Chomsky, Assange, Rousseff Among 200 Prominent People Calling For Release of Milagro Sala

Over 200 prominent activists, politicians, intellectuals, and others called for the release of Milagro Sala in a letter published on Monday by the Committee for the Freedom of Milagro Sala.

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Signees to the document, including former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, linguist Noam Chomsky, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, called on Argentina's government, headed by right-wing president Mauricio Macri, to release the Indigenous lawmaker.

Mara Brawer, coordinator of the committee seeking Sala's release, stated that the document was launched to petition Macri to “comply with the resolution of the United Nations Working Group (on Arbitrary Detention) and release Milagro Sala.”

Speaking in front of Argentina's federal courthouse, Brawer emphasized that the open petition received support from “more than 200 domestic and international figures,” including the progressive bloc in the European Parliament, according to the Non-Aligned Movement News Network.

Milagro, indigenous woman. Political prisoner for struggling for the rights of her community.

Milagro Sala is an indigenous leader of the Tupac Amaru neighborhood association and legislator to the Mercosur Parliament, or Parlasur, where her work involved administering a public grant to build low-income housing in Argentina's northern province of Jujuy. She was arrested last January on allegations of mishandling those funds and has been in jail ever since.

Sala contests the allegations, stating that racism plays a key role in her detention and being subjected to torture and receiving death threats. In several opportunities, she has stated that the Argentine corporate media has censured her and her people's struggle.

Many human rights advocates have denounced her arrest and, apart from the latest petition, she's received support from Pope Francis, the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International.