The Chamber of Deputies approved this Wednesday unanimously and sent to the Senate the project that seeks to expropriate the building where the ‘República Cromañón’ bowling alley operatedwhere 194 young people died and hundreds were injured during a fire on December 30, 2004, to turn it into a space dedicated to memory.
After two hours of debate, the project was approved unanimously, adding 207 positive votes, in a vote in which 49 legislators did not participate because they were absent.
With 207 affirmative votes, the draft Declaration of public utility is approved and the property known as the “Cromañón Republic” is subject to expropriation.
#JoiningVoices?? pic.twitter.com/VAml1MMmRg– Deputies Argentina (@DiputadosAR) October 13, 2022
At the beginning of the debate, the president of the Constitutional Affairs Commission, Hernán Pérez Araujo (Frente de Todos) assured that it is “the most tragic event in our recent democratic history, for which the State, as the party responsible, must take responsibility, not only of the economic reparation of damages, but also of an obligation such as symbolic reparation”.
For the PRO, María Luján Rey, mother of one of the victims of the Once tragedy, stated: “We must be clear about what happened and why it happened, so that other corrupt officials, organizers and owners of unscrupulous bowling alleys do not come, Let them drag our children to their deaths.”
For his part, Alejandro ‘Topo’ Rodríguez, of the Federal Interbloc, stated that for this intention to become an effective reality, “it is not enough to pass the law, we have to work to ensure a budget item that supports the intention of this law to recover and keep the memory.
On the Left, Myriam Bregman, noted: “When they want to tell us that youth is on the right, and that the only thing that matters to them is stepping on the head of the one next to them, the example of those boys and girls who died trying to rescue their friends or strangers, becomes gigantic” .
In turn, the president of the radical bloc, Mario Negri, stated that “18 years later we came to expropriate the place where the pain became flesh, where the economic desire of private hands and the negligence of the State combined one night and triggered the tragedy. We want to materialize the need to make a place of Memory”.
At the end of the debate, Paula Penacca, from the FdT, stressed that “there was the ability to build consensus in relation to the project” and asked to highlight “the acts of solidarity of those who helped get people out of the bowling alley.”
“I want to highlight the fight of the relatives of the victims against the stigmatization of the media, which took it upon themselves to point them out and tried to build a large number of lies about what happened there. Lies like that there were nurseries in the bathrooms of the bowling alley”, warned Penacca.
The objective of the approved initiative is “to declare of public utility and subject to expropriation the property located on Bartolomé Miter street number 3038/3078, between Ecuador and Jean Jaures, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
In its foundations, the text expresses as one of the purposes of the expropriation that of “preserve the property as a refuge for the memory of what happened on December 30, 2004, a social space where the collective memory circulates and helps the victims not to isolate themselves in an individual claim”.
In addition, he emphasizes that it is an action “to be able to transform pain into struggle, and to sow a memory as a people, so that events like these never happen again.”
