He is son of a working class family. His father was an oil worker who died when Daniel was 8 years only. He was raised in a very poor neighborhood, in very tough conditions. Since young, he was a social activist in his city, Comodoro Rivadavia, the oil center of the Argentinian Patagonia. By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, he was an activist and then leader of the picket movement (organized unemployed workers who were identified with this name because they used pickets to cut streets and factory access). Daniel led the picket sector that fought for dignified labor, not for assistance plans.
Since that time, he became a revolutionary militant, entering the IWL-FI Argentinian section.
The fight for work included the recovered factories and the occupation of the Termap petroleum storage site in Caleta Olivia (in the Patagonia), which lasted several days and generated the imprisonment of eight activist for almost a year, among them three comrades from our current.
When more jobs became available, he worked in a cold storage and in civil construction, until he managed to enter the oil sector. He worked in the perforation sector, working at the “well head”, in the midst of the Patagonia dessert, with temperatures under zero and in the midst of strong winds that characterize the region.
At the time, he was elected delegate for his sector and little afterwards he became a well-known leader of the opposition, not just of his sector or city, but in the different conflicts and struggles where we participated with solidarity and pushing the coordination and building of a new anti-employer and anti-bureaucratic union leadership. In this process, Daniel became an important national leader of the PSTU (A) and the International Workers League – Fourth International (IWL-FI).
One of the last struggles he led in the Patagonia was alongside his co-workers to face dismissals, occupying the oil wells during five heroic days in mid-winter. He is imprisoned now, but most of his co-workers are working thanks to this fight that both employers and bureaucracy still hold against him.
On December 18, 2017, he participated in Buenos Aires, along his party, in the great demonstration that faced the reforms that attacked the rights of the retired. This great mass mobilization was brutally repressed by security forces. Five demonstrators lost an eye and there were several imprisoned and prosecuted. Even the judge that oversees the cause speaks of excessive repression.
All the prosecuted, just as Sebastian Romero, who continues to be persecuted, and Daniel Ruiz, who was imprisoned on September 12, are accused of the “terrible crime” of having participated in this mobilization and having stood by it, answering the brutal police repression with the elements at hand, as the fireworks that are traditionally taken to mobilizations in Argentina.
Without a doubt, one of the Macri administration’s main policies is to criminalize social struggles.
WHO IS DANIEL RUIZ
