Seguridad: Crime, Police Power and Democracy in Argentina 9781501300653, 9781441123077

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List of Figures and Tables

Figure 2.1 Major country problems (selected indicators) 1995 and 2004–621 Figure 2.2 ‘Crime has risen a lot’

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Figure 2.3 Argentina homicide rate 1991–2008

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Figure 2.4 Argentina homicides

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Figure 2.5 Three main orientations of Seguridad in Argentina

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Figure 2.6 Victimization

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Figure 4.1 Police categories

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Figure 4.2 Police mechanisms

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Table 4.1 Tolerance for illegal policing (‘On occasions, they can disregard the law’)

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Table 5.1 Surveying police mistreatment

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Table 5.2 Documented arbitrary killings by the police and security forces in democracy, per cent, cases by millions, and distrust of the police, by province

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How does a representation of danger make ‘us’ what we are? …Who and what pays the inevitable price, for the way that ‘we’ are thus habited in fear? Michael Dillon, Politics of Security

Preface and Acknowledgements

Mano dura [iron fist] brings to my mind getting slapped, or mistreated, or punished, right? It seems to me that this is not the time… slavery ended already, the time of blows is gone… we have to evolve in such a way that we can clear up a crime without having to beat up or ill-treat anybody. But let us agree that by sitting a criminal in a chair wrapped in cottons and asking him: ‘Did you steal?’ He will not say ‘yes’! The words of this commissioner from the police of the Buenos Aires province convey as much as they leave unsaid. Given the numerous reports of abuse, mistreatment and torture by members of the Argentine police, his allusion to interrogation seems unsettling. How much police abuse can a democracy take before losing its democratic character? I engaged in this research to understand the ways in which authoritarian practices, exclusion and violence perpetuate themselves within democracy. With a focus on Argentina since the mid-1990s this book scrutinizes life under conditions in which demands for seguridad, understood as state protection from crime, take over the public arena. Drawing on Michel Foucault, I treat the expansion of seguridad into a governmental agenda as a dispositif or ‘apparatus’ that, as a loose net, pulls together discursive practices, knowledge, institutions, policies and laws to address the perceived urgent need of protecting citizens from criminals.1 Through seguridad, policing and the fear of crime come together into a governing rationale with problematic implications for democracy, more so as differences between those advocating mano dura versus ‘human rights’ positions weaken under the consolidation of the seguridad agenda. In 2001, noticing seguridad’s rise, I started interviewing policy-makers and political leaders. One of their common references was the police. Sometimes praised, often demonized, dismissed as a mere tool, yet recognized as strategic in implementing policies, their voices elided, police agents appeared at the centre of governing puzzles involving corruption or deficiencies in public security. As these references converged, the image of the police as those at the bottom of the governmental chain of command,



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in contact with the people, with power to carry out, recreate and distort the policies laid down at the top started gaining shape. It seemed clear that what the police do every day in the streets defines the fate of major reform programmes and policies. It seemed equally clear that no one can figure out how best to implement reforms without understanding such layers of local policing. Were the police really applying these policies in their districts? Could they? How do public safety policies look if examined at street level, in police encounters with citizens? How much do policies and guidelines from above change practices of policing? Only police officers could respond to these and similar questions, I thought, at the beginning of a journey that has just strengthened this belief. Generally perceived as mere law enforcers, the police are key actors with power to define how a government operates in reaching the people. Clustered in patterns of what we may productively conceptualize as informal policies, police practices constitute the most direct, often violent and, on occasion, sole channel of exchanges between citizens and the state. Police power in fact defines a major, traditional mode of governance pervading everyday life and the ‘actual operation of government’, as Mariana Valverde and Markus Dubber note. If, as the authors also observe, the governing aspects of police suffer these days from ‘denial and displacement’, and may have ‘disappeared in name’, the function survives.2 Whenever we see people treated qua resources to maximize, or threats to neutralize or destroy after a rationale invoking the good of the community, the general welfare, or security reasons, we are witnessing an exercise of police power. While adopting multiple forms, in our societies no one embodies this power like the police. They are the single state agents endowed with distinctive prerogatives, including that of taking freedom and life away. If, as Foucault suggested, dispositifs arise in response to a problem and generate new relationships and identities, a new form of governance has emerged in Argentina centred around seguridad. Drawing on people’s fears, promising to protect them from crime and criminals, rather than a straightforward response to a pre-existing problem, – in this case, a dramatic rise of crime – seguridad acts, as Michael Dillon observed for security more broadly, as ‘a principle of formation that does things’.3 Converging under the umbrella of seguridad, a new political rationality at once democratic, individualistic and exclusionary includes in principle everyone, while carving out pockets of exclusion within the polity. As a priority agenda item, fighting crime helps to legitimize the de facto legal and political ban of members of some groups – namely, the poor – that would be otherwise unacceptable in a democracy. Oddly, seguridad’s claims

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of protection imply that not all lives deserve care and that, in fact, some may be legitimately abandoned or even destroyed. I was fortunate in that I began interviewing police officers before September 2001. Since then, as Klaus Mladek notes, the global confusion between war and policing has opened a ‘profound crisis of political terminology’, exposing police power’s intrinsic links with emergencies and the extra-legal.4 If crime scares favour expanding police prerogatives, the last decade furthered this trend, with local and regional accents, in Argentina and elsewhere. Most voices in this book belong to members of the Argentine police, collected through more than 70 semi-structured tape-recorded interviews and about 20 informal interviews and conversations, plus ethnographic accounts and notes, along the lines of a ‘theoretical sample’.5 Interviews were carried out in Mendoza, including the provincial capital and three cities, in wealthy and poor areas within the city of Buenos Aires and the Conurbano, and with members of the police from the provinces of Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Misiones, Río Negro, Córdoba and Santa Fé, including the cities of Córdoba and Rosario. Nine of my interviewees were women. Interviews were held during August 2001, between July and December 2003, and during the southern hemisphere winters of 2006, 2007 and 2008. As a universe of study, Argentine police officers present unique challenges. Arranging interviews was quite difficult, as members of the police invoked rules preventing them from talking to people outside the force without prior authorization. Except for a handful of cases, higherranking police and political officials approved of the interviews. Rather than ‘snowballing’ as expected, my sampling strategy was contingent on the authorities. Because of this controlled access to interviewees, if I were to use standard citations including date and place, who said what would be potentially traceable to the authorities. To protect the agreed-upon confidentiality while providing some necessary background, I identify the interviewee’s gender and spatial coordinates – sometimes listing the name of the city, sometimes the region and the size of the town, often including membership to the police officialdom or to the subordinate personnel, and listing the year where relevant to matter under examination. ‘It is not the same the police of 2006 than that of 2000, 2005, or 1990. They go on changing, as society demands for them to change.’ If in important respects Argentina seemed different in 2008 than in 2001, as the bonaerense officer from the Conurbano noted, quite how much policing has changed in recent years is a different question. In the end, most interviewees repeatedly stressed, despite technological innovation and changes



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in regulatory frameworks, the function and defining core tasks of policing remain unchanged. Here, to illuminate the rise of seguridad and broader questions of police governance, I treat the interviews mostly in a synchronistic way, as a corpus, or ‘chorus’ of police voices interweaving with concepts and data in the text. Finally, the views of political leaders, policy-makers, security experts and advisers, together with those defined as protagonists in the security drama – whether in the role of victims or criminals – at times gain pre-eminence in this particular Argentine seguridad story. To better understand the ways in which police governance may help to carve out internal spaces of exclusion within democracies, in the end overdetermining the scope and character of the government, I propose to treat police practices as a dimension of the regime alongside its political institutions. In interrogating the governing role of the police and their regimes of governance, the book also explores the police core of modern nation-states at a theoretical level, revisiting established political science concepts from a fresh perspective. The project involved connecting the dots, putting some salient concepts of the body of research on police power in a dialogue with others from political theory and comparative studies of democratization, with Argentina as a background. Whereas political theorists traditionally engage with diverse questions, comparativists’ increasing openness to the contributions of theory comes as timely and encouraging.6 This book conveys my own dialogue with other political theorists and comparativists, colleagues and students in the social sciences and other fields interested in the course of democratization and the impact of policing and security on citizenship, individual rights, social and political exclusion, and the quality of democracy within and beyond Argentina. Many people helped me to complete this project. First I want to acknowledge those members of the Argentine police who agreed to participate in interviews – and those who authorized them – as their voices and perspectives changed my own views in significant ways. Core questions and arguments leading to this book began to take shape during my time at the Program of Peace and Conflict at Colgate University. I truly appreciate the opportunity to work closely with Dan Monk and Nancy Ries, who decisively encouraged and challenged epistemological, methodological and substantive aspects of my research. Dan’s mateadas and Atahualpa Yupanqui tunes in the snow storms in upstate New York were, of course, one of those rare gifts that we the unexpectedly diasporic peoples find in life. ¡Gracias! My thanks to those who helped me to get there, in particular my PhD dissertation Co-Chairs, Leslie Anderson and Leslie Thiele, and committee

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members, Peggy Kohn, Philip Williams and Andrés Avellaneda at the University of Florida. They all helped me strategize and navigate to where I am now. My thanks also go to Aida Hozic, who was also in my committee, for her continuous encouragement, help and original suggestions which extended well beyond her mentorship role. I want to especially thank my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Union College for having so generously given me and my not-soorthodox political science project such a cherished home. I know I have been most fortunate in finding them, and they have been key to my intellectual and personal growth. Since my first visit I learned to appreciate Robert Hislope’s sharp and most stimulating questions, for which I want to thank him. My opportunity to explore, experiment and bring this project to completion owes much to Zoe Oxley, whose leadership over the years made the department a welcoming, fair and productive environment. I am especially grateful to Tom Lobe, Michele Angrist and Lori Marso for their close mentorship and invaluable advice, comments and suggestions – and the friendship developed over delicious food, countless lunches, dinners, walks and café conversations. I know how privileged I have been to have had such an original, rigorous, respectful, generous and nurturing theorist like Lori close by while working on this book. To her go my deepest appreciation and my commitment to bring such qualities to others. There remains another person to whom I am indebted here at Union College and that is Martha Huggins. The fact that Martha – a key leading scholar in researching the police in Latin America – developed her career while at this institution, has open up many possibilities and helped me in ways for which I will always be grateful. Outside this institution, I want to thank Manny Ness and Mark Neocleous, for their incredible intellectual and personal generosity. My recognition to Mark obviously draws on his ground-breaking pioneer work in political theory, which I ‘discovered’ sometime in 2000, through The Fabrication of Social Order. Since then, his prolific voice has been constantly present in my own efforts to engage the critical study of the police and security. My appreciation also goes to those colleagues who gave me opportunities to present my research and provided useful criticism and suggestions. Thanks especially to the discussants of the Methodology Workshop at the 3rd International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis at the University of Essex in June 2008, Dvora Yanow, Eva Sorensen and Sarah Hartley, as well as to all those attending the workshop, for their wonderful remarks on the key arguments underpinning this book. I thank Gregorio Kaminsky for the invitation to discuss my work at the programme on security at the



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Universidad de Lanús. Similarly productive were the conference ‘La policía en perspectiva histórica: Argentina y Brasil (del siglo XIX a la actualidad)’ in August 2008 in Buenos Aires, and the panels co-organized with Diego Galeano at LASA 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, the workshop and short course co-organized with Biriz Berksoy at APSA 2009, and Patrice McSherry’s comments on a previous version of Chapter 5 at LASA 2010 in Toronto. Through these meetings, also offering me with an opportunity to present my work at St. Bonaventure University, Mary Rose Kubal has become a main interlocutor and partner, whose camaraderie and friendship I truly appreciate, as well as Eduardo Estévez’s. My strongest recognition goes to my students – in particular to the Political Science majors who took my Police, Security and Bio-power, Challenges of Democratization, and Human (In)Security in Latin America courses at Union College – for their inquisitive and critical comments and interventions, which helped me to refine the arguments in this book. Similarly insightful were the comments of those participating in the Seminar ‘Seguridad, Policía y Gobierno: lo policial como dimensión del régimen político’ in the Department of Political Science at the Universidad Católica de Córdoba, in the summer of 2010, a short, intense and productive experience. Thanks to all of those whose funding enabled me to undertake different phases of my fieldwork and writing, starting with a Tinker Summer Grant in 2001, a Ruth McQuown Scholarship and a McLaughlin Dissertation Fellowship in 2003, research grants at Colgate University, and generous IFAS support and a course release SUN-Advance grant at Union College. I want to express my appreciation to the anonymous manuscript reviewers, whose minute questions, insights and suggestions were key to clarifying essential points and connections. My thanks to Jorge Aragón for his expert advice, and to Malcom Willison, Sheri Englund, Maureen Root Codd, Kim Storry, and Barbara Archer, among others, for their help in organizing and clarifying my writing. I would not have been able to reach this point without friends like Ruchi Chaturvedi and Mariana Geniz, who were always willing to listen and share their views, criticisms and suggestions. I thank both of them for their friendship and support. Nora Infante deserves special recognition for her insightfulness which was crucial to the organization and completion of this book. In addition, I am most grateful to Marie-Claire Antoine, the Senior Acquisitions Editor in Politics and International Relations from Continuum, in New York, for her encouragement and guidance in this process. Finally, I want to thank María and Manuel, for their unconditional love and uncompromising criticisms.

Chapter 1

Policing Inseguridad ‘We are 50,000, right? All of us with guns. All of us armed. In the street, you are lord and master of your actions… Do you understand? How can you control 50,000 lone men, 50,000 officers in the streets with a gun doing really whatever they want?’ so reflected my interviewee, a member of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires, often referred to as bonaerenses.1 These words could be those of police anywhere. They expose the police’s governing role. Government, which Michel Foucault defines as the ‘conduct of conduct’,2 is about guiding and giving shape to individual and collective behaviour. Policing involves direct, even coercive governance on behalf of the community.3 With authority to guide and regulate people’s actions and interactions, in modern societies uniformed police officers epitomize this major, if mostly unacknowledged dimension of government. Addressing its pervasiveness, this book approaches the police as governing authorities, scrutinizes police governance on the ground, and interrogates its links to the government and its political regime. Broadly defined, a regime consists of the procedures, principles and rules organizing a field of activity. When it comes to governing, alternative rules and institutions define typical forms of political regime. Accompanying the expansion of democratization, the study of regimes has developed into a subfield of increasing methodological sophistication. While the focus of comparativists, which I revisit in Chapter 5, continues to be placed on formal political institutions, a different perspective opened by the work of Michel Foucault prioritizes the role of governing practices, intertwined with but irreducible to the institutions and ideas linked to them. Studying how governments work, especially at the interface between policing and governance, requires considering both formal and informal rules, institutions and patterns of practices. Or to borrow from Foucault, to identify ‘regimes of practices’ and the relations between them in governing society.4 Taking life, the traditional kingly prerogative lies these days most often in the hands of the police. Nobody governs us as the police do. As one of my bonaerense interviewees stressed, thanks to their unique powers of arrest, search and the use of force, police officers can do ‘everything that a civilian

2 Seguridad

cannot’, becoming true arbiters of our fate. Police officers can intervene in the most diverse circumstances to enforce laws and regulations and to restore order if they judge it to have been disrupted. Unlike other public officials, in their encounters with citizens they can use force. Police agents can shape our behaviour, restrain our movements, touch our bodies, decide whether to guarantee, restrict, or deny our rights and liberties, legitimately override written rules and even inflict wounds or death. Appeals to protecting life in danger or to gathering criminal evidence often make police breaches of laws and constitutional guarantees justifiable in the eyes of judges. Indeed, what Leonard Feldman calls the ‘prosaic politics of emergency’5 embedded in routine policing may illuminate discussions of emergency powers in constitutional democracies better than traditional debates. The police have an impressive symbolic power. Through the descriptions and narratives framing police reports, those basic building blocks most of the time uncontested in the legal process, they also shape their surrounding world.6 By representing reality – for example, by characterizing a woman as a young lady or a prostitute, or by stating that some specific breach of the law has taken place, police reports generate events and identities and frequently define the fate of those involved. As if this were not enough, the police often serve as the sole source for news crime reports.7 On the scale of a whole nation, police agents seem insignificant, but the power they exercise in the streets exposes core state traits. If, as political theorist Kathleen Arnold observes, ‘it is really the subjects of prerogative who are the litmus test of democracy’,8 the power in the hands of the police calls for scrutiny. They are the state’s capillary arms, its tiny tentacles, preserving and helping to determine its social order, mores and values. Their bodies trace a decisive first line trench of governance at the bottom of the state apparatus. ‘We are the showcase of the state’, an officer from the Federal Police noted, ‘we are the first step that people meet in relation to the state’, he continued, conveying self-awareness of his position on the outer surface, at the bottom of a state that he imagines as a ladder. Also showing self-awareness, a detective from Rosario stressed that ‘we are in charge of the first contact. The first hours are ours.’ Without this swarm of agents of order intervening in interpersonal conflicts, discouraging people from engaging in certain behaviours and enforcing laws and norms, our modern states would collapse. At the same time, police power poses a serious challenge to democracy, as it too often undermines its preconditions, the equal access to and exercise of rights and citizenship.



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As a society with a pronounced fear of crime, where in recent years crime consistently ranked as the most important problem in public opinion surveys, Argentina offers an appropriate setting to explore the governing aspects of policing.9 Moreover, it represents regional trends, since Latin Americans first identified crime as the major problem in their countries, as did Latinobarómetro survey respondents in 2008 and 2010. Millions of Argentines seem sick from inseguridad, experiencing what the traditional newspaper La Nación characterizes as ‘general unprotectedness’.10 People elsewhere may worry about wars or terrorism, but what Argentines fear the most is themselves. It is the threat of becoming the victim of a violent crime that people call inseguridad. In turn, demands for seguridad conflate meanings of personal safety and security.11 Seguridad talk is powerful, it asserts that we should pay attention to what really matters: Things are bad; violent crime is rampant, criminals are out of control, waiting out there ready to kill us; things could not be any worse – and yet they are heading downhill. Things are always at their worst in hellish Argentina. Whether in its higher or lower tide, like a broken thermometer always giving the same torrid reading, such a catastrophist storyline has taken over the lives of many, unable to acknowledge relative improvements or local variations. Nations are always also communities of fear, with a sovereign dimension and a quest for limits, based on the promise to protect those recognized as members from whatever and whoever does not belong to them. Strong, organic links connect ‘an imagined national identity and an imagined national (in)security’, as Mark Neocleous points out.12 Such traits reach especial saliency in 2011 Argentina, where no influential voice challenges the assumption that more seguridad is better. Identifying seguridad as ‘the main preoccupation of our people’, the governor of Buenos Aires Daniel Scioli identified it as his government’s priority.13 Moreover, with the creation of the national Ministerio de Seguridad in December 2010, on Human Rights Day, expressing that ‘human rights and seguridad are the terms of a same equation’, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner boldly embraced the agenda.14 Consolidated as a central policy item by the media and political debates, in a democracy that has come to stay, seguridad has entered the puzzle of governance. This book scrutinizes life under conditions in which demands for seguridad take over the public arena. The book has a double purpose. First, by tracking the rise of a political agenda based on the fear of crime, it maps the formation of a governmental dispositif in democratic Argentina since the mid-1990s.

4 Seguridad

Drawing on Michel Foucault, by dispositif – often translated into English as ‘apparatus’ – I understand a loose, but covering, far-reaching governing net made of dissimilar elements that comes together in response to a social need perceived as urgent.15 In this case, in the Argentina of seguridad, the need demanding a solution appears as violent crime gone wild. As Foucault describes it, through the confluence, only in part deliberate, of discourses, policies, practices, knowledge and institutions, but also of ‘architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philantrophic propositions’, a dispositif appears as the web, network, reseau, or ‘system of relations’ articulating such diverse elements.16 Dispositifs may involve the education of children, taming the working class or the poor, responding to a rise in crime, or neutralizing the disorderly to make things functional. Dispositifs arise at different scales, we all participate in dispositifs and are captured by some of them. In his recent revisitation of the concept, Giorgio Agamben judges dispositifs the most encompassing concept, the equivalent of the universal, in Foucault’s thought. In the case of Argentina, with cyclical virulence, seguridad breaks society into two antagonistic groups, gente versus delincuentes, ‘the people’ versus ‘criminals’. As inseguridad heightens, voices call for legalizing the death penalty, passing harsher criminal laws for teenagers and children, and arming oneself against ‘criminals’, even implying the legitimacy of death squad-like summary executions.17 Such complaints have permeated the media, the internet, newspaper letters, conversations and political campaigns. It was not always this way. One can certainly trace back stories and arguments centred on the prevalence of bloody homicides and the fear of crime in the yellow press and the crime sections of major newspapers. But the generalization of seguridad as the main concern of so many in the country is new. It was only since the mid-1990s that pleas for protection, linked to a seeming rise in common crime and interpersonal violence gained political momentum. After 11 September 2001, the sharp rise in international security measures gave this local dynamic a boost. Seguridad calls for policing, and policing evokes the universe of seguridad. ‘Everybody comes to complain to us, everybody comes to ask us for seguridad.’ As an officer from the Federal Police noted, the agenda increases police protagonism. Treating police officers as governing authorities, this book’s second purpose is to examine the government in light of police power, an endeavour that is both theoretical and empirical. Through the prism of the Argentine police, drawing on a large collection of first-hand



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accounts of police voices, different chapters illuminate seguridad’s and police’s governing puzzles. To the extent that, as political theorist Mladek notes, politicians move to ‘govern largely through crime and security – that is, through the police’, the police themselves come to the forefront as the ‘street-corner politicians’ first identified by William Muir.18 Now, if in Argentina police forces have existed for almost a century and a half, and fear of crime, which translates locally as sensación de inseguridad or ‘feelings of insecurity‘, may be as old as the nation, why talk about a new dispositif ? The assemblage of security with democracy under a neoliberal framework defines the new governmental pattern, I contend. In Argentine history, as Ernesto Laclau helps us to remember, ‘democracy and liberalism were opposed to each other’. Having emerged in Europe in the struggle against feudalism, liberalism became the ideology of Argentine landed, patrimonial elites, who also embraced ‘Europeanism’ against local, popular traditions. Organized in the late 1800s, Argentina’s modern state at once celebrated liberal ideas and dismissed the democratic demands of the masses. By 1945, with the rise of Peronism, tension peaked in such a way that ‘Liberalism and democracy ceased to be articulated’, Laclau explains.19 Things got even worse in the following decades as military dictatorships combined liberal economic policies with endless brutality to subject and silence the people. In 1976, joining Chilean Augusto Pinochet, the Argentine military Juntas threw the nation on the path of neoliberalism in part as a way to destroy popular organizations. After the coup of 24 March, millions of Argentines found themselves caught up in a political and personal nightmare. Burnt libraries, hundreds of concentration camps, death squads, state terror and tens of thousands of ‘disappearances’ of those labelled as ‘subversives’, including their babies, were carried out by the state in the name of protecting the nation’s Christian and Western values. Security, and liberal and neoliberal policies became associated with the most violent authoritarian rule. Police forces played a clear supporting role in the countless atrocities committed by the dictatorship, with police stations serving as clandestine detention centres and the police providing the largest number of perpetrators after the army. ‘The historical truth,’ a detective from Rosario acknowledged, ‘the question of “disappearances”… that it was a police responsibility to a great extent is totally known, it is all documented. There is no way back.’ More than three decades later, hundreds of missing children, now adults, continue to be tracked, and perpetrators are still being brought to justice. In part because of the scope of the violence of El Proceso, it took some time after the restoration of democracy to identify patterns of authoritarian

6 Seguridad

and violent policing not directly attributable to it. Over time, as in other so-called ‘new democracies’, it became clear that policing posed obstacles of its own to the expansion of the democratic polity and the extension of citizenship. The police became a distinct subject of research for established human rights organizations such as the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), and the organizing agenda item for new groups such as CORREPI, the Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression. Police and public security reforms gained salience as a main concern and subject of political dispute. Eventually, after having been first imposed by the military dictatorship, as Ronaldo Munck observes, neoliberalism became naturalized as the only possible alternative facing globalization.20 A positive link between (neo)liberalism and democracy, however, was still not obvious and had to be constructed. This, I contend, has been the task of the governmental dispositif that I call Seguridad. If in the past invoking security reasons promoted military coups and authoritarian rule, democracy sets now the background from which a governmental regime emerges articulating subjectivities, communities and the nation around the fear of crime. Besides addressing the perceived need to combat crime, then, in Argentina, at a deeper, unstated level, seguridad turns into a governmental principle, offering a solution to the puzzle of how to make the unequal and fragmented Argentine society democratically governable without calling such fragmentation and inequality into question. As a solution at hand, increasingly haunting both the body politic and people’s lives, seguridad enters the governmental agenda.

