Milton Tolomeo, a sports massage therapist and professional lifeguard who also works as a porter in Buenos Aires, was arrested last Saturday. He was accused of being one of the people who threw Molotov cocktails at the police cordon during the protest against the infamous labor reform law. Despite the dubious identification, the judge decided to order pretrial detention for the crimes of possession of incendiary material, public intimidation, and attack on authority. The Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression – Correpi- published a statement denouncing the worsening of Milton Tolomeo's detention conditions. In that sector, detainees spend 20 hours in isolation, with only four hours of 'recreation', they have no access to goods deposited by their families nor contact with anyone other than the selected SPF staff who are not identified and cover their faces with balaclavas. At this moment, while we await the decision of the Appeals Court in Criminal, Contravention and Misdemeanor matters of the City on the appeal of the pretrial detention, we are filing a corrective Habeas Corpus resource, demanding Judge Gonzalo Rua to cease these totally unjustified conditions and restore the validity and exercise of the communication and accommodation rights guaranteed by the National Constitution, the laws and the international conventions. We call on the human rights movement to demand the cessation of these unheard-of detention conditions and to demand the release of the comrade, whose only crime was to protest for the rights of workers. Protest is not a crime. However, he flatly rejected the prosecutor's request to frame the facts as 'terrorism' (art. 41 quinquies of the Penal Code). Confronting the most repressive government in democracy, either. Buenos Aires, February 26, 2026.
