mayor of Buenos Aires who positioned himself as a business-friendly moderniser, pledging to open Argentina up for business and end the nation’s perennial struggles with inflation. These policies prompted clashes with unions, who saw his initiatives as a neoliberal attack on workers’ rights and living conditions.

When the video became public, leaders of Argentina’s major trade unions vowed to take legal action and alleged that the meeting caught on camera was not a one-off, but part of a systematic plan to persecute unions, orchestrated by then-president Macri and Buenos Aires province governor Maria Eugenia Vidal. “They weren’t acting of their own accord,” Hugo Yasky, secretary general of the trade union federation Argentine Workers’ Central, said during a December 2021 press conference called to denounce Villegas’ comments.

Not an isolated incident

A major investigation led by a judge in La Plata resulted in the prosecution of Villegas, the former labour minister, along with high-level functionaries and former directors of the intelligence services this April. They are charged with illegal intelligence activity and breach of duty.

Meeting with others to plan legal action against someone is not a criminal offense in Argentina.

However, intelligence agents are only permitted to surveil in cases pertaining to defence and national security, or if they have a court order, so the presence of senior intelligence agency directors at a meeting about a local labour dispute indicated possible illegal intelligence activity, according to a judicial source who spoke to Equal Times on background.

According to the judge’s decision to prosecute, which Equal Times has seen, intelligence agency directors had obtained information about Medina that would prove key to a lawsuit later filed against him by searching databases without a court order.

Moreover, the judge’s decision states that the meeting was not an isolated incident, but rather part of a decision at the “higher levels of national and provincial government” to push a “strategy oriented around involving the leaders of UOCRA’s La Plata branch in criminal cases”. This likely began with a meeting that took place in May 2017 in the Casa Rosada presidential palace, which then-president Mauricio Macri attended, the judge’s investigation found.

One day after the boardroom meeting, on 16 June, complaints about Medina began to arrive at the provincial labour ministry. The president of an engineers’ trade association sent a letter to Villegas expressing “concern” about excess labour costs in a number of private and public works contracts, according to local media. Two months later, a business owners’ association reported to the Buenos Aires province labour minister that the construction workers’ union was requiring its members to pay workers more than the nationally agreed rate.

In September 2017, Medina was charged with money laundering, extortion and criminal association following an incident in which a group linked with UOCRA La Plata allegedly violently confronted a group from another UOCRA branch at the site of some railway works near La Plata. On hearing of his impending arrest, the union head blockaded himself in UOCRA’s offices. During this time, he gave a television interview in which he said that the charges against him had been orchestrated by then head-of-state Macri. “I think there’s a political line that comes, unfortunately, from the president of the nation,” Medina said, claiming that there had been a meeting to co-ordinate the accusations. He was arrested on 26 September and spent two and a half years in prison before being granted house arrest because of his age and ill health.

State hostility towards unions

In December of last year, the UOCRA reported the Argentinian state to the International Labour Organization (ILO) for violation of the right to freedom of association. “Ex-minister Villegas’s statements imply the orchestration of an operation to persecute trade unionism and start court cases,” UOCRA secretary general Gerardo Martínez wrote in the complaint. “This new evidence confirms what the Argentine trade unionist movement partly already suspected: the previous administration set up illegal spying bases to persecute trade union leaders and start court cases against them.” If the complaint is upheld, the ILO can make recommendations to remedy violations of the right to freedom of association and ask the Argentinian state to implement these recommendations. It’s not yet clear whether the ILO will take up the complaint.

The UOCRA did not respond to requests for comment. After Medina was detained, UOCRA’s national secretariat sought to distance itself from the local union branch leader, publishing a statement saying that it did not endorse illegal activity or violence, and appointed a new leader to normalise the union’s operations in La Plata.

It’s not clear whether the prosecution of Villegas and the others will impact the legal proceedings against Medina. But it shows that the labour complaints filed against him were at least in part the result of deliberately co-ordinated action taken by high-level functionaries in conjunction with the business community and illegally obtained material from the intelligence agency.

The state hostility towards unions during the Macri presidency was also felt by the SUTEBA teachers’ union, according to Roberto Baradel, its secretary general as well as the secretary general of the Buenos Aires province branch of the trade union federation Argentine Workers’ Central.

In 2018, Baradel received anonymous emails threatening to kill his children unless he ended the wage negotiations he was conducting. He reported the threats to the police. “The e-mails came from an account in Panama, but [the police] didn’t get any further with the investigation; I don’t think there was the political will to advance it,” he tells Equal Times.

Although the authors of the threats were never identified, they went hand in hand with state union-busting tactics. In 2017, governor Vidal announced that she would recruit volunteers to teach children when educators announced a strike over pay. Ahead of the 2018 annual salary negotiations, the government of the Buenos Aires province uploaded announcements and banners onto its website suggesting that teachers leave their unions. In March 2018, a local court ordered the Vidal administration to take the materials down on the grounds that they violated freedom of association. Despite these tactics, over 50 per cent of education workers in Buenos Aires province are unionised, according to Baradel.

Imposing top-down reforms on workers

While it’s rare for union-busters to be caught in flagrante like in the video, the discourse and the charges used follow the playbook for persecuting organisers, according to Dr Joaquin Aldao, a sociologist who researches the Argentine workers’ movement at Argentina’s National Technical and Scientific Research Council. This often involves associating traditional unionist protest tactics such as blocking roads and picketing companies with illegal activity, and union organisers themselves with violent thuggery.

“Sindicalist practice ends up being challenged in advance,” he says. “This social imaginary is created that links syndicalism with borderline illegal and unethical practice – that they’re mobsters, that they bear arms, that they extort employers.”

To Baradel, the co-ordinated case against Medina, the anti-union tactics his organisation faced, and the illegal surveillance of leaders such as truckers’ union leader Pablo Moyano reflected a neoliberal desire to impose top-down reforms on workers. “[The aim was] that unions wouldn’t have such power to defend rights,” he says, adding that they wanted to “impose labour flexibilisation, wage cuts, and in the case of schooling, move towards privatisation of education in Argentina.”

At the time of writing, the politicians and intelligence agents were in the process of filing appeals and no date had been set for the trial. But irrespective of what happens with the legal proceedings, in a country whose last dictatorship ended in 1983, a politician saying he wishes he had a Gestapo has underscored the link between aggressive “business-friendly” politics and violation of the right to freedom of association.

“He’s appealing to a figure that has nothing to do with democracy,” Dr Aldao says.