An insecure nation With a population of more than forty million, Argentina seems distant from the middle-class nation it once claimed to be. If until 1990 the country exhibited the lowest levels of poverty in the region, today they compare to those of Brazil.21 In 1974, poverty hovered between 4 and 5 per cent of the population; in 2002, it had reached 57 per cent.22 It took less than three decades for the proportion of the poor to grow more than tenfold. By 2003, the wealthiest 10 per cent made 60 times more than the poorest.23 Consistent with this trend, Argentina’s Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality, was 36.7 in 1974 and 57.8 in 2002. If the truly wealthy were forced to report their income in surveys, these numbers would be even more pronounced.24



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After the country’s catastrophic bankruptcy in 2001, economic expansion eventually took off. Since 2003, exceptionally favourable international conditions helped the economy grow at high, sustained annual rates of about 9 per cent. Under these conditions, with remarkable economic growth and less than two-digit unemployment rates, inequality and poverty diminished. By 2006, GINI levels had moved down to 51.9, stabilizing around 45 in 2009, with values comparable to those of the early 1990s.25 Improved public expenditure, coverage in retirement pensions, subsidies and social policies like the Asignación Universal por Hijo helped. A fixed allowance that poor families receive to help with child expenses, the programme was launched by the Federal government in November 2009 to reduce the income gap.26 Aiming at covering 5.7 million, a year and a half later the Asignación had reached more than 3.6 million children. Echoing the recovery, in May 2011, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced that waged workers had reached a participation of 48.1 per cent in the GDP, a record high matching labour to capital in the distribution of wealth.27 Announcements included the reduction of the income gap between the wealthiest and the poorest deciles of the population to 16 times, and unemployment to 7.4 per cent. But not everybody agreed. The reliability of official statistics regarding inflation, salary gains and poverty reduction has been strongly contested since 2007, when the government intervened the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC), the state-funded, independent organism in charge. At the core of the dispute about facts and trends in Argentina lie estimates of inflation. For 2010, INDEC reported 11 per cent inflation, and for 2011, 9.5 per cent, whereas for both years private estimates went up to 23 per cent or more. Influencing assessments of income, poverty and inequality, such numbers draw on the cost of the basket of basic goods and services needed by a family. If one follows private estimates, using market prices up to three times higher than those listed by INDEC, the end of 2010 exposed 24 per cent of the urban population as poor and 7.1 per cent as destitute, this is about 9.7 million people, more than doubling official reports.28 Likewise, checked against private estimates of inflation, the average 26.8 per cent 2010 annual salary rise reduced to 2.8 per cent. No doubt, the first half of 2011 was exceptional, as the terms of trade reached their best historical conjuncture, exceeding the records of 1909, 1948 and 1973. Yet, López estimated that more than 51 per cent of Argentines lived in poverty or at its edge in 2011. If the economic boom led to job creation, the rising wage gap between formal and informal workers makes for forms of employment that do not reduce poverty.29 About 70 per

8 Seguridad

cent of the poor work in the informal market, doubling the overall rate of informality.30 While not negligible, then, the recovery has not sufficed to revert decades of rising inequality and the abandonment of groups marginalized from access to economic, cultural and political capital. There is a mass of the poor that the market cannot even at its best absorb. In the end, whether one chooses to trust INDEC or the twice as high poverty levels reported by private consultants, trends consistently expose the nation’s resilient core of structural poverty and exclusion. Argentina is still an unequal and fragmented society, in which an estimate of a million youths neither study nor work.31 If all improvements should be welcome, as Javier Auyero once noted, referring to improvements in the living conditions of shantytown dwellers compares to ‘redecorating the passenger cabins on the Titanic’.32 Such are the structural dimensions of poverty and exclusion, the material basis of the rise of seguridad.

Community of seguridad ‘What are they [the government] waiting for, for us to start killing each other?’ expressed Matilde, the mother of Diego Rodríguez, murdered in October 2010 in a robbery, at the largest march for seguridad after those led by Juan Carlos Blumberg in 2004.33 Still with memories of the December 2001 crisis, a turning point, a fragmented society calls for articulating new governing rationalities, identities and communal representations of the nation. Seguridad offers this, providing millions with a mutual goal and a common outlook, even if negative – just the certainty of sharing the same threats and enemies. ‘They are killing us all; the only thing I ask for is seguridad’, Matilde concluded. If thinly, the shared experience of fear links different groups, even the wealthy to the poor, in an imagined community of decent Argentine families threatened by unpredictable murderers. If all communities are imagined, as Benedict Anderson showed, and their imagination tends to be placed either in the past or in the future, as Zygmar Bauman noted, behind the more than six million people gathering in the streets during the Bicentenario, the two hundredth anniversary of the 1810 May Revolution,34 to commemorate the renewal of a diverse and inclusive sense of community, lurks the Argentina of seguridad. ‘If you read the Preamble of the Constitution, it says ‘to secure the benefits of freedom, to secure the benefits of security”. That is an inherent state function, the state cannot get rid of it.’ What could sound bolder than this policeman’s defence of seguridad, were it not for the slip he



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commits? There is no line ‘the benefits of security’ in the Preamble of the Constitution. A line of his own invention, as other products of seguridad’s semantic productivity, images like this authorize and disqualify alternative forms of representing local communities and the nation among millions of Argentines.35 Seguridad targets the criminal, represented as a non-political figure of dissolving chaos threatening la gente – the people. Claiming to target crime and criminals, rhetorical oppositions such as gente v. delincuentes often transcend the descriptive, turning into practical enablers of state violence that favour the spread of legal and illegal mechanisms which in fact exclude specific groups. In the end, those stigmatized as criminal suspects see themselves subjected to a police regime, governed merely through force. Police harassment, threats, abuse, arbitrary detentions, beatings, torture and ‘trigger-happy’ killings make up a repertoire in the treatment of those fitting this stereotype.36 If questioned about human rights, proponents of seguridad sometimes observe that rights should protect victims rather than criminals. ‘Where are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to defend the human rights of our children?’ chanted in 2010 a group gathering in front of the presidential palace demanding state protection from crime.37 Seguridad reorganizes people’s experience of reality. In Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin America, more than a decade of survey data show no clear links between personal exposure to crime and its perception as a serious problem.38 Yet surveys and polls confirm Argentines’ fearful preoccupations, which place us among the top of those living in fear of crime, regionally and even worldwide.39 Media representations, public opinion, victimization surveys, statistics, laws, policies and programmes, NGOs, academic and government actors, reports and publications, university degrees and fields of expertise, formal and informal institutions, spatial arrangements, policies and debates –now even part of the political Left – have all incorporated seguridad. In the view of analysts, this illustrates how judgements about the nation’s priorities stem from a national political agenda at least as much as from raw facts.40 The rise of seguridad as a concern in the 1990s marked a normalizing shift that brought together democracy and (neo)liberalism, historically at odds in Argentina. Seguridad condenses this programme. Starting at the most basic level, as a matter of individual self-governance, it reinforces neoliberal principles, governing rationalities, strategies of protection and the regulation of freedom. Like its predecessor liberal strands, neoliberalism frames questions in terms of individuals competing for maximizing gains in the exercise of their rights and imagines freedom as in need of

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balance.41 Moreover, it does so against a background of dangers. Far from those biblical, apocalyptic threats represented by plagues and war, Foucault notes, the liberal tradition represents life as constrained by a panoply of everyday dangers.42 Drawing on their minute identification, which involves the development of ‘a culture of danger’, liberal governance seeks to provide individuals and communities with ‘the least exposure to danger’, Foucault concludes. It is against this background that the range of choices and the interplay between freedom and security take place. Sure, freedom is central, we are told, but its excess can be dangerous. To prevent conflicts between individual rights and choices and the flow of commodities, peoples and capital, a balance has to be achieved between freedom and security. This is done through limits, controls and regulations. In the end, as Neocleous notes, the association of liberty with security opens ‘the (back-)door to an acceptance of all sorts of authoritarian security measures… justified on liberal grounds’.43 The rise of seguridad as a governmental agenda must be situated within this trend. Like ‘moral panics’ elsewhere, paradoxically in the name of freedom, it often reinforces authoritarian discourses and practices.44 As preserving life and property gain centre stage, after a governmental rationality through which, as Roberto Esposito noted, ‘risks are being artificially created in order to be controlled’,45 both the demos and its politics falter. Among those concerned with seguridad politics tends to rank low.46 Seguridad appears as requiring rather apolitical expertise and neutral, technical solutions – even when the ‘apolitical’ may imply allegiances to the 1976–83 military dictatorship of El Proceso, or to other more or less elided authoritarian agendas. In all cases, with its quasi-Hobbesian rhetoric, seguridad competes with more traditional concerns with political life. Seguridad, I argue, betrays an ersatz, anti-political way of articulating communities. Trying to escape the uneasiness of the plural condition of the human and the political, minimalist, as a programme for life in common, it is mostly about calling to identify, neutralize and eliminate those who put our survival at risk. It is, in fact, a police programme. The accumulation of abuses by the police, seguridad’s darkest and often deadly side, traces patterns of criminalization and killings of young poor males. With such killings on the rise since 2008,47 as seguridad summons police power, a new layer of governance comes to light.



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The state’s police heart ‘We are like a comet, like the tail of the comet’, explains my Federal Police interviewee waving his arms, conveying an image that illuminates my own inquiry. The pictures, narratives and repertoires evoked by members of the Argentine police disclose the police power’s at once local and universal character. The thousands of police officers in the streets may seem as unimportant as the particles flying around a comet’s tail, yet the power they exercise matters. Police interventions constantly create, extend and redraw state authority, reifying its bonds and hierarchies, diffusing governance and control. Having gained visibility in recent decades, this governmental dimension was already alluded to in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes. Judged the most enduring metaphor in political theory, Hobbes’ characterization of the state as Leviathan also owes its power to the book’s frontispiece, where a crowned giant wielding a sword and a crosier dominates over city and countryside.48 This ‘artificial man’ or ‘Mortal God’ holds absolute power as the remedy to prevent an otherwise judged inevitable war of all against all. On the one hand, the Hobbesian allegory presents us with a top-down system, where all power seems to come from above. On the other hand, however, the giant man’s chain armour is made of tiny humans. Magistrates, in particular armed guards and soldiers, whom Hobbes likens to ‘artificial joints’,49 are key to preserving the Leviathan. Whether through the comet metaphor of my police interviewee or through the individuals conforming the monster’s body, the role of grassroots agents in maintaining social order, governing, and recreating the state comes to light. A focus on police practices complicates hierarchical representations of the state, shifting our attention from the sovereign head of the monster to the little humans making up its armour. It redirects us towards multiple minuscule acts of governance taking place at the state’s terminal points on the ground, and to the procedures that intend to make individuals governable. Following this path, the case of Argentina in this book serves to reveal the micropolitics of policing as defining a major dimension of the state and its government. ‘Because we have a gun, who is going to say anything? We can pull it on someone whenever we want, and shoot as much as we want. After the bullet has gone off, well, we may have to account for that. But not earlier.’ This time a Uruguayan policeman speaks a truth that Argentines seem unable to acknowledge. Free to wander across social territories, authorized to intervene in the most varied circumstances, the police define the

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quintessential governing organ in modern societies. Each agent exercising police powers creates virtually a minute replica of the state, opening up legal limbos and – as Giorgio Agamben argues – opportunities for sovereign exercises.50 In its origin, traceable to fourteenth-century Europe, as the disarticulation of feudal networks accelerated under expanding market relations, the word police indicated deliberate efforts to maintain individuals and societies in an orderly fashion, recreating through new means the hierarchical order that feudalism had preserved ‘organically’.51 In subsequent centuries, the police developed into a thorough intellectual tradition, with hundreds of treatises, leading to the development of a police science with contributions from philosophers such as Adam Smith and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Echoing the tradition, Smith defined police as ‘the regulation of the inferior parts’ of the government.52 Later absorbed and perfected by the modern state to expand its own forms of order, admitting different political uses, police power draws on unilateral imposition through force or the threat of force on individuals assessed as threats or resources. Regardless of whether it is exercised in a benign or abusive fashion, to counter or reinforce what Alan Sklansky identifies as ‘patterns of unjustifiable hierarchy’,53 as it draws on force, police falls into the non-political side of the spectrum. Beyond and above the police officer lie the police organization and the police power of the state, or the state as policeman, as in its own encounter with the people, the security-centred modern state magnifies its police agents. At all levels, exceptional measures can always be taken ‘for security reasons’, as Walter Benjamin noted.54 The voices of police officers in this book shed light on these dimensions, while the Foucauldian concept of governmentality illuminates their governing facets and links. Yet, as we will see next, considering most of what the police do, arguments on the character, place and imbrication of police governance within the government and the state here owe to Aristotle no less than to Foucault.

Politics and police ‘Not all exercises of power are political’, Leslie Thiele notes.55 Power, the ability to influence others purposely, is political when drawing on the persuasive possibilities of public speech and deliberation, and when the object of deliberation involves the community.56 As Arendt best taught us, the political experience arises as a dialogue and interaction with others



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in apprehending the plurality of the world. If the inclusion of the many as part of the body politic expands room for deliberation and action, political power thrives under what Robert Dahl calls ‘popular government’ or ‘competitive politics’.57 Recognizing the most voices as political and extending opportunities for participation, democracy is the most political form of government. This is why philosopher Jacques Rancière conflates both terms, defining democracy as ‘the regime of politics’ par excellence.58 In this regard, Rancière’s argument matches Aristotle’s. Ultimately, Aristotle observed in his Politics, two irreducible forms of government coexist, political, or constitutional and despotic, or mastery.59 Politics is a relation that arises in the city between the free, relies on speech and persuasion, and involves self-governance, reciprocal recognition and the law.60 It is the form of living in a community of equals. In contrast stands unilateral imposition based on the use of force, as it was known in the Oikos, the Athenian patriarchal household. In Athens, citizens lived in a duality. Participating with others in a free, political relation of mutual recognition, in his household every citizen was a despot ruling over slaves, women, children, animals and things.61 As householders, their goal was to maximize resources and to eliminate any threats in view of the family’s welfare, resorting to force and – in the best case – following prudential guidelines. This order of things seemed naturally fitting with the Greek ontology placing beings along a hierarchy of worth. The principles ruling the Oikos gave rise to the science of household management, which Aristotle called oikonomie, and eventually also to traditions of administration and police. As a mode of governance, police comes to the forefront when the state takes on the role of maximizing the welfare of the nation treated as a family.62 Together with politics, this form of despotic rule, based on force, define the ‘two basic modes of state governance’ coexisting in tension through the centuries in the Western tradition, as Dubber has noted.63 In the antipodes of democracy, the most political form of organizing life in common, stands tyranny, or despotic rule. Relying on force and on suppressing public deliberation, the latter is the least political of all forms of government. Isolating individuals in privatized spaces out of sight where, outside the legal and political boundaries of the polity and the market, they are prevented from engaging in political action, seems key to reproducing despotic rule. In those conditions, exploitation and exclusion thrive. Ultimately, when oligarchic politics reduces the political arena to ‘palace’ politics, as under the monarchies and absolutisms ruling Europe for centuries, only a few individuals participate in politics, and most people are

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governed through force, in a despotic manner. As despotism approaches its boldest expression, a threshold seems to be crossed beyond which no politics – either democratic or otherwise – is possible. In his ultimate loneliness, the tyrant misses not only of the political experience but, as Plato noted, has no friends.64 In contrast, modern democracies build on expectations of full adult citizenship and access to rights, yet distinctions of worth and the treatment of some citizens as lesser continue to take place. As political philosophy gave room only to the analysis of political forms of government, and treated despotism as an anomaly, we lack the means to identify and discuss its surviving manifestations in everyday life. Keys for their analysis, and for studying their interrelation to the political forms, await in the Aristotelian text. The definition of la gente, with its positive meaning within Argentine parlance, or more generally of the demos, appears as the fundamental political problem in determining whose voices count as authoritative in a polity. If the political arena includes those already recognized political status, differently from Aristotle, we know that the scope of the public, the issues treated as political or as non-political, the boundaries between them, and the number of participants in political deliberation and action are themselves subjected to power struggles and political disputes. Rather than a clearly definable body, Rancière notes, the demos results from instances of ‘political subjectification’ as common people demonstrate, argue and demand, producing singular incarnations of the body politic.65 But it can also result from a political decision, as when in the past parliaments set property restrictions to the franchise. In particular, administering rights, life and death at the bottom of the state apparatus, police practices enact direct forms of governance that qualify the scope of citizenship and the quality of the regime. If in places such as Argentina the latter suffers under ‘police criminality and police incompetence’, as Kent Eaton observed, of course there is more to it.66 Police governance involves mechanisms that reproduce de facto exclusion from citizenship every day, neither illegally nor solely in Argentina. Yet except for general references to the ‘rule of law’, mainstream notions of regime types give the governing aspects of policing no consideration. In part, this seems linked to dominant representations of policing as mere law enforcement obscuring its governing dimensions. Despotic governance reproduces through the alliance and coordination of a number of governing apparatuses, all unilaterally imposing a form of order not allowed to become the subject of deliberation. As feminist theorists such as Carole Pateman exposed, the household is one



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of the territories in which such forms of governance thrive. In complicity, different instances of governmentality have traditionally prevented entire categories of people such as women and the non-propertied from gaining effective access to political participation.67 Both police agents and police power have been strategic to the perpetuation of such exclusions as well as to deny recognition to groups of people engaging in political action. Drawing on the continuities between household management, economics, administration and police, I propose to recognize this aspect of rule as a dimension of the regime and to study it alongside its political institutions. This police aspect of the regime contributes to maintaining concealed, unaccounted for, major forms of domination and exclusion at the heart of democracies. In the end, democracy and police represent two distinct, even antagonistic governing rationales. Policing transcends the police. State governance necessarily relies on relations of power sustained by a myriad of institutions. Organizations such as the church, the school and the family govern us as well. Furthermore, we govern ourselves. In line with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, acknowledging multiple territories and agents, policing illuminates critical instances of governance in which large and minute struggles continuously take place. Police agents coordinate the reproduction of governmental chains in the preservation of the status quo. Deepening democratization, on the contrary, demands giving visibility and politicizing all forms of oppression, exposing their mechanisms and subjecting them to public scrutiny and debate. That the problems posed by police governance to democracy these days can be traced back to one form of rule identified at the beginning of the tradition suggests that something important was overlooked, and the need for us to revisit and widen our ways of conceptualizing the government.

Claims and overview This book builds from the case of Argentina into a theoretical analysis of the police power mobilized by seguridad. Scrutinizing the police’s links to the government and its political regime, I engage in a dialogue with various literatures. Policing, I contend, needs to be more widely considered in the study of the recurring obstacles to democratization.68 Its informal rules, which often equal informal policies, all indicate patterns of governing practices that impact on the quality of democracy, the rule of law, formal and informal institutions, and the character of the regime.69

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Prevalent images likening the police to the military and proposing to treat them in a likewise manner reveal conceptual inadequacies that miss the autonomy of those governing the streets. In this respect, my study recognizes the contributions of critical policy studies in capturing the role of police officers as street-level policy-makers.70 Furthermore, if authoritarian police practices clearly corrode democracy, no one has yet conclusively defined what democratic modalities of police power should be.71 Police power has proven to be more complex than it first seemed. Stories and metaphors shape subjectivities and practices of police governance. Acknowledging and tracking them, both epistemologically and methodologically this project engages with the hermeneutic or interpretive ‘turn’ within political science.72 Moreover, police power is deeply discretionary, in particular when invoking the care of the community rather than the enforcement of the law.73 Its governing traits and implications bring it close to classical descriptions of sovereign prerogatives. Yet if this brings the project boldly into political theory, as Iris Marion Young noted, political philosophers, ‘do not generally discuss’74 issues of police brutality. Nor do most of them engage with police power. An illuminating exception, the tradition inaugurated by Michel Foucault, gives visibility to ignored or relegated governmental practices such as those embedded in policing. Recent, critical as well as Foucault-inspired work about security and police power within political theory influence my project.75 In dialogue with these traditions, this book exposes intrinsic links between seguridad, police and governance and the ways in which they affect the reach and character of the regime. To explore the opaque governing dimension of police practices, this book navigates different materials, empirical references as much as concepts and theoretical arguments, and makes two connected but different sets of claims. My empirical claims, focusing on Argentina since the mid-1990s, aim at showing the articulation of seguridad as a governmental agenda reorganizing life and the place and role of police governance as a dimension of the regime. To give further visibility to the governing role of the police and its impact on citizenship and the quality of the regime, in Argentina and elsewhere, data on policing should be assessed alongside the aspects generally considered in studies of democracy. My theoretical claims comprise Argentina but also go beyond. Objecting after Sheldon Wolin to what he describes as a ‘deflationary’ treatment of theory in a present-day political science, I engage with the tradition of political theory on its own classical terms which, borrowing from Wolin,



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involves the challenge for ‘the theoretical imagination to restate new possibilities’.76 What does this mean? We see facts and make sense of reality through concepts and the arguments linking them. They influence the ways in which we perceive and act. The emergence of concepts and discourses, and the works advancing them constitute events and facts of their own, which political theorists explore and treat in ways that compare to how empirical researchers treat their data, as they define fundamental ways of seeing and acting in the world. If Aristotle’s definition of the political, Thomas Hobbes’ representation of the state, or John Locke’s concept of prerogative matter, it is because – whether we know it or not – we still conceive much of our world through the concepts and arguments they put together. The work of Aristotle, in particular, set the foundation for the study of politics in incredibly pervasive ways. Comparative research on political regimes still draws on his insights, political theorists still struggle with his concepts and legacy, and, as I referred earlier, elements to conceptualize the police regime as a dimension of the government appear under what the ancient philosopher saw as non-political or despotic rule.77 While some chapters and passages are based on empirical references, others rely mostly on comparably influential concepts and arguments. To the reader not familiarized with political theory, the latter may seem dense, or at times even look like just citations of authority. What they offer, in fact, is a collection of instruments that, in the way of magnifying glasses, help to see and focus on different facets of the object under examination, that is, the territory of police governance. If the reader chooses to bear with me, at the end of the journey a powerful perspective awaits to inform her/his own analysis of democracy and the state in light of the police power. Key elements of the seguridad dispositif define the subjects of different chapters. Chapter 2 reconstructs the dispositif’s most visible elements, including its anti-crime agenda, defining events, public and expert discourses, actors, institutions, policies and reforms involved in its development. The chapter claims the ultimately undecidible character of inseguridad, whose reality and evidence cannot be separated from the ideas and discourses supporting the claims. A thorough overview of the available sources supports my claims. Chapter 3 delves into less visible, even unspoken conditions and facets grounding the emergence of the seguridad dispositif. After neoliberal reforms consolidated Argentina as a highly unequal and fragmented society, seguridad, the chapter claims, makes it possible to restrict access to the exercise of rights and to maintain forms of exclusion and violence otherwise unacceptable in a democracy. Data and testimonies show ways

