Luis D'Elía is an Argentine activist and politician who served in the government of Néstor Kirchner. He is the founder and head of the Federation of Land, Housing and Habitat, which has been described as a "violent wing" of the Confederation of Argentine Workers.
A longtime leader of protests by union members and others on the Argentinian left, D'Elía is often referred to in the media by the epithet "the picketer" or "the picket leader". He has also been called an "ultra-Kirchnerist". He led a group that occupied a Buenos Aires police station in 1994, and his argument that the bombing that same year of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires was the work not of Iranian terrorists but of Jews. His friendly contacts with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have caused him to be described as "the unofficial spokesman of the Iranian government in Argentina" and as a "hit man for Iran".
Early life and education Luis D'Elía was born on 27 January 1957 at the Clínica Modelo de Morón, Buenos Aires, into a family belonging to the working middle class. His father, Luis Omar D'Elía, was of Sicilian ancestry, worked for the national electricity firm SEGBA, and was a member of the power and light union. D'Elía's mother, Ofelia García Prieto, was a dressmaker specializing in bridal gowns and was the daughter of immigrants from the Spanish province of Galicia. Both of D'Elías parents had been fervent Peronists, attending "all the events" hosted by Juan and Eva Perón at the Plaza de Mayo and receiving their first house as part of the Plan Eva Perón. "I adored Evita", Ofelia later said. She later admired Scioli, Sergio Massa, and the Kirchners, and despised Menem, Rodríguez Saá, De la Sota, Schiaretti, and Duhalde. D'Elía's father died of lung cancer on 9 October 1990. In Spain, Ofelia's father had been a Republican, and her mother a socialist.
D'Elía grew up in the parish of Don Bosco in Villa Luzuriaga, a section of the Buenos Aires district of La Matanza, and had two siblings, Ariel and Mabel. The Church of Don Bosco was the family's "political cradle", and D'Elía's mentor, with whom he would remain close throughout his adult life, was the "progressive" Salesian priest Fr. Enrique Lapadula, who was an activist leader in La Matanza and believed in a "church of the poor". D'Elía assisted in masses at the church and played on a soccer team coached by his father. Interviewed in 2008 as "the mother of the most polemical of the picketers", D'Elía's mother recalled that when he was a child, he had been an "impeccable" student and she had expected him to become a priest; he was, she said, "naughty, like all intelligent boys". He had been strongly affected by the deaths of his father and of his brother-in-law, Daniel, the latter from an aneurysm. Asked whether she had ever told her son he was wrong about anything, she replied that she had done so on occasion, in anger, but unfairly, because "he is always right".
Education and teaching In his youth, D'Elía became active in El Sindicato Unificado de Trabajadores de la Educación de Buenos Aires (SUTEBA), a teachers' union in Buenos Aires; in El Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Service of Peace and Justice), headed by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; and, later, in the Christian Democratic Party, which was identified with the ideas of liberation theology.
On 16 March 1981, D'Elía started working as a teacher, beginning with a job as substitute teacher at School #50 in La Matanza. From then until February 28, 1988, he was employed as a substitute teacher in various schools, teaching "intermittently for 4 years, 8 months and 28 days" and serving most frequently at School #172, in Isidro Casanova. The last day he taught was February 28, 1988.
Meanwhile, D'Elía pursued studies for a degree as a secondary-school teacher at the Instituto de Profesorado Manuel Dorrego de Morón, from which he graduated in 1985. He combined his work and studies with activity in grassroots Christian militancy and the Christian Democratic Party. In 1985, for instance, D'Elía joined thousands of homeless people who occupied several acres of public land in El Tambo (in the neighborhood of Isidro Casanova in La Matanza), setting up hundreds of tents and calling on the government to build housing on the lands. The campaign went through a difficult period, with infighting, poor living conditions, and a food-supply crisis, and at one point D'Elía, feeling demoralized, left his tent and returned to his ranch with his wife. That night one of the other activist leaders, a Afro-Argentine mother of 12 children, came to his home, slapped him, and, calling him a "chickenshit asshole", told him, "you're the only one who can lead this". He returned to El Tambo, where the next day the Afro-Argentine woman reportedly died from a gunshot wound in a police crackdown. D'Elía organized the homeless people into a cooperative called Unidad, Solidaridad y Organización (Unity, Solidarity, and Organization). Despite clashes with police, he and his people ended up developing El Tambo into the new neighborhood of Isidro Casanova.
Activist career In April 1988, Antonio Salviolo, leader of the Christian Democrats and director of schools for the province of Buenos Aires under the presidency of Antonio Cafiero, appointed D'Elía as administrative undersecretary. Later that same year, the Senate of the province of Buenos Aires appointed him schools advisor, a title he held until 1992.
