Detained Argentine Activist Milagro Sala Hospitalized

Argentine activist and leader of Tupac Amaru, Milagro Sala, was hospitalized Friday after falling ill Thursday in the province of Jujuy, where she is currently under house arrest.

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Sala, who is also a member of the Parlasur, Mercosur's Parliament, is suffering from an inflammation in the liver and colon.

“We called SAME (the medical emergency system), SAME went, after we sent the report to the court, they sent their own medical team. They recommended Milagro be hospitalized, but that didn’t happen until yesterday at 3 p.m.,” a member of the Committee for Milagro Sala’s Freedom said.

Sala’s defense had allegedly informed the court that the clinic where she was being treated, in Jujuy’s capital city, was available. However, the court refused that option and sent her to the Pablo Soria hospital. The committee argued that this decision and the long time it took for Sala to be hospitalized constitute “a new form of harassment.”

Mara Brawer, a member of the committee for Sala’s freedom said her ailment might be related to the dry hunger strike Sala began when she was transferred to a federal prison.

“Everything that is gastrointestinal is closely related to the somatic. Besides, she comes from a hunger strike, and after that, there was no process where a doctor accompanied her in the transition to feeding," she said.

Sala, leader of the Tupac Amaru organization, has been in preventive detention since January 2016.

She is being investigated for an alleged illicit association, fraud, and extortion, crimes she was charged with days after being detained for allegedly instigating violence during a protest she didn't attend in early 2016.

Milagro Sala is a renowned activist who is seen as President Mauricio Macri's first political prisoner. She created the Organization Tupac Amaru, which provides housing and other services to informal workers and popular sectors, she served as an Argentine legislator between 2013 and 2015 and was later elected by the Front for Victory Party, led by former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to Mercosur’s Parliament.

The United Nations, Amnesty International and several other human rights groups have demanded Sala’s release and called her detention “arbitrary.”