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in which seguridad makes the excluded and the deaths of those labelled ‘criminals’ invisible while providing those who see themselves as threatened by ‘crime’ with tropes providing for an imagined community. Appealing to the protection of life, seguridad paradoxically cannot stop producing death, exclusion and the very threats it is supposed to address. With Argentina as background, the chapter retrieves the necropolitics behind the agenda of seguridad. Chapter 4 identifies the rationale behind the governance of streets and the people by the police. Embedded in police practices, the chapter claims, a hermeneutical mechanism sorts life and access to rights and citizenship according to hegemonic views of worth. By differentiating between categories of the human, ranging from ‘the people’ to ‘criminals’, police agents have power to define who gets to receive protection and who becomes instead defined as a threat and target of state violence. Drawing on the voices of police agents, the chapter presents seguridad stories and clusters of metaphors producing such oppositions as part of the police governmental routine of administering access to citizenship and rights. If a multitude encounters the state solely through its police, what do police practices tell us about the government? The second section of the book delves into different layers of police governance, moving from everyday practices of policing to a theoretical consideration of police powers, to examine the place of police within the regime, the government and the state. Chapter 5 connects the world of the Argentine police with research on regimes in comparative politics, investigating the relations between police and political governance bridged through the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. Rather than just one more external factor influencing democratization, the chapter claims that police practices make a core impact on citizenship and democracy by defining on a one-to-one basis, aspects as decisive as who counts as a citizen, under which circumstances our rights are recognized, or which territories are subjected to which forms of governance. Police governance encircles, predetermines and limits democratic politics, exposing a de facto multilayered regime with coexisting political and police forms of governance, the chapter contends, while advancing conceptual and methodological suggestions to treat police practices as a dimension of the regime or form of government. Chapter 6 interrogates the status of the power to police claiming that policing involves an exercise of sovereign prerogatives by individual police agents in multiple, simultaneous points across society. Drawing on the voices of police agents, the chapter assesses their power in light of different



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traditions, moving from the ancient and classical framework of sovereign power to John Locke’s theorizing about prerogative to Foucault-inspired studies on the politics of life. Acknowledging such exercises complicates established representations of ‘stateness’, and yet the chapter shows the theoretical soundness of the argument in light of the tradition. Questioning what is in the process of becoming as seguridad takes over our lives, the book ends assessing puzzles and possibilities in light of the common need for care inside and outside police and state governance. I contend that through agents such as the police, the state produces the people of the nation, transforms demands for care into demands for seguridad, carves out room for the state administration of conflict, reproduces exclusion and imposes and co-opts, neutralizes, or destroys alternative kinships. Empirical, historical and theoretical sources justify such claims. As life becomes destroyed in the name of its protection, questions need to be asked, such as: Is police power a contingent or a permanent trait of human societies and can we imagine forms of governance, the care of life and practices of protection outside security? Having come on a long journey since its birth as a goddess watching over Roman families, our modern Securitas, irritable and elusive, unleashes its fury. After its centuries of association with the modern state, defining a problem as one of ‘security’ convokes and mobilizes the state coercive apparatus. Thus, the only certain outcome of calling for more seguridad is the expansion of such an apparatus, and the perpetuation of the problem – namely, violence. This is why some now wish to move away from the paradigm of security, to revisit the same problems from an alternative perspective, in light of need and solidarity with the oppressed.78 Of course, these are not the terms under discussion in Argentina. Most Argentines believe in the existence of seguridad, and they want more of it. In the tradition of classical political philosophy, as Hannah Arendt points out, ‘politics is never for the sake of life’.79 The constitution of a political community presupposes the protection of life, but it necessarily transcends it. What happens, then, when survival turns into the pre-eminent goal of politics? What happens to the meaning of life and to our personal lives? What happens to the lives of the marginalized poor? In examining Argentina, these are the ultimate questions this book explores. My scholarly goal of contributing to political science coexists with other personal aims. I am writing this book to engage in a dialogue with my fellow Argentines, and to all others who are concerned about the ways in which democratic regimes fail their own citizens, by preventing minorities and the poor from gaining effective access to rights. I am also writing

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this book for the young, for whom we must keep fresh the memories and knowledge of the struggles. Writing this book is a form of micro-political intervention, of a woman obsessed with democracy since gaining full consciousness of what it means, after growing up in an Orwellian society, where people ‘disappeared’. Having witnessed in Argentina different ways in which the modern state rids itself of those it defines as outsiders, and going back to the roots of political philosophy, I propose that no regime that is not willing, in one way or another, to embrace its poor should be called a democracy. This opens a wider discussion, one that seguridad impedes and even militates against. For this reason, my book is about both personal and public seguridad and the role of the police.

Chapter 2

Inseguridad: How We Experience It ‘Criminals are killing us, they are sending us to cemeteries.’ Among the citizens of 19n Latin American countries, Argentines have reported feeling the most insecure and having been the victims of crimes in the largest proportion. Inseguridad gained top priority in public opinion surveys in 2004. Both in 2007 and 2010, the nation’s Latinobarómetro respondents identified inseguridad as the main problem, as did those answering the LAPOP survey in 2008.1 Almost four in every ten people in 2007 were afraid of becoming the victim of violent crime ‘all or almost all of the time’, and more than half believed that there was no guaranteed protection. In 2008, almost seven out of ten Argentines responding to Latinobarómetro assessed ‘the level of crime we have now’ a threat to the country’s future well-being. Despite yearly variations, these milestones signal the steady expansion of concerns with crime. By December 2010, a Gallup survey confirmed that ‘inseguridad has [been] installed as the most important item in the citizen agenda’ in the last decade in Argentina.2 The survey data in Figure 2.1 give us a glimpse of the shift in people’s priorities. In the decade shown in Figure 2.1, fear of crime rose more than tenfold. The reason may seem obvious. Violent crime in Argentina has dramatically increased, we are told, defining a premise that founds the consolidation of

Figure 2.1  Major country problems (selected indicators) 1995 and 2004–6

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seguridad. Yet such consensus invites interrogation. As alternative analyses privilege different indicators, sources, cases, criminal modalities and representations of crime, law and the type of social order desirable in a democracy, their comparison delineates an inconclusive picture. Rather than merely acknowledging a neat, pre-existent reality, seguridad installs something that was not there before. As a formative principle, along the lines identified by Dillon, seguridad produces its own materialities by organizing storylines and plots with ‘forces, victims and villains’.3 Identifying such ensembles, this chapter surveys major pieces, dimensions and agents surfacing in the rise of the seguridad puzzle as it is lived and experienced by millions. According to one of my police interviewees, from Mendoza: ‘In general, a policeman is seguridad, if nothing else for the uniform, because you know that behind there is not just one person but an institution. That brings seguridad. You see a policeman and you feel safe, right?’ For reasons in part common to all nation-states, in part unique to Argentina, the police are the ones administering seguridad in the streets, at the point where the state melts into society. Hence, revisiting inseguridad as the basis of a new way of governing Argentina requires listening to police voices. In what follows, after characterizing the dynamics of ‘waves’ of inseguridad, the chapter discusses the seguridad rationale of zoning and problematizes perceptions and data for their inconclusiveness. The three following sections map the institutions and agents of the governance of seguridad, both public and private, as well as groups within the population for how they position themselves vis-à-vis this central axis of governance. After delving into the epiphenomenal elements of seguridad in this chapter, Chapter 3 revisits its cracks and darker side.

Olas de inseguridad Inseguridad expands in olas, or waves. Allusions to a rising ola de inseguridad, or insecurity wave frame violent crimes as a connected series of events taking over the Argentine society – always at deeper levels. The image indeed suggests smaller ripples and wavelets spawning from within the larger wave. Its cluster of images range from ‘the wave of robberies, or prevailing inseguridad’ to ‘the criminal wave in which we live, with inseguridad and all that’, as a Federal Police officer and a bonaerense respectively put it. Images of a tide of crime spreading over major cities shape the collective imagination. The core wave metaphor connects representations



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of danger, demands for more policing and protection and proposals on how to cope with the threat effectively. When it comes to fear and ‘moral panics’, as Stanley Cohen observed, symbolization makes images ‘much sharper than reality’.4 These tropes recur in the media, spreading out through countless headlines and from time to time, magnifying inseguridad like wildfire. Olas of specific crimes, such as ‘express kidnappings’, rapes, attacks on the elderly, or ‘spider men’ entering apartment buildings through balconies or windows, have all had their moment. ‘There was a time, between six months and a year ago, that was terrible. Almost every day we got an elderly citizen murdered by criminals’, a commissioner from Rosario evoked. The wave metaphor represents the situation at hand as exceptional and calling for emergency measures. In turn, as CELS notes, the state’s response to the demands brought by every new wave shape the conditions for the next. Election years, in particular, have been prone to discourses and campaigns drawing on inseguridad tropes, as candidates may choose to raise the stakes, revitalizing the wave with promises of harsher measures to ‘combat crime’ and restore seguridad. In a question unfortunately discontinued, the Latinobarómetro survey recorded a sustained rise in perceptions of inseguridad among Argentine respondents. Over the span of a decade, those who felt that ‘crime had risen a lot’ were always a clear majority, consistently surpassing 90 per cent from 1997 to 2002, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2  ‘Crime has risen a lot’ Source: Latinobarômetro

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Confirming these concerns, the number of reported crimes more than doubled from 498,290 in 1991 to 1,062,241 in 1999, reaching a peak of 1,340,529 in 2002 and slowly declining to 1,218,243 in 2007. Expressed in rates, from 1,484 crimes per hundred thousand people in 1991 the record climbed to 3,095 in 2007.5 Given the somehow deficient official reporting in recent years, some believe that the rise in crime may be much more pronounced. For example, over the end of 2008, Eugenio Burzaco, the former chief of the Metropolitan Police, former legislator and the author of books and articles on inseguridad, estimated that 75 per cent of crime went unreported.6 Crimes against property – which roughly account for 70 per cent of all crimes – are the ones that people report the least. As data and estimates get thinner, perceptions take hold. By 2004, 43.1 per cent of Latinobarómetro respondents assessed their neighbourhoods as insecure, while 55.9 per cent in 2007 and 58.9 per cent in 2009 felt not protected at all by the authorities. ‘The news [reports] are mostly about inseguridad’, a commissioner and educator from Rosario observes. Public security is an eminently representational arena, starting with the perception of dangers, threats and their causes. Media crime reports escalate together with crime waves, and sometimes contribute to create them. ‘When you are mounted on the wave you publish everything’, acknowledges a reporter in an interview with Mercedes Calzado and Nicolás Maggio.7 On those occasions, even insignificant crime stories see print. Crime news substantially expanded in recent years. In the mid-1980s, they gained the cover of major newspapers like Clarín and La Nación. More reported since 1994, after consolidating in 1999, ‘crime will not leave the cover’, Stella Martini observed.8 Between 1999 and 2005, Clarín published a monthly average of 250 to 300 crime reports and La Nación about 200 to 250. ‘Catastrophe headlines’, Martini noted, gained salience by 2003 with the rise of kidnappings for ransom. The main crime reported by newspapers is murder. In unending replication from one tabloid to the other, murder stories produce the effect of ‘a long permanent death’, Germán Rey observes. Represented as ‘an event without processes’, Rey adds, murder targets an impersonal, omnipresent public, potentially any of us.9 A narrative plot of middle-class victims and shantytown dwellers, or otherwise poor criminals, organizes most media accounts on crime. Murders linked to robbery easily fitting this formula receive special coverage. Killings like those of Engineer Ricardo Barrenechea by ‘a gang of minors’ during a family breakfast in their upscale Acassuso home, and of Claudio Rosujovsky, another engineer, in



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San Miguel, nonsensical and terrifying, intensify each inseguridad wave.10 Both of these murders occurred in the Conurbano, the 24 counties surrounding the nation’s capital, which by 2002 was home to 75 per cent of the crime in the Buenos Aires province. With a population nearing ten million, pockets of extreme wealth, and hundreds of shantytowns, the area triggers the most fears. ‘Kill them’ is what la gente ask for. ‘Kill the delincuentes’, contends a retired military officer, in charge of seguridad in a municipality within the Conurbano. ‘Criminals are the enemies’, journalist and political scientist Mariano Grondona uttered on his TV show Hora Clave.11 Show business celebrities often act out the script of seguridad, calling for the harshest punitive measures. Among them, talk-show conductor Susana Giménez added her voice to the chorus proclaiming that ‘who kills must die.’12 Her words pushed inseguridad discussions into an ‘absurd’ debate on the death penalty, as the CELS Report notes.13 Argentina is abolitionist for all crimes. Spreading out of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan area, the rise of concerns with inseguridad in the late 1990s owed much to Radio 10, whose owner’s meteoric career as a media mogul coincided with the rise of a law-and-order agenda.14 For more than a decade, reaching millions every day, Daniel Hadad and his team alerted the public about skyrocketing crime, arguing for the need to make minors legally accountable and to give more prerogatives to the police. Encouraging the audience to participate by making suggestions on what to do regarding crime, the message was effectively delivered; seguridad talk was internalized, and a new set of tropes colonized mass culture.15 During 2010, CELS highlights that not even major crimes sufficed to trigger a national crime wave. In part, the report suggests, it was due to correct governmental measures, crowned with the creation of the ministry.16 To contain media rumours, in early June, 2011, Minister of Seguridad Garré circulated a press release. ‘Even though no concrete reports were filed’, the media had profusely covered ‘rumours’ regarding ‘grave crimes, kidnappings and human trafficking’ in the Buenos Aires neighbourhoods of La Boca and Balvanera that the ministry was unable to corroborate.17 ‘Public opinion is subjected to disquieting versions that do not correspond with reality’, the minister warned. To get a sense of the media’s influence on public opinion, a TNS-Gallup study shows that 70 per cent of Argentines get their news from television, 15 per cent from the radio, and only 7 per cent from newspapers.18 The ‘media from Buenos Aires’, as a commissioner from Córdoba explains, shapes ‘the social perception of seguridad’ in ‘other communities and

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places’ as well by generating the impression that the crimes portrayed occur locally. Crime news are a main selling point: The first thing one watches on TV news is all the violence, right? Suicides, they report… local newspapers report crimes from Buenos Aires, from the United States, from Sao Paulo… The title sells, and then only in a footnote they tell you where it happened… they are not transmitting reality… the crime is not from there… this is also how inseguridad gets constructed. Indeed, Rey notes, the media portrays crimes as piled up collections that look all the same, in no organized sequence, decontextualized.19 Emotional and dramatic, the obsessive recording of crimes overlaps with a lack of analysis, making crime grow into a continuum and giving shape to a permanent scenario of inseguridad. The newspapers’ ‘red ink’ style, describing wounds, bodies and criminal cruelty portrays individuals as viciously murdered for no reason, and thus as a threat to all. In August 2002, 60 per cent of TV news reports were about inseguridad. Of the 13 per cent dealing with politics, most news covered primaries, party candidacies and corruption scandals.20 Thanks in part to these media portraits, the image of olas advanced, along with a ‘new’ criminality personified by pibes chorros, or thieving kids. ‘New’ criminals are depicted as heartless, younger and murderous others.21 The police echo such representations: ‘criminals “with codes” are the exception these days’, one policeman stated with nostalgia. In the past, criminals would not touch women or the elderly because of those bygone ‘criminal codes’, which these days he judges ‘broken’. As one commissioner put it, ‘let’s say the policeman is standing there. If they have to kill him, they kill him, then go rob [someone]. That is, they first commit a very serious crime, as it is taking the life of a person, in order to commit a minor crime.’ Criminals would not do that in the past, he explained. It may be that, as a bonaerense stressed, ‘most of them… are under the effect of drugs’‘. According to another policeman, these ‘criminals, who are sometimes extremely young’, show a deep ‘lack of respect for human life’. Unpredictable, unruly, anarchical and potentially contaminating, these youths seem like true social enemies. ‘Crime – the criminal wave in which we live – ensues... I am not sure of whether the laws are not strict enough, or if they are not enforced as they should’, a bonaerense commissioner concluded. Concerned with the image of criminals entering prison ‘through one door and leaving through the



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other’ because of overly permissive laws, he declared his support for ‘tough on crime’ policies. A common trope of the seguridad crowd in Argentina, ‘the revolving door’ aligns with proposals ‘to cut the flow’ of criminals imagined as easily going free.22 Such proposals, fusing a sense of urgency, imminent threat, and pressure to resort to extraordinary measures, expand with every new inseguridad wave. Police agents on the ground express exhaustion. ‘Everything is exaggerated on TV and the newspapers. They pick statistics from previous years, add everything up, and the not so educated people who watch Show Match [a popular TV entertainment show] all the time read that and they get to believe that everybody is being killed. It is not that way’, one bonarense commented. A commissioner from central Argentina asked: ‘Who promotes inseguridad? Let us watch TV, let us watch the news.’ The policeman blamed the media. The media, in turn, relies on the police. ‘I am who tells the media the things they show, I know most of them’, a policewoman from a provincial capital on the Paraná river explained. ‘You know what you do not have to say. As my boss tells me: “Do not give them details, say this and that”…I, truly… I give them more or less everything I see. This is to say, not everything, for I would get in trouble,’ she acknowledged. If in everyday life police voices seem salient, they clearly influence the media. More than 90 per cent of crime news comes solely from police sources. Media representations assimilate crime prevention and safety to the police. Many perceive the police as ‘a more effective form of justice than formal courts’.23 In addition to producing meaning through police reports, the police appear as the main knowledgeable agents about crime and how to stop it. With faculties to arrest, criminalize and typify, often as the main or sole source of information on crime, perceived as authoritative regarding what needs to be done, at the bottom of the state apparatus, police agents have an exceptional power to manufacture the realities of seguridad. Beyond the media, some in academia also incorporate the wave metaphor. According to Di Tella, Galiani and Schrgrodsky, especially ‘during crime waves’, the cifra negra (the crime left unreported) grows and makes official statistics particularly inaccurate.24 A bonaerense commissioner agreed: ‘One is lucky to learn about 30 to 40 per cent of crime.’ Indeed, in 2003, 72.8 per cent of survey respondents who were the victims of crime in the city of Buenos Aires did not notify the police.25 To estimate how much crime goes unreported, in 1997 the federal government implemented victimization surveys, until their discontinuation in 2003. Relying

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on their own data, Di Tella, Galiani and Schargrodsky identified ‘sharp increases’ of crime in major Argentine cities during the second half of the 1990s, peaking in 2001. In a longer span, about 15 per cent of respondents admitted to having been the victim of crime between 1990 and 1994, 35 per cent between 1995 and 2000, and about 40 per cent in 2001.26 Following up on that research, in May 2008, the LICIP Institute at the University Torcuato Di Tella began administering a victimization survey in 40 Argentine cities. A year later, common crime, theft and robberies had gone up, particularly in metropolitan areas outside Buenos Aires, such as Tucumán, Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza (34.2 per cent total), followed by the Conurbano (30.6 per cent).27 By mid-2010, close to one-third of households in the country had experienced some form of crime in the previous year.28 Robberies with violence reached 45.8 per cent of all crime reported, affecting 16 per cent of households. In April 2011, reported levels of crime were the same than a year before. Despite the media privileging of middle-class victims, poor citizens are ‘the ones who suffer [from crime] the most’, noted a police officer in the Conurbano. Indeed, by 2006, the poor were 50 per cent more likely to become the target of crime than the wealthy.29 As my bonaerense interviewee acknowledged, the poor ‘who wake up the earliest and go to bed the latest’, live and move in the most dangerous territories.

Zoning ‘Seguridad has a lot to do with zones, places. Every place has its own conflict, and not all conflicts are the same’, an officer from the Federal Police observed. The spatialization of social relations is just another facet of inseguridad, after a concern with ‘places where problems arise and situations can get out of hand’, as a commissioner from Rosario explained. People venturing into areas where they ‘do not belong’ expose themselves to danger and risk being judged dangerous themselves. Zoning – the organization of space through borders and areas of exclusion – intensifies during crises. In 2002, in wealthier neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, panic spread after rumours of ‘invasions’ of the Conurbano poor.30 Debate peaked in occasions as when the mayor of San Isidro allowed the construction of a wall separating La Horqueta, a wealthy neighbourhood, from poor Villa Jardín, in San Fernando, allegedly ‘to block the entrance of criminals’.31 Following a judicial order, the wall was demolished. Of course, no judicial order can change the threatening perception of poor areas.