Judicialist Party and FREPASO In 1992, D'Elía was appointed head teacher at School # 188 in La Matanza, but while retaining the title and collecting a salary, he never actually took up the position in practice. Instead he was active in the Justicialist Party, a Peronist group, and led more actions involving housing for the homeless. In 1995, Carlos Chacho Alvarez, leader of Frente por un País Solidario (FREPASO, or Front for a Country in Solidarity), a new party which had been formed in 1994, invited him to join its list of candidates for city councilors in La Matanza. In 1997, FREPASO prevailed in the elections in the Province of Buenos Aires, and in 1999 it was part of the coalition whose candidate, Fernando de la Rua, won the presidential election. Around this time, D'Elía began organizing unemployed and homeless people; he remained active in SUTEBA, the teachers' union, which upon the formation of the Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos (Confederation of Argentine Workers, or CTA), became a leading member of that federation.
Federation of Land, Housing and Habitat After leaving FREPASO, D'Elía founded the Federación de Tierra, Vivienda y Hábitat (Federation of Land, Housing and Habitat, or FTV), a group for unemployed persons in Argentina, which in turn joined the CTA, under secretary general Victor De Gennaro. The FTV has been described as "a violent wing" of the CTA. In one of his first public activities, he was accused of trying to disrupt a protest by retired workers during the administration of Carlos Menem and of advocating violent support of Menem.Lanata, min. 0:00-3:14
Extortion charges It was reported in January 2001 that union members under the control of D'Elía compelled beneficiaries of state aid to hand part of it over to them on threat of losing the entire benefit. D'Elía, who was mentioned by several witnesses in a legal case about the extortion charges, admitted that recipients of the aid were asked to make "a social contribution."
Kirchner government When Néstor Kirchner became president of Argentina in 2003, he appointed D'Elía Subsecretary of Lands for Social Habitability, a position that Kirchner created expressly for him.
Police station incident On June 26, 2004, D'Elía led a group of activists and residents of La Boca who occupied police station #24 by force, and justified their action by claiming that the murderers of their fellow activist Martin Cisneros were enjoying police protection. The exchange of gunfire between the police and the protesters lasted for hours, causing extensive damage.
The police chief, Cayetano Greco, later testified that D'Elía had behaved aggressively and was "very violent" and "threatened to burn everything" in the station. Greco charged the government and his own superiors in the police department with failing to intervene in the situation because of D'Elía's position. He stated that although the magistrate María Angélica Crotto had authorized him to retake the police station, the Undersecretary for Civil Protection at the Ministry of Justice, José María Campagnoli, had told him to stand out and seek an agreement with the violent protesters. Greco said, "It would have been easy to recover the station" but he "was not allowed" to do so. He stated that the takeover of the police station would have gone very differently had it been led by a Kirchner opponent such as Raul Castells rather than by D'Elía.
A pregnant woman later testified that she had been inside the police station during the incident with her husband and a child, and that D'Elía and his confederates had not allowed them to leave. Greco confirmed her account. He also testified that D'Elía's group had stolen from the police station a charcoal by the artist Quinquela Martin, as well as records of court cases, hard drives, and bulletproof vests.
D'Elía and 42 of his confederates were accused of damage, theft, unlawful imprisonment, threats, injuries, and extortion, among other offenses, he enjoyed "parliamentary privileges" as a member of the Buenos Aires legislature that caused the case to proceed "very slowly" through the judicial system. An October 2004 news report stated that D'Elía's legal status as a result of the incident was growing more complicated by the day. By November 2006, the case was on its seventh judge. Greco expressed cynicism about the possibility that D'Elía would ever face justice for his actions. D'Elía was never called to testify.
Greco said that D'Elía had used the death of activist Martin Cisneros to try to regain his position within the activist community, which he had lost after entering the government.
Conviction for slander In 2005, D'Elía said that "Eduardo Duhalde introduced drugs to Argentina." The president sued him for defamation. D'Elía requested immunity, but his request was rejected by the judges. On December 21, 2009, Judge María Romilda Servini de Cubría found him guilty and sentenced him a fine of $6.000. D'Elía did not pay the fine. The case reached the Supreme Court. In 2012 the Supreme Court upheld the conviction and imposed a $150,000 fine. D'Elía again refused to pay and said he would go to the Interamerican Court.
Douglas Tompkins In 2006, D'Elía took on Douglas Tompkins, the American founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing lines, who had bought land in Argentina to create an ecological preserve. Accusing Tompkins of blocking access to public roads, D'Elía cut the locks on gates outside Tompkins's property and led an effort to pull down the fences around the property. "We want to tell everyone: We're going to continue cutting down fences," he said. "What is more important, the private property of a few, or the sovereignty of everyone?" He also expressed the view that "These lands should not belong to an individual, much less a foreigner," and, according to The Washington Post, "publicly hinted that he believes Tompkins is an agent of the U.S. government." He told the BBC that "The Americans are in cahoots with the Pentagon which, as you know, is building an airbase across the border in Paraguay." The BBC described him as a "stocky man with an angry mien" who identified "'tierra gringa,' the gringo lands," on a map, "like a general pinpointing the enemy."