Claudio Hugo Lepratti (27 February 196619 December 2001), popularly known as Pocho Lepratti, was an Argentine political activist volunteer who worked in a poor neighbourhood in the city of Rosario (province of Santa Fe, Argentina), and who was shot and killed by the Santa Fe Provincial Police during the December 2001 riots, when he tried to stop police agents from firing at a children's school. Biography Early years and work Lepratti was born in Concepción del Uruguay, Entre Ríos, and studied Law between 1983 and 1985, while at the same time serving as a cooperator of the Salesians of Don Bosco. After that, he entered the Ceferino Namuncurá Salesian Seminary in Funes, Santa Fe (a town in the Greater Rosario area), as a coadjutor brother. He studied Philosophy and became a professor. The students of the seminary were customarily taken to visit nearby places to get in contact with the everyday reality of the poor and work with them. Lepratti eventually asked to extend this practice to constant work among the poor, but his superiors told him that he needed to take vows of obedience and keep studying. Due to this, after five years he left the seminary and went to live in a villa miseria or shanty town in Barrio Ludueña, Rosario. In the parish led by Father Edgardo Montaldo, he created and coordinated a number of child and youth groups, organizing camping excursions, workshops, etc. He worked as a kitchen assistant in the associated facilities that provided food for the poor children in the villa, and taught philosophy and theology in the parochial school. The murder At the end of 2001, Argentina was nearing the peak of an economic crisis marked by long-term recession and massive unemployment. On 18 December, riots and looting of supermarkets and stores, initiated by activists who requested food, broke out in Rosario and Greater Buenos Aires. President Fernando de la Rúa dictated a state of emergency, suspending constitutional guarantees, and violent repression ensued. Lepratti lived in the villa miseria in Ludueña but was doing daily volunteer work in a school located in Barrio Las Flores, a poor neighbourhood in southern Rosario. On 19 December, the Santa Fe Provincial Police raided the area of the school to suffocate an evolving protest, with people picketing and blocking a nearby major avenue. Lepratti and two other members of the school staff climbed to the roof of