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Villas miseria, villas de emergencia, asentamientos de emergencia, or just villas are common names for shantytowns, seguridad’s darkest zones in Argentina. ‘Hardly a conversation about public (in)security passes without mention of the villa or the villeros’, Auyero refers.32 With precarious housing arranged in irregular, maze-like fashion along narrow alleys, villas developed after the 1930s, as import substitution industrialization based on the production of consumer goods attracted workers from the provinces and neighbouring countries to Argentina’s industrial metropolitan areas. Often strategically located, initially thought of as provisional places to stay, villas became a permanent horizon for many. Besides extreme deprivation and stigmatizing, shantytown dwellers suffered violent attacks, massive evictions and repression – especially under military governments. While shantytown life was harsh from the beginning, the dismantling of industrial plants and the dramatic loss of jobs in Argentina since the mid-1970s made many lose hope to see their conditions of living improve. In the antipodes of shantytowns lie ‘countries’ (i.e. country clubs), barrios privados and hyper-surveilled luxury towers.33 A new suburban geography developed since the 1980s, as some wealthy families began to move outside the city in search of a better quality of life. First, it was middleclass weekend housing in country clubs near highways. In the 1990s, favoured by laws deregulating the use of land, this ‘archipelago urbanization’ evolved into barrios privados, combining promises of social prestige with safety from street crime, as Sonia Vidal-Koppman shows.34 It was then the turn of ciudades pueblo, high-class gated communities including schools and shopping areas. After the 2002 currency devaluation, real estate developers gained centre stage with luxury housing projects targeting the international market as well. About 800 private communities spread nationwide.35 For those drawn to the charms of the city, luxury condominiums in Palermo, Belgrano and Puerto Madero, known as torres jardín, countries de altura, or torres country may seem a good option.36 About 200 such buildings and skyscrapers were built in Buenos Aires by 2005. Luxury housing saw a peak in 2006 and 2007, with developments in Córdoba, Rosario and Mendoza following those in Buenos Aires. Exclusive developments coexist with traditional housing. Together with forms of ‘mass private property’ such as shopping malls and movie-theatre complexes, self-segregating private communities neglect their surroundings and undermine public space.37 Spreading as ‘a mosaic of fortresses’,38 after the regional trend described by Diane Davis, wealthier communities hire private security services (about 50 per cent of common expenses go to private security) and lobby to receive more state police patrolling.39 Based

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on current norms, more than half of these communities could request formal recognition as towns, becoming true ‘private cities’, Vidal-Koppman noted.40 Not unlike the Brazilians in Teresa Caldeira’s study, Argentines of all social classes embrace an ‘aesthetic of security’, embedding security and surveillance devices in the design of their dwellings.41 While common crime gets displaced into poorer neighbourhoods, selfsegregation does not shield the wealthy. Both María Marta García Belsunce and Nora Dalmasso were horribly murdered – the first in the country El Carmel near Buenos Aires, and the second in a country in Río Cuarto, Córdoba.42 The investigation has not run smoothly. Private communities can be lawless in their own ways. Young dwellers of countries have been reported to vandalize their own communities out of boredom. ‘Nobody takes care of them. This is why now so many things happen’, observed a resident of a private community in Mendoza. ‘One time, a gang “robbed” a house just for fun.’ Often, teenagers steal cars for a few hours, explained another resident. ‘It is difficult to punish them’, as it involves confronting their wealthy and powerful families.43 In the ultimate irony, shantytowns arise near private communities after the demand for low-paid workers in construction, gardening, or domestic labour. It is as if these pockets of wealth produced the very evils from which they seek to escape. The Conurbano is described by a bonarense police officer: Atypical, similar to no other. It is huge. As you go, you find a private neighborhood, and as you leave the private neighborhood you find a villa. You leave the villa, go for two blocks, and find a middle class neighborhood. And perhaps then you go for two more blocks and see the countryside. It is very atypical this territory. Contrasting landscapes of villas and mansions, side by side, such as in La Cava in San Isidro, capture some distinct trait of the Conurbano. Hundreds of villas appear as one leaves the federal capital and enters its surrounding partidos or districts. While most dwellers commute every day to work and study, villas, Javier Auyero notes, are perceived as ‘no-go areas, “patches of crime” to be feared and averted’.44 Confirming such fears and exuding fatalism, a policeman contended that life in villas ‘ends up turning into a culture that goes on transmitting. And now you see that three-year-olds, not knowing why, throw stones into police cars. And when they turn fifteen, unfortunately, they will not have changed.’ Meanwhile, an officer from the Federal Police in Buenos Aires suggested visiting a few



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shantytowns to take a look at ‘the overcrowding, the promiscuous atmosphere’. In villas, he explained, ‘the notion of belonging disappears, the state disappears’, and people’s coexistence ‘functions in unforeseeable ways’. Villas are territories of crime and lawlessness, ‘where all these criminal kids come from’, he concluded. Like the media, the police metonymically turn shantytown dwellers and the poor into signifiers of crime and criminal suspects. ‘Criminals live or hide in shantytowns… use villas as shelters; they even have hospitals inside, it is spectacular… If uniformed police enter, they get killed’, noted the same commissioner. Public policy towards villas has moved from forced eradications, often violent under authoritarian governments, to relocations to, more recently, urbanization. Through the latter, government officials promise to provide shantytown dwellers with all basic services, rebuild public space, improve the commons and help raise living standards. Following on the steps of Rosario, the city of Buenos Aires announced the urbanization of major villas. Poor, marginal zones are not all the same. Villas differ from newer asentamientos, settlements now proliferating in the Conurbano. With regular patterns in the form of a grid, asentamientos consist of planned land occupations of public or abandoned lots by dwellers planning to gain legal recognition. In 2006, 819 villas and settlements sprawled in the Conurbano, with more than one million people living in them.45 The perception that police forces are insufficient to control such areas led to deploy militarized security forces – first the Prefecture and then the Gendarmerie – to patrol the borders of villas in the Greater Buenos Aires. After residents, members of the police and the security forces confusingly killed squatters occupying public land at Parque Indoamericano, in December 2010, the authorities responded with ‘social housing’ on course at the banks of Río Matanza-Riachuelo, the creation of a Ministry of Security, and more police.46 Such measures notwithstanding, as of August 2011, the newspaper La Nación reported that about 15 people continued moving into villas and asentamientos in the city of Buenos Aires every day, showing no changes in a decade.47

What crime? ‘As I was telling you, here they rob cars, they rob cars every day, many… but here they take them from the parking lot. Instead, in Buenos Aires, they kill the people inside to take the car’, a detective from Córdoba explained.

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Another commissioner, from Rosario, observed that crimes had worsened not ‘in the quantity, but in the violence’. Violent crime, it is the belief, has significantly increased in Argentina. Yet available data suggest a more qualified, inconclusive scenario. The most serious and least under-reported form of crime is homicide, judged a reliable indicator for crime internationally. In Argentina, the number of homicides peaked in 2002 before declining to lower levels, as Table 2.3 shows. In 1991, official data from the Dirección Nacional de Política Criminal indicated that 2,468 homicides had been committed, at a rate of 7.48 per 100,000. In 2007, the number reached 2,071 at a rate of 5.26. Sixteen years later, fewer deaths by homicide were reported in the country.

Figure 2.3  Argentina homicide rate 1991–2008 Source: Dirección Nacional de Política Criminal – Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos

Data compiled by the World Health Organization from 1979 to 2005 differ. For example, as Figure 2.4 shows, for 2005, WHO records 2,028 homicides, significantly fewer than the 2,731 documented by the Ministerio.48 While some WHO under-reporting seems likely before 2003, the figures come closer over time. Still, since the earlier gap results in different projections, one could use WHO data to ‘prove’ a higher rising trend in homicides. This is just a small example of how methodological differences around seguridad can be used politically. Homicide during a robbery is the most feared form of crime. Compiled for the Buenos Aires province since 2000, statistics show their rise, beginning with 38 in January 2000, peaking at 108 in December 2001, and decreasing after July 2002 to reach 19 in July 2007. In the same province, homicides linked to car theft climbed from two cases in February 2002 to 29 in March 2003, thereafter declining again.49 No data are available for the entire territory.



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Figure 2.4  Argentina homicides

A detective from Rosario with an air of a Raymond Chandler character observed: Homicide is unpredictable. Except for homicides during robbery, which are the fewest, the police will not be able to prevent them. This year [in Rosario] there were only six or seven of them linked to robberies. The rest are all score settling, crimes of passion, intra-family murders (parricide, matricide, filicide), which speak specifically to the social question. The homicides we have seen this year, sometimes we ask ourselves: ‘Why does the mother give birth to the child and a few hours later step on his head? …it is because of a social question: a lack of culture… the psychological condition also plays a role, intra-family factors. Homicide behind closed doors cannot be prevented. Overall, no explosive increase of homicides appears to have taken place in Argentina. This evidence will hardly satisfy the many who feel insecure, however, under the influence of what some refer to as ‘fear inertia’ which heightens with every new inseguridad wave. In occasions, accusations against the federal government thrive.50 ‘The government does not disclose any kind of data’, noted Burzaco, pointing the finger at the Federal administration.

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Also the newspaper La Nación has commented on the ‘reluctance’ of the authorities to publish crime statistics, observing that the Argentine society ‘got accustomed to living with fear, and the government responded…by neglecting the perception of the public, insisting, unconvincingly, that it was only a “feeling” of inseguridad.’ To some, the state turns into the object of distrust not only as the protector of life and property, but also qua statistician – as the gatherer of knowledge about itself. Suspicion about the latter came as INDEC saw its prestige and professionalism questioned after its dubious reports on inflation and poverty.51 With the credibility of state institutions called into question, alternative sources emerged to assess inseguridad. Online crime maps of the city of Buenos Aires and the Greater Buenos Aires warrant a special mention. Introduced by wealthy media businessman, now also a member of Congress, Francisco De Narváez, the system allows anyone to report crimes on the internet.52 Many in the Argentine security lobby support such maps, arguing that they may be able to capture unreported crimes. Following the drive to see one’s own fears materializing in statistics may bring problematic consequences, though. Inaccurate crime statistics promote politicians’ launching of plans ‘based on no data whatsoever’, impossible to assess, as the CELS Report notes.53 Sources ranging from state statistics and victimization surveys to media and interpersonal narratives compete in representing ‘reality’ when it comes to crime and inseguridad. Academia is now one of them. In its expansion, seguridad favoured initiatives of research, education and publications. In a few years, university degrees were created, conferences organized, masters’ and doctoral theses written, and state research funding devoted to the study of public safety. Besides traditional university degrees in criminology, seguridad degrees are now offered at public universities in Morón, Lanús, La Matanza, Comahue and Villa María, and in private universities in Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, La Plata, Mendoza and the city of Buenos Aires (in particular, at the universities of El Salvador and the Federal Police’s). Degrees in disaster prevention, civil protection and emergencies were created at the University of Litoral and the University of Tres de Febrero. Mariana Galvani documents the contribution of academic conferences to the constitution of the field in Argentina since the 1990s, and the role of publications related to police and seguridad ciudadana as well as periodicals such as Delito y Sociedad.54 Still, if policing and seguridad gained status as subjects of academic research, the urgency associated with this field in the public’s imagination threatens distinct academic ways of producing and validating knowledge,



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Gregorio Kaminsky and Diego Galeano contend. Perceived as a rushing matter, seguridad seems to call for experts rather than for researchers and intellectuals. ‘Efficacy, efficiency, effectiveness’, a pragmatism, instrumental assessment of means towards ends characterize the expert.55 Gaining salience in the production of knowledge about seguridad, interpreting trends, and advancing policy proposals, the figure of the expert, Kaminsky and Galeano noted, emerged out of NGOs and think tanks.56 Regardless of how much more crime there is or of how we define and measure crime, amid widespread distrust of official statistics, inseguridad ‘takes off’, developing after an inner, independent rationale that may or may not have to do with pre-existent facts. It generates its own data, it generates policy and it starts generating facts of its own. Thus, while public opinion studies – from LAPOP to Latinobarómetro to Universidad de Belgrano’s – show the lack of a clear relationship between crime rates, fear and media representations of inseguridad in Argentina, Buenos Aires’ lower homicide rate does not prevent many from feeling more insecure than people in cities with homicide rates 20 times higher, e.g. Guatemala or San Salvador. Ultimately, as a self-fulfilled prophecy, it gives rise to the anti-politics of seguridad.

Governing seguridad ‘You know, the staircase of seguridad. This is how I see it, as a staircase similar to those leading to a pulpit or to the bell tower in a church. Spiral stairs get narrower and… it gets very difficult. The first step, to go up well, is the step of seguridad.’ During his interview, an experienced commissioner in a city in the West imagined the government as a staircase with seguridad at its basis. Not that differently, the United Nations Millennium Report conceptualizes seguridad as a matter of good governance at the convergence of the rule of law, human rights, efficient and accountable state institutions and citizen participation. In Argentina, the 1992 Law of Internal Security (24,059) defined seguridad as protecting the Constitution and individual rights. A council of ministers and high-ranking officials designs policies. Their implementation is charged to criminal justice, the police, security forces and prisons, the system’s key components.57 ‘While the citizen has the state to protect him, the means… it is us’, noted a commissioner from Mendoza. Except in exceptional circumstances, the use of the military in domestic security is banned by law. In Argentina, the governance of seguridad is mostly in the hands of the police.58

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‘The police[man] is someone who helps by bringing seguridad’, observed a police officer from a small town next to the Andes. Both as an institution and as a collection of individual agents, the police define a major transmission network communicating all layers in which governance takes place. In a sense, it all comes down to ‘the police agent as seguridad, the uniformed [officer] who is able to guarantee seguridad in the street’, explained a commissioner in a provincial capital in the northeast. Beyond their initial self-description as law enforcers, most police agents ultimately identified multiple functions. ‘The police officer is a worker of the whole’, noted a detective in Rosario. Police officers tend to be mistaken ‘on the one hand with the military and on the other hand with lawyers’, a bonaerense concluded. A commissioner from Córdoba described being ‘forced to do judicial things’, despite believing that his main commitment is with ‘neatly police-like’ tasks, by ‘not only maintaining order… but mostly taking care [of the community]’. Helping a woman in labour, rescuing a child from a pit, deactivating a bomb, are also mentioned by a policeman from Rosario. ‘We are public servants’, he concluded, ‘we are there for any type of situation’. Meanwhile, a policewoman in Misiones assured to be ready ‘to help those who need you, whether in the street or elsewhere’; a member of the Federal Police from the city of Buenos Aires added that ‘we do just everything that is needed to maintain order’. The police work with ‘victims’, often playing the role of ‘psychologist, because someone needs comfort – a widower, a father whose children’s lives have been taken’ – all situations particularly difficult as ‘one generally does not return’ due to the ‘irreversible sequels’ they leave, the detective further explained. ‘We perform all kinds of functions’, a federal policeman observed, from serving as ‘the nexus’ between judges and ‘the common people’ to playing the role as ‘parents… psychologists… mediators’ and priests. Approximately 250,000 police agents patrol Argentina. In 2010, the bonaerense force was estimated to have 55,238 members.59 In addition to the police, two militarized security forces, the Gendarmerie and the Prefecture, perform police functions along borders and ports. They also gained visibility since the late 1990s in the policing of protests and have been given more functions recently. Besides the most recent additions of a special police body assigned to the custody of airports, created in 2005, and of the city of Buenos Aires’s own Metropolitan Police, the system’s main street agents comprise the Federal Police and 23 provincial police forces, subordinated by law respectively to the federal executive power and to governors. ‘We are civilians with an arm’, a bonaerense noted, acknowledging the police’s unclear status. ‘We are and we are not civilian… for



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some things we are civilian and for others, police.’ An estimated 250,000 police agents patrol Argentina. A commissioner from a provincial capital in the south explained ‘the Argentine Federal Police has been a sort of older brother for the provincial police forces. Nearing forty-two thousand members, this older brother, who had a much better education and higher standards… represented the other policemen.’ The Federal Police was created in 1943 to intervene in federal crimes across the nation through provincial delegations while serving as the police of the federal capital. The leading police force in the nation since then, the Federal Police is the only one entitled to patrol the entire national territory. They protect buildings and members of the government, represent Argentina before INTERPOL, play the role of fiscal police, carry out tasks of intelligence throughout Argentina, and, until recently, also made individual IDs and passports. ‘Security forces are the history of the peoples’, a commissioner from a city in Mendoza observed with pride. Like all institutions, police bodies tend to maintain the traits they acquire when first assembled. Authoritarianism, opaqueness and secrecy characterize the Argentine police. ‘Already since the school we are organized hierarchically… we either give orders or obey, there is nothing else’, a commissioner from a provincial capital in southern Argentina explained. Despite Argentina’s nominal federalism, historian Laura Kalmanowiecki noted that also in police matters the city of Buenos Aires imposed its hegemony. When the city became the nation’s capital in 1880, its own police were put under the control of the federal government to police national territories. The ambivalent reception of this transplant by the provincial police forces continued as the original city police became the Federal Police. Ambiguity transpires in the words of the chief of a provincial police force, who noted that the Federal Police’s superior standards rely on a very generous budget supported by the entire nation’s taxpayers. The federal district had its police unfairly subsidized by all. Transferring part of the Federal Police to the city of Buenos Aires, he hopes, will alleviate the tax burden on the rest of Argentines. Like its ‘sister’ provincial forces, despite defining itself as an ‘armed civilian institution’, still regulated by norms sanctioned by military governments in 1958 and after 1976, in key aspects the Federal Police remains untouched by democratization. On this, the Federal Police also represents the other forces well. Despite the almost three decades of uninterrupted democratic life, Argentine police forces remain ‘conspicuously immune’ to controls and accountability, as Kalmanowiecki described a decade ago.

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Except for a few districts, Argentine police forces maintain castelike parallel bodies of officers and suboficiales, sub-officers, or subaltern personnel. One bonaerense officer characterized suboficiales as ‘badly trained people with no good education’. Earning the lowest salaries, with a faltering education, poorly equipped and frequently working additional jobs to make a living, subordinate personnel take most of the burden of patrolling. Each group, officers and subordinate agents, ‘is used to talk at a certain level’, notes an officer from the Federal Police. Claiming no intention to ‘diminish or humiliate’ his subaltern peers, the officer’s remark achieved exactly that. More critical, a policeman from Río Negro characterized the two-tier ‘police institutional pyramid’ as ‘very cruel’ and ‘castrating’. A well-educated bonaerense officer also questioned the system: ‘a sub-officer, today, is a youth between eighteen and thirty-five years old who, having the same qualifications, decides to join one school instead of the other… for a question of time. And, then, for the next twenty-five years I – an officer – will keep segregating him from the rest.’ At least until 2011, when Minister Garré released Federal Police members from administrative chores and sent them to ‘to gain the streets’ of Buenos Aires, subordinate personnel were traditionally in charge of patrolling and most closely in touch with the population. In everyday life, they are the most tangible agents embodying the micro-politics of seguridad. ‘We are the Godfather of the governor’, a high-ranking commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast observed, evoking the character in Francis Ford Coppola’s film on the Italian-American mafia. Indeed, Argentine police forces respond directly to their respective executive authorities, whether provincial or federal. Subordination to the executive power coexists with secrecy as the basis for police autonomy, which opens the floor to bargaining – even illegal – among police chiefs, local bosses and politicians. Politicians, Kent Eaton noted, use the police in their struggles with competitors.60 ‘We depend strictly of the powers that be; hence, there is a lot of fear’, confirmed a young police spokesperson in a provincial capital in the northeast. The Godfather metaphor above betrays a darker police facet, their frequent involvement with corruption and criminal networks. The latter, as one bonaerense observed, define a ‘sadly’ ingrained subculture, ‘supported by the chiefs representing the institution’. If known as a paradigmatic corrupt police force, bonaerenses look admirable to a detective from Rosario. ‘The largest police force in the nation, it is an army. I admire their work… “It is a corrupt police force,” many say. Yes, but if it is a corrupt police it is because Buenos Aires is corrupt.’ Police criminal involvement, one of the most ‘pressing and intractable



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political problems’ in democratic Argentina, as Eaton notes, comprises illegal gaming, prostitution, robberies, extortive kidnappings and drug, car and women trafficking, supplying guns and ‘freeing zones’. A flourishing illegal economy unfolds under the police’s watch, with the complicity of corrupt politicians, judges and elites. ‘The drug that appears in the Buenos Aires province, how does it make it here? In transporting it here from Colombia, if it is not by crossing some border, I cannot imagine how it enters… and, the chemical precursors that they sell here, they must leave the country… How do they get out?’ wondered a young bonaerense officer. Argentina has served for years to transport drugs from Colombia or Mexico to Europe. Most domestic drug trade, however, involves small quantities sold by families. None of this could happen without inside help. Neither the estimated 5,000 selling points of illegal drugs just in one city, Córdoba, nor the hundreds of planes thought to bring marijuana and cocaine clandestinely every day into Argentina, none of this business could prosper without police complicity.61 Drug trafficking networks are now visible in the Conurbano, where organized criminal networks show signs of outgrowing their links with the police in ‘competition, and/or open confrontation’, Marcelo Saín warns.62Tolerated, and profited from by many politicians, these activities serve ‘the illegal financing of politics’ repeatedly denounced by human rights organizations. Knowledge of police corruption and criminal involvement is the main reason victims of kidnappings for ransom or robbery choose not to file reports. The 1994 terrorist bombing of AMIA, the Jewish community centre, is just one of dozens of crimes exhibiting traces of police complicity. From time to time, police apparatuses close to local or provincial caudillos commit political crimes that reach the media. Corruption, violence and human rights violations go hand in hand. Tainted with corruption, public security policies lead to ‘extremely distorted results’, a Transparency International report states. On a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 means no corruption and 0 high levels, the organization gave Argentina a score of 2.9 in 2009 and the rank of 109 in its Corruption Perception survey. Argentina fares worse than the media for both Latin America and the entire sample. More concerning, the country has been dropping positions quickly in recent years. ‘In general, a policeman is seguridad, if nothing else for the uniform, because you know that behind there is not just one person but an institution. That brings seguridad. You see a policeman and you feel safe, right?’ an interviewee from Mendoza observed. The honest answer should be ‘no’.

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Argentines have little or no confidence in their police. According to data gathered by the Americas Barometer (LAPOP) in 2008, 60.90 per cent of respondents believed that their local police were involved in criminal activities.

Reforms and counter-reforms ‘When it comes to seguridad, in general there are no grand policies… no radical changes… these are transitory policies that last for the time that the official in charge… remains in office. There have been many policies’, a commissioner from Misiones observed. Since the mid-1990s, federal and provincial authorities implemented police and public security reforms and counter-reforms, often improvising responses to public demands mounted on every new crime wave, or to resounding crimes and scandals with police involvement. Thus, the elimination of police edicts in the city of Buenos Aires followed the murder of teenager Walter Bulacio and others by the Federal Police. In the Buenos Aires province, the macabre murder of photographer José Luis Cabezas in January 1997, with bonaerense involvement, led to the most ambitious reform in decades. Reform followed the murder of high school student Sebastián Bordón by the Mendoza police the same year. As scandals exposed broad institutional complicities after the murders of María Soledad Morales in Catamarca, and of Patricia Villalba and Leyla Nazar in Santiago del Estero, the provinces underwent federal intervention. ‘See, here it is this way, but in New York, the mayor of New York imposed Zero Tolerance’, a young police officer from a small town in Mendoza observed. Many in the police look up to American police forces, deemed modern, efficient and not limited by concerns with human rights. American public safety doctrines such as ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘broken windows’ are also put forth as models to follow. Police and public security measures have followed ‘models’ presented as successfully applied in the United States and other nations.63 ‘Original designs have been scarce’, notes Eduardo Estévez.64 Alternatively, most governments left the public security in the hands of their police chiefs. Whereas authoritarian governments led to the ‘militarization of the police’, weak constitutional governments allowed for police autonomy. Autonomous, authoritarian, corrupt and violent police organizations thrived as a result. Police reforms confront structural complexities, such as perennial tensions between high-ranking officers and street-level bureaucrats around



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the latter’s discretion. Despite the efforts of top officials, as Michael Lipsky noted, grassroots officers ‘conspicuously create capacities to act with discretion and hang on to discretionary capacities’.65 As with bureaucracies in general, these traits are core to the police. In varying degrees, each individual police agent in the street is able to exercise discretionary prerogatives. In Argentina, public security reforms take place between paradoxes, Eaton observed. Federal and provincial governments sabotage each other’s reform initiatives for political gain. Electoral competition simultaneously pushes and obstructs reforms, as voters’ expectations clash with politicians’ needs for campaign funding even illegally obtained through the police. Mounted on crime waves, society’s demand for hard-core policing tends to undermine police reforms. Subordinated to the electoral calendar, undergoing frequent reversals, reforms generate exhaustion and cynicism. Policy oscillations and turnarounds, even within the same governments, delineate a system that may appear as liberal and repressive at the same time. For more than a decade, mano dura and garantismo (‘guaranteeism’) or equivalent expressions such as human rights or mano blanda (‘soft hand’) framed the debate on public security in Argentina. ‘[It’s] neither mano dura nor mano blanda: [now] mano justa’, former chief Burzaco claimed. The image of tough, soft, or just hands seems central in representing criminal and public security policies. Mano dura or tough hand views tend to attribute moral causes to crime, to securitize it through ‘war on crime’ tropes, to deem accountability superfluous, and to justify all means to chase suspects and maintain order. Such tropes gain salience during crime waves, as well as during electoral campaigns. The mano dura rhetoric peaked in 1999, when in his electoral campaign for the Buenos Aires province governorship Carlos Ruckauf infamously called for ‘filling in criminals with bullets’. Known police figures form part of that universe: There have been police officers of renown, as some say about Patti, who was a very good investigator, a mano dura man. But others link him to repression. Others, like ‘Malevo’ Ferreyra in Tucumán, he was a man with a great mano dura… Other policemen of renown, from the Federal Police, include ‘Fino’ Palacios. These eloquent examples offered by my interviewee, a detective from Rosario, seem also most problematic. Luis Patti – whose notoriety in the 1990s as a ‘model policeman’ helped his promising political career, was sentenced to life in prison in April 2011 for crimes against humanity

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committed under the dictatorship. ‘If one interprets mano dura as solving criminal cases, it is fine. There is nothing else’,66 Patti described in my short interview with him, concluding by characterizing seguridad as an activity that transita muchas veces por el barro (often takes place in a muddy place). The other mano dura figure mentioned by the detective above, ‘Malevo’ Ferreyra, committed suicide on live TV by shooting himself, in November 2008, as members of security forces approached his house with an arrest order. Given a life sentence in 1993 under numerous homicide charges, Ferreyra had escaped prison. Eventually, his suspected participation in torture and killings in one clandestine death camp during the military dictatorship led to an issue for his arrest, which he chose to confront in such a horrific, spectacular manner. Finally, the career of the third policeman mentioned by the detective, ‘Fino’ Palacios, apparently also ended after charges of illegal phone tapping and spying during his short tenure as the head of the Metropolitan Police. A core of illegal violence transpires in mano dura references when the figures one chooses to exemplify good police investigation appear linked to the disregard for civil liberties and human rights. At the core of the mano dura lobby, Jorge Casanovas, a former Buenos Aires minister of security, once explained that the ‘conflict is, whether we are on the side of the people or with criminals’. Gente v. delincuentes, people versus criminals, are key terms, especially in the tradition once known as mano dura. In the hands of the police, as we will see in Chapter 5, their identities materialize every day in the streets. ‘If I give the criminal more benefits than the honest [people], I will get high numbers of criminals’, a bonaerense commissioner from San Isidro stressed, concluding: These days, only the criminal has any human rights. But the honest [man], the common neighbor does not have the minimal human right to transit the street. And if a police officer goes too harsh and slaps the criminal, the human rights group comes. Portraying criminals as enjoying the rights that decent citizens have lost under their siege, heightened by the media, the police and some politicians, fear of crime leads many to support mano dura policies. On the other end of the spectrum, human rights-minded reformers challenge images of ‘order without rights’ and stress the need to reduce police prerogatives. Rather than an obstacle to public safety, as suggested by the policeman above, rights should be among its main policy goals. The



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latter, a confluence of safety and rights, characterizes seguridad ciudadana, democracy’s official paradigm in Argentina. Seguridad ciudadana acknowledges the legitimacy of demands for safety while stressing democratic values. In contrast to the National Security Doctrine conducive to military coups and human rights violations in the past, citizen security aspires to protect individual rights, the rule of law and democracy. In a way nuancing the United Nations tradition of human security, citizen security casts violent crime as a threat to personal liberty and to the potential for human development. In 1997, the Argentine federal government introduced these concepts in the first draft of Argentina’s Plan of Crime Prevention, ambitiously launched in 2000 and subsequently re-launched in other opportunities. Yet facing pressure during crime waves, at times even public figures known for their human rights allegiances have added their voices to the seguridad crowd. ‘The police work and make arrests, and the judiciary lets [criminals] go’, President Fernández de Kirchner once noted, asking judges not to set people free. Many complain about the judiciary. As a bonaerense commissioner observed: ‘The judiciary does not accompany us in our race against inseguridad. Because I chase the criminal, and I arrest him. Yet, who is the one who sets him free?’ Still another policeman from Córdoba explained: Many times, after making an arrest, I have been declaring, and the judge… released the suspect before I finished giving testimony… Cases involving drugs, federal crimes, in which it has taken me longer to declare than the time the detainee stayed… then, one feels powerless, demoralized. Like the President and this policeman, many Argentines question what they see as the judiciary’s permissiveness towards criminals. Not only criminal justice, but also public security authorities gather criticisms. Whether because of the background of most experts and politicians in the legal professions, many underestimate or despise as pathological the role of discretionary power in policing, the non-instrumental dimensions of police work, and the structural autonomy of police power within the modern state. Metaphors of control, subjection and the rule of law linked to policing among Argentine seguridad experts and political leaders treat police discretionary power as an anomaly that they judge possible to eliminate through laws and reforms. Irradiating from the 1992 Law of Internal Security, the ‘political conduction’ of the police and the security forces has become a pervasive

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metaphor in Argentina. The main problem with the police, many say, consists of their desgobierno politico, or lack of political governance. Objecting to police autonomy, Saín argued that they ‘must constitute the instrument of the public security system’ after civilian and political leadership. Saín stressed the need to ensure the political governance of seguridad, to transform the criminal justice and prison systems, and to decentralize public security policies to reach local communities. Despite profound differences regarding to whom and to whose authority the police should be subjected, most Argentine seguridad experts and policy-makers alike portray the police as a body that can be made docile, and the state as a neat hierarchical apparatus in which top officers command and subordinates obey and execute. Both the state and the dynamics of policing seem drawn just along the vertical, formal lines of legal and military models. Dismissing police autonomy and discretion, reforms mobilize a power whose scope they only partially acknowledge (i.e. only in its vertical dimension) while leaving its lethal potential intact. The dismissal of key traits of police power, running across the ideological spectrum, may contribute to the repeated failure of reforms. Moving beyond vague allusions to properly conducted law enforcement, debate on the appropriate uses of police power and police discretion in a democracy remains a pending task. In the meantime, regarding the exercise of their discretionary faculties, the police remain left to their own. ‘In 1983 everything was ready for changing things completely, and they let [the opportunity] slip by. And, then, when the situation with Arslanián exploded, they let it slip by again’, a young bonaerense officer commented. Before the ongoing reforms carried out from the new federal Ministerio de Seguridad, historian Osvaldo Barreneche judged the police reforms conducted by León Arslaniánin the Buenos Aires province after 1997 and again in 2004 the most ambitious since the 1940s. Arslanián, who served at the 1985 historical trials against the military Juntas and then as Argentina’s Minister of Justice, in 1997 started advising the governor of Buenos Aires Eduardo Duhalde, when a crisis erupted after corruption and murder scandals involving the bonarense police. Soon afterwards, he was appointed Minister of Security in the province. Justifying his decisive measures as a minister, including the purging of thousands of police officers, Arslanián argued that democratic governments after 1983 had negotiated with the police to avoid prosecuting police officers who had participated in death squads during the dictatorship of El Proceso, and who had ties to the military and organized crime. Negotiating



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with such a corrupt force, however, brought ‘lethal’ consequences, he observed. Thus, the need to purge the police from members involved in corruption and violence, he maintained. After purging the top hierarchy of the police, firing thousands of police agents with criminal or disciplinary records, Arslanián divided the bonaerense into four different bodies devoted to judicial, investigative, security and traffic matters spread in 18 district delegations. Laws were passed setting police standards and guidelines, instituting offices to investigate corruption and misconduct, unifying police schools, introducing curricular innovations such as human rights courses, regulating private security firms, and establishing neighbourhood forums as the core vehicle for community participation in the governance of public security. ‘Neighborhood fora, one around each police station; municipal forums, one per municipality’; such was Arslanián’s motto. Arslanián’s reform initiatives made progress until running into local networks of corruption with police and politician involvement. Supporting their police allies, mayors resisted further change, while community forums met police resistance and sabotage. Confronting opposition within the Justicialista party, amid rising fear of crime, given the impending elections Governor Duhalde interrupted the reform. The election of right-wing Peronist Ruckauf as the new governor in 1999, after his violent campaign promises, started a ‘police counter-reform’ undoing all the measures introduced by Arslanián. Police officers who had supported the reform faced serious trouble for having expressed such allegiances, my bonaerense interviewees reported. As Ruckauf’s mano dura approach did not help reduce crime rates or people’s fears, after the crisis of December 2001, new elections, and a few more seguridad ministers, in the middle of yet another crisis, Governor Felipe Solá called back Arslanián in April 2004. The trigger, one of seguridad’s highest peaks in the last decade, brought a ‘common citizen’ to the frontlines. On 24 March 2004, the media reported that the body of Axel Blumberg, a college student kidnapped for ransom, had been found in a wasteland. In the following months, Juan Carlos Blumberg, Axel’s father, mobilized hundreds of thousands of citizens into the streets. Blumberg, stressing his condition as a father who had lost his child, and as a simple, hardworking, law-abiding, apolitical tax-paying citizen, spoke on behalf of ‘all the children of an insecure Argentine’. As articulated by the movement, seguridad antagonized human rights. Presented as part of a leftist agenda protecting common and political criminals, human rights were portrayed as a main source of inseguridad. As Blumberg expressed in his third major

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rally in September 2004, ‘here, human rights are not for people like yourselves but only for criminals’. Heading a so-called crusade ‘for the life of our children’, he demanded the state seguridad to protect families and communities. Treating the death of Axel as the product of a loss of community, Blumberg called for its restoration, which in his view required dramatic changes in Argentine criminal justice and its doctrinal foundation, as Susana Murillo observes.67 His demands included increasing prerogatives to allow police officers to stop and search citizens in the street without a warrant and extending the maximum prison time from 25 to 50 years. The petition got more than five million signatures of support. Through four massive marches to Congress and the Courthouse in Buenos Aires, vigils, Catholic masses and interreligious ceremonies, Blumberg positioned himself as a main interlocutor of the state. The aesthetics, politics, tropes and forms of participation in the Blumberg marches – including candles, silence, proclaimed apolitical positions and prayers – speak of what Calzado calls ‘insecure democracies’ with ‘reactive citizens’. Blumberg gained access to the highest authorities, including President Néstor Kirchner, and attended formal ceremonies in his role as ‘civil society leader’. Soon afterwards, the executive announced a new plan of seguridad for 2004–09. In just a few months in 2004, Blumberg successfully lobbied to reform the Penal Code and to replace the city of Buenos Aires’ Código de Convivencia with harsher norms, while persuading Congress to pass roughly a dozen laws that became known as ‘Blumberg Laws’. Although Blumberg’s star waned almost as quickly as it had risen, the movement – and the mores and norms it left behind – defined a salient peak in the rise of seguridad. It exposed the porous texture of Argentine politics and the chances for anyone mounted on a crime scare to lobby successfully outside established channels. Moreover, as Laura Glanc noted, it consolidated ‘a democratic demand for security that itself contains authoritarian claims’ in present Argentina.68 In what the newspaper Clarín described as a ‘non-linear’ response on the part of the authorities, and Blumberg judged ‘madness’, Arslanián was invited to take back on the leadership of public security in the Buenos Aires province.69 ‘Either we decentralize, or we cannot govern this institution’, the minister observed. In this second tenure, Arslanián created municipal police forces in small towns and a new provincial police body, the Policía de Buenos Aires 2, devoted to crime prevention, among other measures aiming at better organizing and controlling police work. Arslanián aspired to deepen forums’ decision-making capabilities.



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Yet in 2007, once again sabotaged by mayors and police networks, the minister left the post. Under his successor Stornelli, the reform was again thoroughly undone. Governor Daniel Scioli went further to dismantle the provincial seguridad ministry. Amid regressive measures, the police regained the governance of public security in the province. National initiatives capitalized Arslanián’s experience. Convinced that the centre-left ‘should not leave seguridad to the political right’, alliances were forged between human rights advocates and progressive political and civil society leaders. The Acuerdo para la Seguridad Democrática, presented to Congress in December 2009, one such initiatives, included experts such as Arslanián and Saín, academics, human rights organizations such as CELS and the Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo, and former governors and leaders from different political parties seeking to articulate alternative policies. ‘A good security policy protects all persons equally without making any distinction’, Horacio Verbitsky, from CELS, voiced the group’s premise. The Acuerdo announced the implementation of an observatory on crime and violence and a network to coordinate academic research. After police violence leading to deaths followed the occupation of public land by squatters in Parque Indoamericano in mid-December 2010, President Fernández de Kirchner created a federal Ministry of Seguridad, putting former Minister of Defence Nilda Garré in charge. A few days later, the President stressed the ‘right to seguridad’ as a key dimension of citizenship. The President also announced Operation Centinela, sending 6,000 members of the Gendarmerie to patrol the Conurbano.70 Several such operations were launched in the following months in different districts. With these measures, Fernández de Kirchner addressed the ‘problem of public security’ that Steven Levistky and María Victoria Murillo anticipated as one of the major challenges of her administration. Leaders of the Acuerdo para la Seguridad Democrática voiced their support for the creation of the Ministry, a ‘historical opportunity’ to carry out reforms tending to ‘guarantee the political leadership of the federal security system’ under democratic auspices. Stressing the need to ‘end police forces self-government while leaving the military mold behind’, Minister Garré sought to consolidate the ‘political conduction’ of the Federal Police, renewing police leadership, releasing police officers from administrative tasks to send them to patrol the streets, reviewing protocols for police intervention in public space, and launching the Plan Nacional de Participación Comunitaria. The latter convoked NGOs and citizens to take part in controlling the police through ‘social forums’ throughout the nation. Under the motto ‘The right to seguridad, state duty,

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the work of all’, the Plan was first implemented in the city of Buenos Aires.71 Trusting to advance a ‘democratic’ form of seguridad, the minister and her supporters welcomed such reforms. The apparent dissimilar approach to public security implemented by the governor of the Buenos Aires province, Daniel Scioli, did not prevent the ministry from close collaboration with the province. ‘What I think is that governments play politics with us, and they make a fortune with us. The [provincial] Ministry is a money-making machine for big politicians. Do you understand?’ asked an experienced bonaerense after telling me about the defective bullet-proof vests and the never-reallyarmoured armoured police cars they were given to work. Experts and plans may change, but political dynamics have not. Launched loudly after scandals and crises, public security policies and reforms lack monitoring and continuation, and tend to wane or even to be reversed after new scandals or in the proximity of elections. Only time will tell whether the new national Ministerio de Seguridad helps to transform this dynamics or rather reinforces it. Regardless of whether the reformers’ beliefs in ‘democratic seguridad’ prove correct, or if their proposals result into heightened yet legitimized as ‘democratic’ forms of state repression, one thing is certain: by virtue of engaging in the debate, they will all have contributed to consolidate seguridad as a priority and as a field. The seguridad wave sedimented. In the meantime, at the bottom of the state apparatus, the police increasingly share tasks with private guards, situated at the threshold where the state melts into society.

Seguridad, the industry ‘Money… and several branches of activity come out of police work.’ In our conversation, a commissioner in Rosario highlighted the positive implications of ‘the work of the policeman in the street’, who, as he explained, promotes services and industries, and the work of lawyers, judges and the media. Whether this is true of the police, private security brings this potential to a new level. CAESI, the Argentine private security association, estimates the sector’s annual profits at about two billion dollars. Other estimates rise up to ten billion pesos, or about 2.5 billion dollars – a sum that exceeds the nation’s entire public security budget. Private, yet also part of the public security system, the sector’s expansion parallels the fear of crime. Making its appearance in the 1960s, private security took off in the early 1990s. A retired Federal Police commissioner, turned into an executive at



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a private security company, judged the expansion of the sector a consequence of ‘the complexity of our present world’, where ‘critical resources’ are increasingly in private hands. ‘The media, transportation services and systems, water, energy… in the USA, private companies administer even prisons.’ As part of this trend, he concluded, ‘private security gets more important every day’. In Argentina, while state norms limit private security companies to surveillance, the services offered range from home and workplace protection to tracking, security guards, bodyguards, truck escorts, electronic security, cash transportation, investigation, spying and data security. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the police defined norms and standards for private security services in each jurisdiction, which gave commissioners substantial opportunities to shape the field and to take advantage of their position to create new firms. Things have since changed, yet still no federal law regulates the industry, which remains subjected to local norms. To operate in different jurisdictions, companies have to apply for a license in all of them, Lucía Dammert notes. An estimated 164,000 private guards protect buildings, shopping malls, banks, neighbourhoods and schools in Metropolitan Buenos Aires – twice as many as the police agents in the area. Most private guards cannot carry guns; only 5 to 6 per cent report doing so. Private security companies appear as an attractive placement for retiring high-ranking military officers and policemen, who make up to 90 per cent of owners and top management. Federico Lorenc Valcarce found that managers with a military background often left the force because of the military’s relative loss of salary and prestige. This contrasts with those joining private security after their forced retirements in the past, as it happened after carapintada rebellions.72 All in all, Lorenc Valcarce noted, the market of private security benefits from ‘qualifications and legitimacies’ acquired from the state in the performance of police and military functions. Indeed, the transformation of former police and military agents into businessmen, moved by strong profit incentives, gives the industry its distinct traits. These individuals bring ‘forms of thinking and action acquired… within state armed bodies’, and they have power to define formal and informal rules shaping the new field. According to my police interviewees, the industry provides second and third jobs for overworked, underpaid police subordinate personnel. An officer from the Federal Police explained: Many people hire surveillance services, they request police personnel for eight, six, twelve hours – all this as a consequence of the wave of

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robberies… of inseguridad… let us say a group of business owners request seguridad. Then, well, police personnel, besides spending six hours here, they get an extra job, they make a bit more money… most of it is in charge of members of the subordinate personnel. An officer from the Policía de Buenos Aires2 (Pol2) who knows many in the industry argued that they ‘lack some fundamental qualifications’. In Argentina, ‘the fever of private security is a corporate deal, there are many ghost companies and… sadly, people go because they need the job, they work for a low salary and even in irregular conditions’. Indeed, up to half of the private security companies may be in the informal economy. While CAESI lists around 200 member companies, Lorenc Valcarce counted about a thousand private security firms in 2004. Citing CAESI as source, Dammert reported 1,200 companies in 2006, including about 350 in the city of Buenos Aires and 430 in the Buenos Aires province.73 From the 40,000 people working in the sector in 1992, the number climbed to more than 150,000 in 2007, perhaps even 200,000 workers, with a quarter to half of them presumably working without a contract. The number of informal security guards could well reach 200,000 – the same or more than the total number of registered guards. CAESI has complained about local government complicity with illegal hiring, especially in the Conurbano. ‘Unfortunately, these days, the business of seguridad, especially private security, is huge’, the bonaerense above commented somewhat bitterly. Private security companies are among the ‘shadow sovereigns’ exercising authority outside the state.74 A detective from the Federal Police noted that the industry developed ‘because evidently the state does not satisfy people’s need of seguridad’. Still, he argued, private security companies ‘do not bring seguridad because they are not qualified, they lack the police power that they should have to do so’. Because of what the provision of seguridad entails, ‘this function has to be fulfilled by the police, the state, the police as a state organ’. As the state itself becomes a major consumer of these services, the boundaries between the state and the market turn blurrier. The fears mobilized by inseguridad are key to the expansion of private security. However, both paradoxically and disturbingly, at different points in the past the lack of regulations of the industry favoured the hiring of former human rights perpetrators as personnel or part of the management in some firms. No less disturbingly, the sector has given rise to a ghostly army of between 50,000 and 200,000 armed security guards working informally, illegally and unchecked. This is in part why scholars studying policing have observed that private security worsens insecurity. Hence, the



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case of Argentina proves Davis right as she noted that private security does not diminish ‘violence or public police corruption’, but rather further fragments sovereignty. This is just one of the many ways in which fear may be generating its own monsters.

La Gente, Seguridad constituencies: A community and its hidden enemies Inseguridad waves tend to bring new figures who often turn into politicians. During the 1990s, individual justicieros such as ingeniero Santos gained media exposure. Justiciero tropes represent the struggle of citizens against criminals and a useless, unresponsive state, with an inclination for mano dura policies as the expected response. Between 4.1 and 5.6 million Argentines had firearms by 2002. Capitalizing on these trends, former sub-commissioner Patti successfully steered into a political career, obtaining 73 per cent of the vote in 1995 and getting re-elected as Mayor of Escobar in the northern Conurbano. One political figure who rose with the seguridad agenda is Francisco De Narváez, whose voicing of concerns with crime and open internet crime maps gained public support. In June 2009, defying expectations, De Narváez won a Congress seat against late President Néstor Kirchner. ‘We need to solve inseguridad urgently’, Congress representative De Narváez wrote on his blog, questioning the government for not caring about people’s safety. At the time, his booming political career made him into a new figure of what Paul Chevigny called ‘populism of fear’, of politicians who, deeming the distribution of tangible goods unviable, pull together traditional populist appeals with people’s fear of crime.75 Voices of vecinos, or la gente, stand for crime victims, voters and authorized recipients of crime prevention policies. They appear on television, in surveys, or in the letters to the editor section of newspapers. In the end, they stand as the ‘real community’, a term with traces of the Spanish colonial term la gente decente. In contrast, the omnipresent but shadowy figure of the delincuente, the criminal, is hardly ever given a chance to speak. Condemned in advance and just spoken for, criminals – and those perceived as such – are treated as the virulent extreme of a chain of deviants who do not deserve the protection of the law. ‘When a society lives as a community’, an experienced commissioner from a small town in Mendoza observed, under the motto ‘ “we are all one”, we get along well in the neighborhood, then we do not have major problems

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with the asocials… because the asocials, if this society lives in community, cannot enter. They cannot. The community rejects them.’ In such terms, the entire project of seguridad consists of identifying the worthy members of the community from those threatening them. These parameters define a comunidad de los decentes, in which the true Argentine nation becomes recast as a fearing community of seguridad. Seen through the lenses of seguridad, as in a Mobius strip, Argentina defines an inside containing the decent la gente while simultaneously including and excluding those who threaten to undermine it. ‘The people’ define a main addressee in seguridad narratives. Yet, other than through scattered snapshots in the media, as in relatives of victims crying and demanding justice before the cameras or in street gatherings, how do we know who they are? Drawing on the 2008 Latinobarómetro survey, using a statistical technique known as cluster analysis, I identify three main groups or orientations (Figure 2.5) according to how individuals align themselves along dimensions including classical seguridad tropes, fear of crime, or distrust of state institutions and democracy. The first group, the seguridad crowd, exhibits the most concern with inseguridad and a high disregard for democracy. The group contributes about 85 per cent of the individuals disagreeing with, and 92.9 per cent of those strongly opposing ‘the Churchill question’ stating that democracy is the least worst form of government – a dimension usually indicating (un)democratic attitudes. Almost 90 per cent in this group would not mind having a non-democratic government if it favoured economic growth. Similarly, almost 80 per cent express complete dissatisfaction with democracy, and more than 70 per cent evaluate the performance of Argentina’s democracy as worsening. Almost 60 per cent of respondents with no confidence in the judiciary, who judge public institutions bad, and almost half of those who believe that there is no protection against crime in Argentina, who do not trust others or the police are in this group as well. They watch TV the most to keep track of political events and contribute with more than 40 per cent of those judging their neighbourhood and the country increasingly unsafe, even if the group includes the fewest people having actually suffered from crime themselves. Finally, they contribute with 70 per cent of those judging Argentina a very violent country and more than a half of those who strongly oppose the authorization of marches and protests in a democracy. The second cluster includes many of those whom we will call ‘progressives’ and who tend to assume quite the opposite views, paralleling tropes and priorities alluded by reformers. They do not perceive Argentina as



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a violent society; they judge the performance of democracy positively as improving over time. They contribute almost 60 per cent of those who judge Argentina to be as safe as in the past and the same percentage of those who judge it as even safer. They overwhelmingly support democracy, are satisfied with it, and trust other people, public institutions, the judiciary. Many more of them trust the police than those in other groups. They feel quite protected against crime by the state, even when one-third of them were victimized. The largest number of those who learn about politics from newspapers are in this group. Finally, the third group, which I will call worried democrats, exhibits mixed perspectives. On the one hand, they are the most supportive of the Churchill question, even though they express disappointment with the performance of democracy, the judiciary and the police. They contribute the largest number of people feeling insecure. Since this group includes the largest proportion of respondents claiming to have been victims of crime, then – unlike the seguridad crowd – their concern with a lack of safety seems grounded. Exhibiting deep democratic convictions, they seem disappointed with the ways in which democratic institutions work in Socec level Very good Churchill’s question Strongly agree

Churchill’s question Strongly disagree 100%

Democracy Not at all PeformDem Poor

90% 80%

PerformDem Mejor

Public Instit Bad

70% 60%

Country Equally safe

No confidence judiciary

50% 40%

Country More safe

Not guaranteed at all protection crime

30% 20% 10%

Victim crime No

Victim crime Yes

0

Neighbourhood More unsafe

Fairly guaranteed protection crime

Country More unsafe

Quite legal Equality

Pacific v. violent country (two most violent categories)

Public intstit Good

You can never be too careful when dealing with others

TV Mentioned Newspapers Mentioned

Most discriminated against No confidence Police

Legal equality Not at all

Worried Democrats Progressives Seguridad crowd

Figure 2.5  Three main orientations of Seguridad in Argentina

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Argentina. Reporting to have been victims of crime, they may be prone to endorse the politics advocated by the seguridad crowd. As an electorate, this group shows the potential for significant oscillations across the spectrum traced by seguridad. Every new crisis reactivates these identities and tensions.

(In)Seguridad: A threshold

Victimization

A politics of seguridad grows out of fear of crime. Perceptions of insecurity and fear respond to an immanent dynamics that tends to gain autonomy. As the survey data on victimization collected monthly by LICIP in different urban areas of Argentina show for the period of March 2008 through May 2011 (Figure 2.6), despite seguridad’s waves and tidal ups and downs, victimization assessment appears to have stabilized at a higher level.

Monthly Values (March 2008 – May 2011)

Figure 2.6  Victimization Source: LICIP

‘The thermometer lies in the social perception of seguridad’, a bonaerense police officer observed. Seguridad interweaves the layers of private and public life. At a collective level, it calls for organizing and strategizing, from neighbourhood watches to private security companies to political candidates stressing the importance of fighting crime. Distrust, anxiety and fear seem only to escalate with the perception of being under an imminent violent attack from criminals. From time to time, such fears and panic intensify in light of terrible, cold-blooded deaths. In the last months of 2009, three horrible murders of defenceless women struck public sentiment. The three cases occurred in the Conurbano. Renata Toscano, a 43-year-old architect and catechist,



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was shot dead on November 17 as she returned to her house in Wilde. Sandra Almirón, a 37-year-old schoolteacher, was also killed while entering her house on November 25. Ana María Castro, a 54-year-old biochemist, died from a bullet to the back of her neck in Lanús. As if confirming the worst popular nightmares, the heartless murderers were teenage minors. However, if the deaths of these women did not trigger new mass mobilizations á la Blumberg, it is because this is just a part of the story.

Chapter 3

Seguridad, a Governmental Dispositif ‘All the people necessary will have to die to achieve seguridad.’ Jorge Rafael Videla In mid-December 2009, Carlos Stornelli, the then Minister of Security of the Buenos Aires province, went with a prosecutor to file an unusual report. Renata Toscano, Sandra Almirón and Ana María Castro, three women shot dead in the Conurbano just a few days apart, plus a fourth woman who survived, had been gunned down at police ‘instigation’, Stornelli claimed. Those nonsensical, vicious crimes, he alleged, had been committed by minors under police pressure, with the sole purpose of triggering a new inseguridad crisis.1 The intellectual authors of the murders, according to Stornelli, were policemen acting in retaliation after having been sanctioned for selling stolen cars. The victims, professionals known in their communities, had been carefully chosen to maximize the impact of the crimes. Did the police force socially vulnerable teenagers to act out Argentina’s worst fears, manufacturing these murders? While the police and some government officials questioned the minister’s atypical move, others supported the accuracy of his testimony. ‘Behind a minor there is an adult’, Supreme Court Justice Carmen Argibay observed. ‘Who gives guns to a fourteen-year old?’2 Months earlier, a judge had told the media that the police recruited minors to commit crimes in exchange for drugs and money.3 Detentions for identification and background checks often served such recruitment purposes. To a 12-year-old murderer, for example, recruiters had given 40 doses of paco, the cheap, poignantly addictive and poisonous form of crack cocaine popularized after 2001, for each car he stole.4 Judge Arias also presented 23 cases of torture of minors by the police. Luciano Arruga, who was 16 years old when last seen in January 2009, may have been victimized for his refusal to collaborate.5 ‘Nos están matando a todos’ (They are killing us all) concluded an anguished, terrified woman from Wilde after the murder of architect Toscano.6 If in a certain sense she may be right, both agents and the rationale behind such violence suggest a complex picture. Who is ‘killing



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us all’, and why? The ready to go answer is ‘criminals’. As an epistemology, or a micro-politics of the perceptible, visible and sayable, seguridad reduces danger to crime. Have homicides increased or decreased? How many of us are doomed to confront such a horrible fate? These are questions that seguridad invites. Yet, whether the crime data appears accurate or not, the question to examine is how seguridad as a mode of governing Argentina generates the realities claiming to merely describe, deaths included. As sinister as the criminal police recruitment of minors for murders may be, it evokes the familiar self-referential ellipsis of state racketeering, creating the very same demons whose neutralization and destruction the state promises to justify its own existence.7 CORREPI’s analysis goes further: ‘No crime is unrelated to the security forces. The state repressive apparatus (police, gendarmerie, prefecture, airport security police, armed forces, prison guards) organizes and administers crime.’ Ranging from bribery, to ‘freeing’ areas, to carrying out kidnappings, to robbing banks, to tolerating and profiting from drug and human trafficking, all major forms of crime in Argentina, the organization argues, relate to the state security apparatus. Inseguridad, they conclude, ‘is the police in the streets’. The modern state, as Foucault notes, makes crime necessary. ‘No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal?’8 The criminal is quintessential to justify the apparatuses devoted to fighting him. Otherwise, Foucault continues, were it not for our fears and for newspapers telling us horrible crime stories every day, why would we ‘accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have the exclusive right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our doorsteps’? If the techniques, institutions and knowledge seeking to maintain the population orderly configure a governmental regime, the (anti-)politics of seguridad in Argentina defines one such formation.9 Moreover, if, as Mitchell Dean proposes, changes in governmental regimes manifest in ‘transformations of the exercise of sovereign and biopolitical powers of life and death’, then both killings and killers must be reinscribed within the economy of ruling of seguridad.10 ‘Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as basic principle of state politics’, Agamben maintains.11 This chapter addresses the ontological productivity of seguridad and its politics (indeed, anti-politics) in Argentina, while interrogating seguridad in light of its ambiguities, embedded in its claim of protecting life. Attracting us with the ancient promise of Securitas, of helping people to live free of worries,

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its mechanisms often inflict the death from which they claim to protect. Behind its claims about the care of life, seguridad discloses a necropolitics, which Achille Mbembe defines as the ‘subjugation of life to the power of death’.12 It betrays the death drive soaking the modern state. Seguridad, I propose, establishes this regime along the lines of what Foucault refers to as a dispositif, or a network articulating governing practices, macro and micro, as they take place throughout society.13Dispositifs of power arise in response to disruptions of social order, to shape people’s opinions, behaviour and discourses, making them prone to engage in some relations of power and not in others.14Dispositifs generate new realities, sometimes entirely different. As Gilles Deleuze points out, however, the newness of the dispositif does not result from any of its elements, but rather from the regime or pattern of relations connecting them.15 A dispositif develops in two steps. The first is the definition of ‘a strategic objective’, Foucault notes, responding to an urgent need.16 In Argentina, made substantially unequal and fragmented in a short period of time, the challenge is to make society governable in a democratic fashion. How can individual and collective identities stabilize and a sense of commonality be recreated in a fragmented and unequal society when millions of Argentines have so little in common? Reporting an allegedly exceptional rise of violent crime, with its Hobbesian narratives on human nature and citizenship, and its thin view of politics, seguridad provides a response to these challenges. It articulates a governmental horizon portraying Argentina as what Murillo calls a ‘community of the decent’ under the siege of crime.17 Millions can imagine themselves as part of such a community, free of corrupt politicians, criminals and vagrants. Furthermore, the consolidation of seguridad as a governmental agenda teaches actors to frame their own claims in these terms in order to be heard. In particular, it offers an alternative to potential alliances of the less privileged. In exceptional moments, as when the middle classes came together with the poor to protest neoliberal policies in December 2001, a radical, never completely suppressed grassroots autonomist tradition surfaces from inside Argentina’s formal politics.18 The alchemy of seguridad breaks such possibilities, making individuals perceive others as a threat and eroding the potential for political action. In the previous chapter, I sought to present salient pieces of the seguridad dispositif as they articulate a seemingly seamless, smooth narrative. The dispositif’s disruptions, interstices and darker spots define the object of scrutiny in this chapter. Police power is key to making individuals, populations and territories legible, as James Scott showed.19 With their comprehensive aims, the police



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are everywhere. In the words of a commissioner from a provincial capital in the south: Police power encompasses [everything], from the quality control of hamburgers to the control of the legal status of the supermarket’s employees, to the safety of the street, to check on the state of electrical cables. This is the security offered by the state, yet the police as an institution devote themselves to the prevention and repression of crime. In fact, what the state seeks is public order, that this does not turn chaotic. Enacted by rising demands for security, policing makes possible – in the sense both of constructing and legitimizing – internal forms of exclusion from citizenship that would be otherwise unacceptable in a(n aspiring) liberal democracy. In this respect, the micro-politics of seguridad continues the anti-politics of the 1976–83 dictatorship of El Proceso, as a politics based on violence that seeks to reduce if not eliminate the diversity inherent in the political world. Once the strategic objective is constituted, Foucault explains, a dispositif‘s perpetuation depends on whether its elements can adjust to make room for unforeseen, unexpected, or conflicting effects.20 In Argentina, seguridad was nominally destabilized by human rights organizations denouncing torture and arbitrary killings by the police. A series of cold-blooded crimes quickly re-established and strengthened seguridad. Now, through the national ministry, seguridad even appropriates human rights. If every single murder linked to a robbery in the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings seems to trigger a new media and political scandal, it also sets in motion demands for expanding seguridad measures; the authorities’ promises of more patrol cars, more security cameras, tougher criminal laws, follow. As its autonomy increases, seguridad installs self-expanding, self-validating and self-perpetuating – even ‘progressive’– mechanisms of governance. Seguridad provides a framework for a new form of governing Argentina, making everything from the character of the state to the souls of individuals legible and interpretable under a fear of crime rationale. It involves what after Foucault should be named an episteme, with methods for discriminating between the voices and knowledge that count as authorized, scientific or expert and those that do not. Foucault defines the episteme as an apparatus articulating ‘words, things and their order’.21 The episteme makes it possible to sort out fields and types of knowledge, conditions of production and governing genres; it also permits to differentiate statements as forming or not part of a field, to tell for example what counts as

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scientific from what does not.22 Fear is central to the episteme of seguridad.23 It is this episteme that lies behind the experts, media reports, victimization surveys, academic degrees and research. With ample evidence showing that fear of crime has no direct relation to actual crime levels, Gabriel Kessler proposes to address fear through specific policies.24 Yet, even if it may be an indication of something other than crime, as Hobbes knew, fear is a powerful passion eager to colonize life with threats, distrust, conspiracies, hidden traitors and enemies.25 Based on fear, seguridad appeals to our most intimate anxieties, touching concerns with the well-being of our loved ones, and emerges as an overarching trope organizing daily life. ‘The policeman does not have to be a synonym with fear, but rather with seguridad. Granted, perhaps in some cases it is the same’, a commissioner from a provincial capital on the Paraná river acknowledged. Seguridad narratives typically omit the human drama elicited by crime and danger, instead laying down a ‘script’, a performative programme defining territories and identities. Constituting new arenas of governance defined by crime, criminal activities, criminal subjects and the administration of justice renews the state’s possibilities to expand its web of regulation. The more activities are criminalized, the more individuals get caught in suspicion, exclusion and disenfranchised. Concerns with crime fuel police moralizing crusades, expanding territories of governance to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects and preventing the former from falling. Crime justifies the expansion of specialized police bodies and repressive state apparatuses. ‘Crime must exist. If it did not, you would not be able to test the limits of society’, asserted a young, savvy bonaerense officer citing Emile Durkheim. Captured in police mechanisms of criminalization, the young, the homeless and the poor are harassed and turned into delincuentes while the wealthier, perceived as in need of protection, are turned into decent citizens, la gente. As CELS reported in 2004, the antagonism ‘identifies the world of the law with the sectors of the population included in the redistribution of goods, and the world of crime, with the excluded’.26 CELS has reported sustained rising levels of the criminalization of poverty in recent years.27 Those invested with police prerogatives are key artifices of this alchemy by giving it the force of law. Their practices of ordering materialize the categories that they order, redefining on the ground what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is normal, what constitutes legitimate behaviour and dissent, and what constitutes crime.



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‘No nos une el amor, sino el espanto… ’ ‘It is not love, but horror which unites us’, wrote Jorge Luis Borges in a poem to Buenos Aires. The image appropriately conveys the new Argentine imagination as a community of seguridad. ‘We have fallen so low, so low, that the people, the only thing they want – they do not mind to be robbed, no… the only thing they aspire to is not to get hurt’, a commissioner from San Isidro in the wealthier Conurbano thus interpreted the voice of the people. Things would fall much lower just a few months after he uttered these words in August 2001. In the days following the 19 December, many people would get hurt in a number of different ways. Crushed by financial catastrophe, many Argentines were trapped within their own country without access to their savings or salaries. Tens of thousands took to the streets in protest, where they met with police brutality resulting in a number of killings. The president resigned. In the 13 days from 21 December 2001, to 2 January 2002, Argentina had five different presidents. ‘The idea that Argentina does not exist becomes more and more obsessive’, French sociologist Alain Touraine wrote at the time, comparing the country with a dark stain on the world atlas which, no longer productive, was moving through ‘decadence and decomposition’ until ceasing to exist.28 In 2003, with no fewer dark overtones, political scientist Ronaldo Munck wrote: ‘In the longer term I think we are moving towards the possible national and social disintegration of Argentina.’ Years of neoliberal economic policies, Munck observed, had turned Argentina into ‘a market more than a nation’, submerging more than half the population under poverty to the point of ‘jeopardising the minimal social cohesion a nation needs to survive’.29 As a result, he saw ‘no longer a national project of any sort in Argentina’. By 2003, a Federal Police officer still expressed concern with the complexity of the crisis: ‘There is a grave rupture of the social tissue, a great loss of hope of younger generations,’ he said, ‘a very serious identity crisis.’ Given the exceptional sustained economic recovery after 2003, the massive bicentennial celebrations in 2010, and the government’s constant references to the new ‘model’, Touraine’s and Munck’s words may look outdated. They are not. The fracture runs deep inside the body politic and its millions of individual bodies. It has the signature of neoliberalism, or ‘the philosophy of the capitalist ideology, as a commissioner from a major provincial capital defined it. Neoliberalism is based on the belief that prosperity and happiness can be reached by letting the market alone regulate everything necessary to live, from food to health to education.30 Far more radical in their faith

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than their liberal ancestors, neoliberals gained pre-eminence in the late 1970s with figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. After 1989, their principles became cemented in the ‘Washington Consensus’. Fiscal discipline, reduced public spending, privatizations, floating interest and exchange rates, imports and capital flows, and an ‘outward oriented’ economy for developing countries were the Consensus’ milestones.31 In the aftermath of its hyperinflation crisis, 2,000 per cent price increases led to the anticipated resignation of President Raúl Alfonsín. Under his successor, Carlos Menem, Argentina joined the club. For market principles to rule over all areas of life, Foucault notes, ‘a general art of government’ or governmental regime is required.32 In Argentina, the experience of hyperinflation, a traumatic ‘dissolution of social bonds’, as Maristella Svampa observes, readied individuals for the transformations to come.33 Menem’s government implemented radical pro-market reforms by pegging the local currency to the US dollar to control inflation. Massive financial deregulation, privatizations of mail, trains, phone, water, highways and electricity state companies, and part of the pension system ensued. World Bank and IMF officials became involved in crafting domestic policy, Argentina was praised internationally as a model of neoliberal orthodoxy.34 Import deregulation made small luxuries like perfumes or electronics accessible to many while further eroding domestic industries. Tens of thousands of workers went unemployed; many more lost legal and social protections. A pleasant feel of modernization overlapped with the bitterness of rising unemployment and poverty, while harsh budget cuts in education and health took a toll in the lives of many. In 1995, at the peak of the neoliberal feast of shiny shopping malls, middle-class travel to Miami, and ‘pizza with champagne’ – an image of the times in Argentina – Menem was re-elected.35 These were years of ‘weak accountability and transparency, lack of effective controls of state violence (e.g. police abuse), widespread impunity and corruption, and deepening poverty and a rapidly increasing gap between rich and poor’, as Ariel Armony sums up.36 Menem granted pardons to the few military leaders convicted for their crimes against humanity under the dictatorship. As Patrice McSherry points out, his presidency turned increasingly authoritarian, engaging in ‘close alliances with the military-security hierarchy and political figures from former military regimes’.37 Regardless, financial capital throve. If one nation ‘stuck to its original economic program’, IMF experts acknowledged, that nation was Argentina.38



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Neoliberal policies deepened social exclusion. Since a significant number of jobs came from state offices and companies, privatizations caused massive layoffs.39 By the mid-1990s, poverty reached one-third of the urban population. Among the urban poor and informal workers, ‘hunger lurked’, as Eduardo Silva notes. It was even worse in the provinces. New forms of protest erupted: puebladas, or town uprisings, such as the December 1993 Santiagazo anticipated others in Neuquén, Salta and Jujuy in 1996 and 1997; hundreds of road-blocks or piquetes mushroomed after 1997. Popular protests demanding the ‘recovery of life’ often met with state repression and deaths.40 Outrage over such repression fuelled more protests. By the 1999 presidential election, millions were exhausted and wanted change. Contrary to voters’ expectations, however, the Alianza government did not provide it.41 The economic recession worsened, while national debt payments and recessive policies mandated by the IMF and World Bank made the situation unbearable. The country’s debt grew beyond $160 billion. In March 2001, President De la Rúa called back Domingo Cavallo, a key architect of the orthodox neoliberal years, granting him special powers. Extreme budget cuts, and salary and pension reductions, threw many more into poverty. By mid-2001, the ‘country risk’, a technical index assessing investors’ prospects by country, had become ‘the thermometer of the nation’s angst’.42 Common citizens obsessed over this figure, as they experienced daily how the index determined their fate. On 3 December 2001, Minister Cavallo announced a policy, corralito, which strictly limited individual banking account withdrawals. After the IMF demanded harsher measures in exchange for assistance, the government took on people’s cash. For most citizens, everyday life turned hellish. By mid-December, unions announced strikes. Protests, looting and police repression began. On 19 December De la Rúa declared a state of emergency. Citizens reacted with rage and marched en masse to the presidential palace in what at the time was referred as a moment of ‘social warfare. The state had trampled on the rights of the people, reflected a Federal Police officer, taking ‘over our rights [and] citizens’ savings. What’s the difference? This is more violent than blocking a road. It is the state changing the rules of the game.’ This officer recalled ‘hundreds of people with heart attacks, hundreds of suicides’ resulting from this period of state repression. As a policeman, he felt ‘anger as any other citizen,, he explains. Belonging to ‘the infrastructure of the state’, forcing him to take part of the blame, made things worse, since, he indignantly remarked, ‘the state washes away its guilt with the police’. On 21 December, two days after the declaration of the state of emergency, the president resigned. At least

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37 people had been killed. The country imploded amid unemployment, poverty, riots, looting and repression. In the last week of December, one of several interim presidents announced the country’s default. As Argentina declared bankruptcy, a hidden nation came to the surface, with images of babies dying from malnutrition broadcast around the world.43 ‘Cameras focused on the indigent… the north of Argentina, cities, villages of the oligophrenic, people who do not eat, who eat earth’, recalled a Federal Police officer, exposing mixed feelings of shame and racism. By 2003, he noted, there was ‘a very serious crisis of identity’. His description is insightful. Modern nations developed around clusters of productive social relations. As capital these days moves into highly concentrated, non-labour intensive activities, transnational in scale, and millions find no economic function to perform, fragmentation ensues. If ‘shock therapy’ market reforms precipitated conflicts behind the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and Argentina went through the same policies, after December 2001 there were good reasons for concern.44

Garbage people In the early 2000s, millions sunk to unspeakable levels. An officer from the bonaerense Pol2 described: ‘Do you know what it is to see a fouryear-old, a five-year-old, eating from the trash? What an image! Many of them, piling up on a mountain of garbage 30 meters high. What can you expect from this society?’ How did this come to be? The most egalitarian society in the region until 1990, in just a decade Argentina turned into one of the most unequal.45 To idealize a bygone past may prove as treacherous as the notion of comunidad organizada coined by Juan Domingo Perón; still, the pinnacle of social equality in Argentine history was reached under the first Peronism.46 During those years, seguridad gained social connotations, as the protection of labour and social rights, making it possible for waged workers to perceive 53 per cent of the national income by 1948, a level almost reached once again under Peronism, in 1974.47 Despite economic growth and reversals, inequality had slowly but steadily increased since the mid-1950.48After significant losses, worker and middleclass income downfall began in the mid-1970s, accompanying structural changes in the economy, employment and wealth distribution. Months after Celestino Rodrigo, Isabel Perón’s economy minister, devalued the currency and increased prices around 100 per cent in one night, in 1975, in an early version of ‘shock therapy’, came the coup. After the 24 March 1976 military



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coup, economic policies favoured financial speculation, undermined most industries, and caused the ‘re-primarization’ of the economy towards agricultural production.49 The scope of deindustrialization led scholars to talk about a regressive ‘re-foundation’ of the Argentine society.50 Under the dictatorship, the income gap grew 50 per cent, especially after forced salary reductions. Grassroots resistance was smashed by the military killing ‘all the people necessary’, as Videla had announced, through tens of thousands of ‘disappearances’ in hundreds of clandestine death camps.51 In 1983, with the restoration of democracy, President Alfonsín began promoting import substitution industrialization. Yet under recessive regional conditions, the new structural traits of the economy prevailed. Facing numerous difficulties, any industrialist, substitutive, and fordist or welfarist-like traits were ultimately pulverized by hyperinflation in 1989, which drastically worsened poverty and unemployment.52 Under Menem, high unemployment helped to legitimize ‘labour flexibilizing’ reforms. The state deregulated labour contracts, reduced workers’ benefits, and made firings easier. Through manipulation and corruption, the government gained support of union leaders. Many lost their jobs, and most remaining jobs were low-paid, unstable and plagued by irregular conditions. The informal economy expanded. Between 1991 and 1994, unemployment more than doubled.53 Labour participation in national income went down to less than 20 per cent. Recessive cycles linked to the global economy worsened after 1998, with the GDP dropping 20 per cent between 1998 and 2002.54 Decades of deindustrialization, recessive cycles, structural adjustment and thin social policies led to the pauperization of millions and threw hundreds of thousands more into villas while worsening their already precarious conditions of living. By 2001, unemployment, labour instability, informalization and poverty expanded eventually into the collapse of the economy and the government.55 In some families, no member had had a formal job in three generations, nor health coverage, social benefits, or pensions. No wonder that many among the younger find the law, the state, or any sort of objective ‘third party’ a very thin notion. These youths, their values and subjectivities, are achieved products of the lawless side of neoliberal governance. To them, the police, in particular, appear ‘as another gang, powerfully armed and prepared’ with no link whatsoever with the law, Kessler notes.56 Recurrent crises fuelled by recession and a lack of jobs pushed many to pursue a career in policing. ‘I decided to be a policeman out of economic need. Never in my life had I thought that I would become a policeman’,

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acknowledged a commissioner from Misiones. ‘My decision came as an economic solution.’ Another commissioner, from the Federal Police, said he joined the police just to become ‘economically independent’, without having any idea of ‘what a policeman did in the streets’. No existís, ‘you do not exist’, is a common Argentine expression. The point beyond which an exceeding population loses its chances to serve as a reserve army in the labour market is where exclusion kicks in. The number of minors living in extreme poverty indicates that the threshold has been crossed. In 2007, between 606 and 950 children were born in poverty every day in Argentina, and more than a million and a half between the ages of 5 and 13 worked. While the 2005 Act on the Comprehensive Protection of the Rights of the Child mandates the state to guarantee the care of all those under 18, the number of minors living in extreme poverty betrays the contrast between norms and reality.57 ‘I saw how little children ate trash at CEAMSE’, the officer from the Pol2 continued, conveying his experience patrolling Buenos Aires metropolitan waste disposal sites to protect little children from the trucks: What example receives a little child who sees his father picking up trash while smoking pot? We are assigned to prevent the trucks from running over them. They had just one hour to search for trash... I saw people eating from the trash, little children drinking what was left in soda bottles, eating expired trashed chips. The meat. I told the guy: ‘But, what are you doing with this meat?’ –‘I take this meat and I put it in chlorine…’ I swear, the meat smelled so rotten! I got this feeling inside, of pity. Poor man! Seguridad should encompass social inclusion, moved by the experience the policeman stresses. Only slightly less dramatic, the story told by a commissioner from Rosario conveys much of the poor’s daily tragedy: We have arrested eight-year olds who have broken into a store to eat. I do not know whether this is the fault of the police, the system of government, or someone else. But the fact is that I do not have [a place] to take a little boy who is barefoot, naked, shaking from the cold… so he can be taken care of, protected and given a meal… I have gotten help from the girls here, and from other employees. We get clothes for these kids because they are going barefoot. And the next day they [are still] barefoot because the father sold everything to buy something to eat.



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Who are these little garbage children, the multitude of toddlers spreading over mountains of trash in the struggle to get something to eat? Too many children, former minister Arslanián noted, are ‘left to their own, without any protection whatsoever, and exposed to situations of conflict with penal laws’.58 The miserable remain ignored, nobody wants to see the conditions in which they survive. If inseguridad expands in waves, inequality expands through shocks. The mass of the Argentine poor are a casualty of turning the nation into an early neoliberal experimental field. Neoliberal policies led to the loss of basic forms of state protection. Such were the formative conditions for generations of poorer Argentines who then became subject to class discrimination. The same officer from Pol2 above describes cartoneros, or cardboard trash collectors, as ‘people who lack culture’. In a nation that prides itself for its cultural traditions, his characterization suggests that these poor are not fully ‘us’. Likewise, poor people from villas are depicted not only as different but also as lesser. Fifty-six per cent of the Argentine 2008 Latinobarómetro respondents identify skin colour, 51.3 per cent neighbourhood of residence, and 39.8 per cent an individual’s way of speaking as traits that put young people at a disadvantage. These traits connote exclusion and abandonment. It is the case of villeros, a label, Javier Auyero observes, that applies to ‘people living in poor areas, irrespective of whether they live in shantytowns, or not’ while also functioning ‘as a symbolic (but no less real) threat to be avoided’.59 In the end, as criminologist Juan Pegoraro notes, ‘Piqueteros (picketeers), cartoneros, marginals, villeros, the excluded’, are all similarly labelled as naturally prone to ‘indigence and illegality’.60 Shantytowns are stigmatized as criminal, their dwellers turned into security threats, and both treated as less than civilized or properly human. ‘Today, sadly, a very important part of society lives in indigence… there are tons of villas de emergencia’, noted a bonaerense detective in Martínez. In the 1950s, villas miseria served as sites of passage towards stable workingclass jobs and neighborhoods. In recent years, in the way of geological layers, shantytown dwellers represent a variety of groups excluded by the market and the law. Years of crisis and recessive policies made the hypershantytowns of the neoliberal era places to stay, with no way out. With chances of social mobility gone, Auyero notes, people in the Argentine slums became ‘functionally disconnected from the rest of society’, and ‘abandoned by the state’.61 New villas came into existence after the 2001 economic crisis. By 2003, Mike Davis estimated that one-third of the urban population, about 11 million people, lived in some form of slums in

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Argentina.62 In 2009, in the city of Buenos Aires alone, 23 villas – mostly in the southern quarter, hosted up to 200,000 people, and 900,000 in the metropolitan area.63 ‘Here, we have like three or four villas or “emergency settlements”, in an extremely indigent zone’, noted a Federal Police commissioner in the city of Buenos Aires. Irregular settlements grew 25 per cent between 2007 and 2009, with significant densification.64 During that period, 11 families moved into shantytowns every day. While growing economic activity leads to an expansion in employment and policies begin to reach the poor, poverty, exclusion and the stigmas attached to them have come to stay.65 Fortunately, no identity cleavages with potential to escalate existed in this case. People came together, more or less desperately, in hundreds of popular assemblies and barter clubs. Bankrupt factories were ‘recovered’ and run by workers themselves while foreign tourists and scholars came to learn from an explosion of popular creativity. A profuse literature and a number of documentaries were assembled covering these aspects of the post-2001 crisis. But the world of cooperation, solidarity and sharing was difficult to sustain. If expanded, it would likely have put the premises of the (neoliberal) market into question. Goddess Fortuna, however, did not let things reach that point. After 2003, exceptional economic growth came, tied to a booming world demand for agricultural products, skyrocketing international soy prices and expanding domestic industries including tourism.66 The recovery was uneven. Although the exact number of the poor varies along categories and measuring methods, even after eight years of exceptional growth, by the end of 2010 Eduardo Basualdo estimated poverty in 22.9 per cent and destitution in 6.1 per cent.67 Assessments vary depending on whether one consults official or alternative estimates. Yet, while unemployment went down, economic expansion coincided with wage differentiation between registered and informal workers and public employees, with gains for the first ones and slow, dim raises if any for the latter.68 Increasingly apart from their legally recognized peers, at the end of 2010 informal workers amounted to 35 per cent. With their low wages, many of them lived in poverty. Available social programmes such as the Asignación Universal por Hijo allowance served to alleviate more than to pull people out of poverty.69 In light of the exceptionally favourable international conjuncture for Argentina, and the record budget destined to social policies and subsidies, 5.2 per cent of the GDP, resilient poverty speaks of this society’s pervasive, structural exclusionary traits.



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The Argentina that resurfaced through the economic boom was ‘unequal and fragmented as only a few times before in history’, as by 2004, CELS observed.70 Along with economic expansion the universe of seguridad prefigured in the 1990s came boldly into existence. A commissioner from Rosario explained the following: Openings for a better education for a sector of society have brought the exclusion of another sector… it will be very difficult for this socially excluded sector to be able to access a certain level… in trying to do so, discovering that ‘I want to do it but I cannot, because they close all the doors to me’, lie many explanations of crime. Asked for the sources of inseguridad, people included ‘disappearances’ from the 1970s, hyperinflation from the late 1980s, lack of jobs, labour instability, extortive kidnappings, violence between relatives and neighbours and the loss of egalitarian values.71 Vulnerable living conditions resulting of losing savings, property and stable labour relationships are also identified behind inseguridad. The macro-narrative of seguridad, however, leaves no room for such nuances; it reduces inseguridad to the existence of crime. Even when statistical studies identify income inequality as the most accurate predictor of violent crime leading to homicide, seguridad advocates rarely preach equality.72

Politics, biopolics, necropolitics Turning life into the raw matter of politics by making hierarchical distinctions that recognize some forms of life as worthy, others as lesser, and still others as worthless is the central activity of what, after Foucault, we call biopolitics. Differentiating between worthier and worthless forms of life, Agamben showed, appeared early in Western philosophy. In the Politics, Aristotle observes that speech and action, distinctive human traits, only reach full development in the political life of the citizen, and declares all those who are not members of political communities lesser or defective. Thus articulated, the distinction between bios, the life of the citizen, and zoē, a solely biological fact of existence with no rights attached, runs deep in the Western political tradition. It divides the ‘human bios into zones of different value’, as Esposito concludes.73 If the categorizing of life is conceptualized by Aristotle, the stereotyping of the poor as criminals goes back even further. In Book VIII of the

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Republic, Socrates likens paupers to drones without stings and criminals to those with ‘dangerous’ ones. To the philosopher, it seems clear, ‘in any city where you see beggars, there are thieves, pickpockets, temple-robbers and all such evildoers hidden’.74 Thus, while the poor’s stigmatizing may worsen during crises, as well as the treatment of certain groups as lesser than human, it lies at the roots, and it is there since the beginning of Western philosophy. In the pre-modern, pre-liberal world, distinctions and categories of the (in)human were explicit. Yet after modern revolutions declared individuals free and equal, and the people sovereign, the hierarchical ontology reworked itself against a background of formal equality. Of course, it did not disappear. Hierarchies, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note, connect different fields of knowledge and practice. Four main realms, the body, the psyche, space and the organization of society structure intertwined hierarchies of worth, in such a way that what passes for high or low in each field influences the perception of high and low, and the stability of hierarchies, in the others.75 It is precisely the specific task of the police, Rancière explains, to preserve ‘a certain manner of partitioning the sensible’, arranging beings along hierarchies of worth.76 Because of the possibility that police agents have to characterize situations and to label and criminalize individuals, policing possesses an ontological productivity to generate the categories that it claims to merely differentiate. As the categorizing of life, selecting only some as worthy to be part of the body politic and treating the rest as merely biological life, defines for Agamben ‘the original activity of sovereign power’, and the police make such distinctions on a daily basis, the philosopher’s recognition of the police as endowed with sovereign power should come as no surprise.77 In modern politics, the poor appear as an ‘intolerable shadow’, Agamben notes, of which from time to time the body politic tries to rid itself.78 A death drive permeates the politics of life. While the biopolitical involves taking care of the population, since the state does so ‘for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary’, Foucault explains. From the state’s perspective, individuals count only to the extent that they contribute to the state’s strength. Sometimes, what an individual ‘has to do for the state is to live, to work, to consume; and sometimes what he has to do is to die’. Hence, it follows, biopolitics carries with it a ‘thanatopolitics’, a politics of eliminating life.79 This rationale intensifies as crises produce exceeding populations. In occasions, political discourse makes the latent fracture explicit, setting cycles of open violence against the part of the people deemed undesirable, represented as threats or enemies.



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Producing death does not need to be as bold as genocide, however. Mounted on the impersonal rules of the market, death can spread out in a piecemeal fashion through the normal working of the economy. Coining the concept of necroeconomics, Warren Montag notes: Besides the figure of the Homo Sacer, the one who can be murdered with impunity, lies another figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than that of the first one and who is the subject of no memory or commemoration: the one who, with impunity, can be left to die, whether slowly or quickly, in the name of rationality and market equilibrium.80 In this light, the market emerges as a central dispositif of ‘letting die’ and ‘making live’, the key biopolitical movements identified by Foucault.81 As ‘the unthought-of neoliberalism’, letting die surfaces from time to time.82 It suffices with allowing an economic realm imagined as ‘natural’, to develop without interference, as if letting an ecosystem subsist on its own. As in ancient times, the space defined by the oikos, the realm of labour and the reproduction of life, coincides with bare life. The market –Montag follows Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, will push salaries down to subsistence levels, to the mere reproduction of biological life. If the market may not kill, it does instead let die.83 Explicit in Hayek and Von Mises, anticipated by Smith, lies the belief that in order for the market to function freely, no intervention seems acceptable, not even to protect the starving poor. No ‘executable human right to existence’ seems legitimate to Von Mises; people who are unable to subsist, cannot claim anything like a right to do so. Only private charity should assist those lacking the means to secure food or medicine. The market is the source of freedom; it is the free market what must be secured. The state should intervene to protect the free flow of market exchanges, preventing anybody, including members of the exceeding population, from trying to influence them or to take goods by force.84 At some point, some of the poor may need to let themselves die for the sake of the survival of all, Smith suggested. Discovering the possibility of letting some die at the core of political economy, Montag concludes that ‘Smith’s economics is a necroeconomics’ that turns the market into a legitimate arbiter to administer life and death.85

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Criminalizing the victim: Seguridad’s ontological productivity ‘The criminal says: “I steal from you, because I do not have anything, I am poor and you are wealthy”. I am very sorry, but you cannot steal from me. It is wrong’, a bonaerense commissioner in San Isidro imagined this dialogue. What should the poor, hungry person do, when there are no jobs, charity, or social policies available? What to do with the deep fissures and exclusion, with millions of the exceeding population that economies such as Argentina’s generated for decades, whose labour force cannot be absorbed even during years of exceptional growth and whose lack of instruction and skills does not even turn into a reserve army? This is a typical blind spot in the narratives of my police interviewees; they just do not know. At this point in our conversations, there is always a moment of tension which tends to be filled in with moralizing stories about crime and criminals. Concluding from Smith that those in the exceeding population ‘who reject letting themselves die must be forced to do so’, Montag’s argument saves us the moralizing.86 A young poet Camilo Blajaquis, whose real name is César González, a villero youth who discovered the world of ideas, art and politics while in prison explains: Besides excluding you economically, they exclude you culturally and symbolically. They exclude you because you are el negro de una villa, el negro de mierda, you will be a thief, a worker, and nothing else. The system excludes you, and it is much more cruel than what one thinks… What is at stake is a form of symbolic exclusion: the one from the villa is ignorant, a possible criminal… Remembering the psychological and bodily violence to which he was subjected as he started writing, including the prison psychologists who despised his attempts to write, he noted: ‘I realized that society prefers for youths to steal, to use drugs, rather than for them to act and think. It is more dangerous a kid who thinks than a kid who steals.’87 To be born in the villa becomes an automatic stigma that narrows life possibilities and pushes one into a horizon of crime, drugs, alcohol and violence. ‘Would I have ended in a prison cell if I were not have born in a villa? Nine out of ten of those in prison were from villas’, recalls poet Blajaquis, sent to prison when he was 16. A detective from Córdoba agreed: ‘The policeman ends up criminalizing the poor, because they expose themselves’, explained how he discovered



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that all of his detainees came ‘from popular, marginal neighborhoods’. In contrast to wealthier individuals, the poor, he said, have no option but evidencing themselves when selling drugs or committing other crimes. The fate of villeros seems impossible to change. ‘Negro villa, vos no entrás’, said a policeman in ‘Discriminado’, Yerba Brava’s cumbia villera song. The lyrics describe the lot of a youth prevented from entering a popular dance by the police, given no way out by society, denied jobs and opportunities, until he finally gives up, exhausted and ends up killed. Cumbia villera is a musical genre that was born during the 1990s in Argentine villas. The stories of pibes chorros, or ‘thieving kids’, conveyed in the lyrics mocked and denigrated the police, celebrated popular bandits, and promoted sex, drugs, money and violence. Violent death, whether one’s own or that of others, was treated as a common fate in a universe offering no alternative and no escape. Over time, ‘the stigma of chorro [thief] becomes selfassumed’, observes Cristian Alarcón after spending some time living in a shantytown.88 In the words of a commissioner from Paraná: ‘Since 1995 onwards, this society leveled down through cumbia villera… The poor and the rich, drugs spread in both groups. Then, what happened, the poorer ones, perhaps even people from the villa gained access to places where they used not to show up.’ Cumbia villera and drugs, the commissioner explains, dangerously confused hierarchies, making upper class kids unrecognizable from villeros and encouraging the latter to enter spaces where they do not belong. A policewoman from a small town in Mendoza acknowledged that, most of her colleagues, ‘to someone that they see coming from the villa, in general they will go to individualize, to pat down’. While she ‘can see that these are prejudices, but… kids who look poorer, like belonging to more… separated groups of society, how can I tell you, self-marginalized groups, the most marginal kids are those who call my attention the most’, she concludes. Comparing his job with collecting ‘trash in the streets’, a Federal Police officer conveyed a way of approaching criminal suspects when they are almost as numerous as the poor. A commissioner from the same force: ‘I can say, in some zones, crime prevention requires police officers to stop people in the street, especially the poor, to ask them what they are doing and where they are going.’ Along these lines, a patrol officer in Mendoza justified interrogating poor teenagers ‘preventively’: When they go buy something… a pair of jeans, tennis shoes. Where are they from? If they mention certain neighborhoods, a red light turns on,

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because… unfortunately, these are wild neighborhoods… the origin of all these criminal kids… obviously, it does not mean that all the people there are bad. But it keeps adding up. This officer did not see anything problematic in this treatment. Rather, he insists: ‘In two minutes we can interrogate a person and we can ask to be shown the money with which they are shopping. I have gone through many cases in which they have no money with them.’ For poor villero kids, this is life. The police arrogate themselves the right to ask them to prove not only their identity but also their condition as consumers by demanding to see the money with which they intend to make purchases. How many middle- and upper-middle-class teenagers would pass such checks? Any citizen would find this offensive and humiliating. For the poor, it seems particularly dangerous. Subjected to police harassment, many among the poor decide not to venture beyond the limits of the villa. This is just one of the ways in which the ghettoization of poor neighbourhoods manifests itself in Argentina. In Paraná, Entre Ríos, neighbours from villas such as Maccarone reported police harassment of their teenage children. With the excuse of searching for drugs, they are detained ‘preventively’, and warned by the police not to leave the villa.89 As poverty turns into exclusion, after a mass of the population has been stigmatized and progressively disconnected from the labour market and from the rest of society, villas become sites of enclosure where the economically worthless are ‘warehoused’, to borrow from Loïc Wacquant. All sorts of borders are traced and policed between what Etienne Balibar referred to as life-zones and death-zones, which reproduce themselves in filigree within regions and cities.90 Masses of the poor are ‘deterritorialized’, de facto treated as nomadic or stateless beings, and left to merely survive in the margins of cities. Exclusionary practices reproduce on different scales, as the wealthier withdraw to their enclaves protected by private guards and electronic surveillance systems.91 Hundreds, soon to become thousands, of CCTV security cameras scrutinize the public in large and small cities and shantytowns. At different levels, policing, architecture, electronic devices and design converge in the silent but active repulsion of the undesirable. As the geography of exclusion expands, the recognition of political rights narrows, the political diminishes into policing and the excluded are de facto made subjects of police instead of subjects of political governance. Poverty and exclusion, Agamben observes, are ‘eminently political categories’.92 Regardless of economic resources, no one can enter the market’s play of contracts and exchanges without being recognized rights,



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and those who have been stigmatized are given access only exceptionally and marginally. There is of course much more to exclusion than being simply left out, or ‘abandoned’ outside the law.93 They are actively produced as such, also ‘accorded a status’ through multiple procedures, categories, laws and rules, Judith Butler observes. Judging Agamben’s notion of ‘abandonment’ insufficient, Butler invites us to explore the mechanisms and practices through which some people are transformed into, and kept as marginals.94 Confined into what borrowing from Butler can be described as an ‘interiorized outside’, like others placed at the margins, the Argentine have to fight for their existence. They are on their own. If they insist on living, as Grinberg notes, their survival lies in their own hands, in a hostile environment that includes the police.95 During 2009, hundreds of police agents carried out razzias in ‘saturation operations’ of villas and other poor neighbourhoods in José León Suárez, Villa Ballester, Morón and Beccar, CELS reported. These operations, taking place without a judicial order, ‘fill in’ a zone with police cars and agents while closing off all access points.96 Agents then proceed with a mass search ‘for identification purposes’, confiscating belongings and arresting individuals. In the Buenos Aires province, detentions by the police between 2002 and 2009 tripled.97 Besides the police, in the city of Buenos Aires, harassment of the homeless and evictions of the poor, treated as ‘usurpers’ of public space, were carried out under the auspices of the Unit of Control of Public Space (UCEP) instituted by Mayor Mauricio Macri in 2008. ‘Indigent with a mattress and other belongings’, or ‘group of indigents of high dangerousness’ were common entry labels in UCEP recordings.98 Although significant controversy led to the dismantling of UCEP, such practices seem unlikely to go away. Policing poverty has always been a priority for the police.99 Serving as ‘an institution of the market’, controlling the poor, excluding those who could not work, and forcing the able-bodied to do so, was an explicit goal of police already in the eighteenth century, Foucault notes.100 Remaking the ‘sacred border’ between the worthy citizen and the deviant, ‘the “deserving” and the “undeserving poor” ’, is also a key task of the ‘neoliberal Leviathan’, Wacquant concludes.101 Police brutality, ‘disappearances’, killings, torture in prisons and police stations define a ‘hard core of human rights violations’, the 2011 CELS Report notes, victimizing members of the same vulnerable groups who have their basic rights denied by the state.102 Seguridad turns invisible spaces, events, voices and deaths, in particular those of the poor. Invisibility is a complex political concept. It is not that we do not see the poor. They

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are everywhere, collecting trash, sleeping on sidewalks, wandering around parks and subways, begging. Yet they are not listened to, not taken into account. If anything defines the politics of life as a play of hierarchical differentiations and exclusions, it is the recognition of the right to have rights, which Hannah Arendt103 lucidly judged a fundamental problem and which, I argue in Chapter 4, the police routinely administer. To curb discrimination, reformers promote the paradigm of seguridad ciudadana, or citizen security, seeking to protect the lives of citizens without discriminating among them. These aspirations are hardly ever met. Tropes of citizenship, as Michelle Bonner notes, are not enough to overcome a long anti-democratic tradition of ‘security as a frame’ justifying police violence and the harassment of the poor.104 In fact, in contexts of inequality and social fragmentation, appeals to citizenship can easily slide into tropes of exclusion, for it is not enough to be a citizen; one also has to look like one (most likely a productive one). Paired with seguridad, citizenship acquires a restrictive ‘patrimonial’ meaning, as Svampa suggested.105 Contentious definitions of citizens deserving protection, criminals and of how much power should the police be given to protect the former from the latter frequently give citizenship opposite meanings than the inclusive ones sought by reformers. Under these conditions, tropes of citizenship intended to tame state repression frequently backfire. ‘It is as if just for including the words ‘human rights’ in the curricula, then it [is] democratic… These things worry me’, observed a young bonaerense, concerned with the often empty words portraying what passes for democratic police training. Historically, seguridad has opposed human rights. Linked for centuries to the definition of threats which states confront through force, in Argentina the word seguridad traditionally connoted domestic threats and the use of all means in eliminating them, as Bonner notes.106 Rather than democratic, then, as reformers enthusiastically promise, citizen security is an umbrella under which contradictory meanings of security and citizenship coexist. At its worst, it turns into what Svampa christens the Citizen Security Doctrine, a new repressive framework based on dispositifs of control and intervention, the criminalization of poverty, and forms of political participation that treat every single poor person as ‘a potential criminal’ in the name of protecting citizens in a representative democracy.107 Beyond Argentina, expert assumptions about a new benign ‘citizen security’ tradition,108 may inadvertently conceal and legitimize enduring state violence performed in the name of security. At least in the region and the western hemisphere, empirical evidence on persistent illegal spying, political intelligence, torture, military hypothesis



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of conflict, outrageous ‘counterinsurgency’ tactics targeting civilians, and clandestine detention camps such as that of Guantanamo Bay does not clearly support claims that security became anything like ‘civic’ or ‘citizen’ friendly. Putting things in perspective, historian Lila Caimari compares recent crime scares in Argentina with others from the past. In particular, present fears parallel those triggered by massive immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. How will our years of panic be remembered? she asks. Among other things, Caimari suggests, historians will refer to the emergence of ‘new criminals’ and the intensification of violence after the spread of paco.109 Behind ‘a cycle of drug-induced street violence never seen before’ in Argentina, paco seems perfect to help consolidate a seguridad agenda.110 As well as crime waves and crises, drugs organize narratives and metaphors linking the new to familiar explanations about the world. Media and private discourses generate a sense that no efforts suffice to fight crime and that ‘the worst is always yet to come’.111 Inadvertently, victimization surveys at times instill the fear they claim to simply record. Like the media, surveys often induce individuals to imagine themselves in dangerous situations, thus contributing to trigger fear, and tend to focus on common crime and homicides, ignoring entire areas of criminal activity (e.g. financial, white collar, police violence), and leading society to conceptualize crime in such narrow terms.112 Some reality television shows reinforce seguridad’s discursive practices and governmental rationale. ‘There was a very interesting TV show about the scientific police investigating crime scenes, Policías en acción… where Buenos Aires’ police reality can be seen’, recalled a member of the Santa Fe police force. Fiction reinforces seguridad stereotypes. Reminiscent of the American television show Cops, Policías en acción started in 2005 as an attempt to narrate ‘Conurbano’s great novel’, as defined by the show’s executive producer Eloy Alazard, featuring scenes involving crime, the police, and their ‘moral dilemmas’ in Argentina. Despite promising viewers access to reality, the show’s editing, music, titles and subtitles represent the poor with remarkable cruelty, María Eugenia Boito notes. The blurring of faces, the camera’s focus on (sometimes, odd) body parts (e.g. genitals, a toothless mouth), presenting only fragments of speech generate a less than human representation of those living in poverty. Faceless, dehumanized, interchangeable, a spectral ‘other’ emerges from ‘blurry images of pieces of bodies crying and groaning’.113 If the label delincuente turns people invisible, the show intensifies the namelessness and invisibility of the stigmatized poor.

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In the end, those not given recognition, for whom the market has no room, and who resist letting themselves die, turn into security threats, to be labelled as criminals of some sort, neutralized, or eliminated, often legally. Ultimately, seguridad becomes a necropolitics, or an anti-politics that produces death. To most of us, however, the scene remains elided, out of sight. Figures of the dangerous populate the genealogy of modern Argentina. From its beginnings, the nation constituted itself through excluding and annihilating the alien ‘other’, who seemed alien because of not fitting dominant representations of Western culture. In a locally poignant, genocidal way, national identity was defined against a collection of others identified, excluded and destroyed. The Argentine melting pot’s alleged openness, based on giving up one’s own identity, Daniel Feierstein notes, was limited by ‘non-assimilability’.114 Whatever the reason for being deemed worthless of assimilation, it put one at the brink of destruction. It still does. We ‘still’, stresses a detective from Rosario, still these days have ‘aboriginal’ communities living in what he terms a ‘half natural state’. Characterizing the Argentine poor as people who lack culture, live off the land, and inhabit the borderline of both the nation and civilization, he draws on a long tradition. Civilización y Barbarie served as an organizational trope in the construction of modern Argentina. With its full incorporation to the world market, by the 1880s, the nation represented itself as victoriously advancing Western civilization against barbarianism. Sarmiento’s Facundo portrayed caudillos like Facundo Quiroga and their followers as ‘American Bedouins’ in the Pampas likened to a desert. If civilization was to prevail, ‘barbarians’ had to be annihilated.115 This narrative, or guiding fiction, to employ Nicholas Shumway’s term, provided Argentines with elements for defining a national identity while consolidating a myth of exclusion. Even Europeans, in theory the kind of immigrants sought by the state, were targeted as suspicious, as legal positivism and biological determinism infused state and police authorities blending ‘migration, sickness, and criminality’, Sofía Tiscornia shows. Subjected to deportations and repression by the 1902 Residence Law and the 1910 Law of Social Defence, immigrants became the object of hygienist policies. Anarchists, in particular, were represented as ‘bacteria’ contaminating the working class.116 Ideas brought by immigrants, like anarchism, ‘needed to be controlled, neutralized, and smashed in any way possible’, one bonarense commissioner acknowledged. This is why, he noted, the modern Argentine state assembled its police forces as a ‘quasi-militarized body for rapid action in the streets’. At the onset of the twentieth century,



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the police saw foreignness as synonymous with the morally defective. Today, like then, assumptions on a natural criminal predisposition among the poor, especially if migrant shantytown dwellers, legitimizes their deaths. Hay que matarlos a todos, ‘They all should be killed’, is a common expression in present-day Argentina to refer to suspected criminals. In the past, securing the nation served as a rationale to subject and annihilate gauchos, Native Americans, undesirable Europeans and leftist ‘subversives’. These days, the surviving original peoples, whom the detective above referred as semi-savages, with about 35 ethnic groups and 600,000 self-identified members in 2004–05, confront ambivalent, hypocritical state treatment.117 Visibly celebrated in the Bicentenario along critical revisions of nationhood, they continue enduring different forms of exclusion. Amid the economic boom of recent years, wealthy and powerful usurpers supported by local governments illegally occupied, claimed and often sold different groups’ ancestral lands in localities in Tucumán, Neuquén and the northeast. Subjected to illegal evictions and to constant occupations authorized by state officials, suffering most directly from the environmental pollution linked to the soy and mining booms and from projects of infrastructure developed without taking them into account, communities resist.118 Protestors find themselves often criminalized and threatened by local bosses or the police. A number of people, notably members of the Qom and Toba communities in November 2010, have been attacked and killed by police bullets. Secular forms of violence against the indigenous peoples gained visibility only recently, thanks to their own organization. Following the recent discovery of lithium deposits in the northwest, communities requested Supreme Court protection.119 Present in the elisions of hegemonic seguridad narratives, the non-commodified lifestyle of these peoples seem to threaten Argentina as much as the spread of common crime in the figure of the delincuente. Echoes of the past recreate themselves in this figure.

The lives that it takes A young commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast conveyed the dilemma caused by overcrowding: ‘You tell yourself: “Well, what do I do to lower the number of crimes? What do I do? Do I club him [the criminal] to death when I grab him… or I pick them up… and I kill them?” What to do, because there is no room for more inmates.’ Death appears at the point where questions like these find no response. Amplifying dangers associated with common crime, the seguridad dispositif leaves others in the dark.

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In the first years following the return of democracy in 1983, police abuse was interpreted as a residue of the dictatorship. It soon became clear, however, that it had come to stay.120 Almost three decades later, in its 2009, 2010 and 2011 reports, CELS stresses the irregular searches, arbitrary detentions, abuse of force, violence, torture and extrajudicial executions of suspects linked to policing in the nation.121 In the Buenos Aires province, according to data from the now defunct Ministerio de Seguridad, the number of arrests escalated from 81,012 in 2002 to 112,349 in 2004, 153,472 in 2006 and 248,546 in 2009.122The police make arrests, the CELS report notes, with ‘absolute discretion’, sometimes without any other reason than a vague concern with inseguridad.123 ‘We cannot fit one more detainee here; there is no room. This poor Commissioner has fifty detainees who have no place. This is not a prison. Besides, the government does not have enough money… every prisoner costs three thousand pesos’, a commissioner from Corrientes complained. Unsafe prison conditions have been reported, especially in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Mendoza. Since 1990, the province more than tripled its prison population, and now has one of the highest world rates of imprisonment, reaching 196.4 per 1000,000 by the end of 2010.124 Large numbers of people, many of them minors, have awaited trial for years: 75 per cent of inmates have never received a sentence, and more than 5,500 individuals were held in police stations. Just in the Buenos Aires province, between June 2004 and February 2006, nearly a quarter of a million people, 240,047, were arrested, and the prison population saw a 25.21 per cent increase. By mid-2010, the threshold of 30,000 people incarcerated in the Buenos Aires province had been crossed, three-quarters of them without a sentence.125 ‘Justice lies between two dark shadows, the police and the prison guards’, a bonaerense detective noted with irony. Acknowledging the efforts of the Kirchners to investigate crimes against humanity committed under the military dictatorship, the United Nations Committee on Torture expressed concern about the ‘torture and ill-treatment committed in a widespread and habitual manner by the State’s security forces and agencies, both in the provinces and in the federal capital’. Inmates suffer in overcrowded, unhealthy and unsafe prisons, with a lack of proper food and medical care, systematic mistreatment and torture. Slow or non-existent judicial investigations on abuses and a very small number of convictions complete the picture. Despite the committee’s repeated recommendations to keep records of deaths, ill-treatment and torture at the hands of police, so far only the Buenos Aires province has done so.126



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Darius Rejali defines torture as ‘the systematic infliction of physical torment on detained individuals by state officials for police purposes, for confession, information, or intimidation’. In Argentina, with torture techniques such as the picana eléctrica, the police developed a unique violent repertoire. These days, police torture and mistreatment target mostly the young and poor, often street children and the homeless. Members of indigenous groups and the gay community have also been victimized. Along the lines of intimidation examined by Rejali, in Argentina torture reinforces hierarchy and social discipline, preventing the excluded from speaking up. Most of the time, the torture and death of such individuals remains invisible.127 ‘It is not all of us, not all of us, do you understand?’ one bonaerense insisted. Typified in Argentina as a crime against humanity, torture has such strong associations with the last military dictatorship that many resist acknowledging that it continues to take place in democracy. María del Carmen Verdú describes the intricate arguments through which judges avoid the use of the term, torture and choose milder legal language to indict police agents.128 In 2007, for example, the Argentine Supreme Court rejected charging a member of the Federal Police for torture, alleging that it had taken place in 1988, when Argentina was already under a democratic regime that did not deliberately persecute citizens. The actions behind this case, justice Righi concluded, constituted just an individual crime not involving the police or the Argentine state. Despite the thousands of cases documented since the democratic restoration in 1983, barely a dozen have led to sentences on the grounds of torture. Saved by the judiciary from charges of torture, indicted police officers are less severely punished, which facilitates the ‘recycling of torturers’ into higher positions in the institution, Verdú explains.129 ‘When a police officer fires, the one aiming is the state’. As suggested by a graffiti painted on a wall in the streets of Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina, no ‘bad apple’ argument suffices vis-à-vis the accumulation of killings by the police. ‘The Argentine state kills, and it does so regularly’,130 Carlos Motto notes, even though no official statistics on the number of individuals killed by the police have been made available. The death of a criminal, or of anyone perceived as one, passes as a natural occurrence, with minimal to no media coverage. Linked to street patrolling and to the detainment of suspects, most arbitrary killings are disguised as ‘shootings with criminals’, suicides, or as ‘accidental’ shootings in prisons and police stations. Most of the victims happen to be detained for identification or misdemeanours. Only if successfully proved ‘innocent’, by the mobilization of relatives,

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friends and neighbours, can the dead gain media attention and visibility.131 Otherwise, to most of the poor, the label ‘criminal’ seems just as naturally fitting as death itself. Most of the time, the media acts complacently towards the police. When it comes to the children of the poor, theirs are ‘silenced deaths’, as Daroqui puts it.132 Pushed to the margins of the law and humanity as homini sacri, it is as if their deaths do not count. ‘Mr Minister of Seguridad: Your police were the ones who put us in a situation of inseguridad’, voiced a young woman while protesting the violent police and the security forces attack on youths outside a rock concert leading to the death of Rubén Carballo.133 CORREPI documents 3,393 arbitrary killings by the police from the beginning of the democratic transition in 1983 until early November 2011, and this figure is just approximate.134 By the mid-1980s, ‘TV shows presented those killings as the result of a “war on crime”, Minister of the Supreme Court, Eugenio Zaffaroni observed.’135 In May, 1987, the nonsensical, cold-blooded street murder of three teenagers in Ingeniero Budge by the police set a milestone.136 The case bridged a rhetoric of justification of state violence still traceable to the dictatorship, with the seeds of a new discursive formation centred on crime, Gabriel Sarfatti notes.137 Forty-nine per cent of the deaths recorded by CORREPI resulted from ‘trigger-happy’ policing, and 33 per cent occurred when the victim was under custody. Sixty-one per cent of the deaths were inflicted by members of provincial police forces, and the rest by prison guards and members of the Federal Police.138 One-third of the dead were minors. ‘Hundreds of people,’ according to CORREPI, ‘were seen for the last time at a police station or taken into a police car’. Sometimes, months later, their bodies are found. Many remain missing, such as Luciano Arruga, a sixteen-year-old last seen in January 2009 when taken by the police from Lomas del Mirador, in La Matanza. The police, witnesses reported, had tried to recruit Luciano to commit crimes, and he repeatedly refused. The growing victimization of minors by the police lay behind Supreme Court Justice Carmen Argibay’s decision not to release minors unconstitutionally held in detention centres.139 They are ‘moving targets’, she observed, and the police ‘have them marked’. If she let these minors go, the police would kill them, and ‘I do not want to have those deaths on my conscience’, Argibay concluded. Any random CORREPI weekly report gives a sense of the scope of police violence in Argentina.140 In the last week of May 2009, for example, we learn about seven arbitrary killings by the police, including that of a 16-year-old male murdered by a bonaerense sergeant while riding a bus in Bernal, in the



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Conurbano. The policeman alleged a shooting, even though the only two shots, his, hit the victim in the back. The same week, a 28-year-old man was killed by another bonaerense sergeant also while riding a bus, once again in the Conurbano, this time in Lanús. In Tucumán, a police agent chasing criminals by motorcycle started shooting in a neighbourhood as a group of children played soccer. Ariel Ledesma, 13, died from a bullet in the back of his head. In Esquina, Corrientes, Leandro Escobar, 54, got caught in a shooting at a gas station and died from bullets to the back shot by three police officers. CORREPI also reports the murder of Marcela Serrano, 28, killed in Merlo, Buenos Aires, by members of an undercover unidentified police brigade in her house. As the unidentified men forced themselves into the house, and Marcela’s husband resisted them thinking that they were criminals, Marcela covered her 10-year-old son to protect him from the shooting. She died. Finally, the report refers to two shooting deaths by members of the Federal Police, one of a Paraguayan citizen stopped in the street for identification, in the San Telmo neighbourhood, and the other in Villa 21–24, as the victim supposedly got caught up, once again, in a shooting with criminals. In contrast to CORREPI, which between November 2009 and November 2010 documented 219 arbitrary police killings across the nation, CELS limits its monitoring to the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, where in 2010, drawing on newspaper reports, counted 113 violent deaths.141 Police violence also targets social and political activists. CORREPI recorded at least 65 activists killed between 1995 and 2011.142 The executions of Maximiliano Kosteki and Darío Santillán in a piquetero protest in June 2002, of the piquetero leader Cristian Ibáñez in October 2003 (followed by that of his fellow activist Marcelo Cuéllar while protesting against Cristian’s murder), and the killing of a schoolteacher and union leader Carlos Fuentealba in April 2007, are well known. Fuentealba, the late President Kirchner bitterly noted at the time, was ‘executed by a policeman’, facilitated by those who were ‘building this national security doctrine bis’ reinvigorating state repression.143 ‘Judges are reluctant to intervene because it is a political matter, and politicians do not want to intervene because they consider it a judicial matter… from my humble point of view, piqueteros blocking traffic, for example, is both a judicial and a political matter’, concludes the Federal officer. With their open stance on human rights, the Kirchners gained the support of most reformers. CORREPI however observes that police repression has only turned more selective in targeting social and political activists and the poor. More than 6,000 activists are being prosecuted for participating in protests, CORREPI notes, while arbitrary detentions,

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razzias, torture and killings continue.144 Moreover, more than fifty-four per cent of the deaths in CORREPI’s records have occurred since the start of Néstor Kirchner’s tenure in May 2003. As mentioned earlier, the state does not publicize the number of deaths by its police or security forces. Listed under the general category of ‘homicides’, victims of police violence are counted as the product of the same ‘crime’ from which the police protect us. A paradoxical mutation takes place, as Motto notes. State murders and its murderous agents are elided, and their killings appear as the deed of the ‘criminals’ they allegedly fight.145 In what appears to be a vicious cycle, the murders of the young and poor by the police acting under the seguridad rationale are ultimately recorded in official statistics as a product of crime, feeding the need for more seguridad. The seguridad dispositif, naturalizing the poor as criminal suspects, through its epistemic, ontological, territorial, legal-institutional and political dimensions, including the police and the media, help to eliminate ‘criminals’ while making their deaths invisible.146 Verdú points out that acknowledging these forms of state violence in the Argentine democracy requires questioning headlines such as: ‘Young criminal with a thick record brought down by the forces of order’.147

The rise of the Dispositif The political rise of seguridad finds its boldest discursive articulation in the motto, ‘La delincuencia es una nueva modalidad en el campo de la subversión (Crime is a new form in the field of subversion)’. In a September 1998 interview, President Menem identified a new antagonist, delincuencia, which he further associated with the term subversión, a word with a loaded lineage in Argentina.148 Used to label rebel Peronista groups after the military coup that ousted Perón in 1955, the term gained currency with the expansion of the Cold War’s National Security Doctrine. After the 1966 military coup, the dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía treated dissent as pro-Soviet support. ‘We are aligned with the Americas’ common cause,’ he declared in 1965, ‘to defend our Western and Christian lifestyle against the attacks of red totalitarianism.’149 The regime’s defence law, the 16970, consecrated the figure of the ‘internal enemy’, as the military alleged there was an ‘internal irregular war against an irregular enemy’. In those darkest years, with the nightmare peaking in the mid-1970s, the word subversión acquired deadly connotations. Subversión apátrida,



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whose strong moral condemnation the English translation of ‘unpatriotic subversion’ misses, was deemed the explicit enemy of the military dictatorship of El Proceso after March 1976. The dictatorship profusely used the expression ‘subversive criminals’, in reference to individuals whose beliefs, whether political, philosophical, aesthetic, or personal, deviated from official definitions of ‘the Western’ and ‘the Christian’. Those the regime labelled subversives were seen as non-Argentine, or worse, as ‘no persons, as defined by then General Ramón Camps, and likened to a pest or cancerous cells calling for ‘surgical’ solutions. The latter was just one of the euphemisms hiding hundreds of clandestine camps and tens of thousands of ‘disappearances’. In that context, being deemed a subversive essentially amounted to a death sentence through extra-legal means. In 1998, Menem’s retrieval of the term in reference to common crime established a continuity, turning criminal suspects into a threat to the security of the nation, in the same vein than were those targeted by state terror back in the 1970s. In the interview, Menem stresses crime’s immanence and (im)moral roots. With their advanced arms and communication devices, new forms of international organized crime, can easily overpower our police, he observed. They ‘recruit people as subversion recruited [people] before’. Like subversives in the past, these criminals use ‘police uniforms, arms’, and move around not unlike a ‘subversive commando’. ‘Do you remember, in other times?’ Menem asked. ‘This is what we need to be careful of.’ The identification of a domestic enemy as the radical ‘other’, whose existence threatens ours and our communities, is rather infrequent in political discourse. Its occurrence anticipates, or sets the field for violence against this other.150 Likening crime to subversion, decades after the dictatorship gave the word its sinister materiality, Menem recasts common crime and criminal suspects as the hidden internal enemy of the nation along the lines of El Proceso. The formula, ‘crime is subversion’, turns criminals into irregular enemies. It just seems natural, then, for the police, the security forces and even the military to be deployed in the pursuit of defence. Moreover, if criminals are like subversives, the association implies some continuity between the methods of fighting crime that Menem judges most appropriate and those with which the last military dictatorship responded to those judged subversives. One common thread is the acceptance of extra-legal forms of violence. Crime, Menem concluded ‘is an evil at the international level’, and the only solution to fight it is ‘Zero Tolerance. Mano dura [tough hand or iron fist]. There is no other option.’ In the political coordinates defined by this speech, Zero Tolerance, or mano dura become weapons

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in a domestic irregular war – a police war waged against those labelled as ‘criminals’, which the speech portrays as the new subversives. Aware of the loaded political implications of his words, Menem acknowledged that ‘some human rights organizations may make a great fuss’, and yet – he insisted, ‘here, a criminal has more protection than a police officer or the people’.151 Seguridad’s opposition to human rights re-emerges from time to time, in the same terms, as in 2004, Blumberg expressed: ‘Here, human rights are not for people like you but only for criminals.’ Menem’s words convey the political rationale behind the rise of seguridad. With common crime perceived as a national security threat, its protagonists as enemies, and their physical elimination as a natural consequence, they legitimize a new hegemony, helping to delineate the new scenario that Svampa describes as a ‘society of security’. Seguridad naturalizes the terms of Menem’s narrative in personal stories of inseguridad and fear of crime. Once the public learns to see certain individuals as criminals and criminals as subversives, the need for their elimination seems to follow as a logical consequence. The assimilation of delincuencia to subversión revitalizes the Argentine state’s lineage of internal enemies. Besides the dictatorship’s use of ‘subversion’, the label delincuente has been for more than a century linked various dangerous ‘others’, whether in response to their political ideas – as in the case of anarchists or socialists – or to their alleged abnormal, monstrous nature, targeting from immigrants to workers, to those in the political opposition. In retrospective, such lineage as well as the repression and killings taking place in the 1919 ‘Tragic Week’ in Buenos Aires, the 1921 and 1922 mass executions in Patagonia, and the widespread use of torture by the police can be seen to anticipate the full-fledged state terror of the 1970s.152 Now as we embark in the fight for seguridad, an indeterminate number of deaths are obscured by the label delincuente.

‘Those times’: the Argentine police and El Proceso ‘The policeman must be nosy, inquisitive, curious, to be able to reach the malignant cyst. There is no alternative’, explained a well educated, charming commissioner from Córdoba. Cancer-like metaphors, which back in the 1970s the dictatorship associated with subversives, now target criminal suspects. In police parlance, ambiguity towards the military dictatorship still prevails. Police agents tend to refer to it vaguely with expressions such as época or tiempo. The latter, meaning simply other times,



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is as neutral as one can get when referring to the past. Other euphemisms for the dictatorship are ‘other time/s’, ‘the violent times of Argentina’, ‘the time of the dictatorship’, ‘the time of repression’, ‘the times of El Proceso’, ‘the time of the coup’, or ‘those past times’. There are also those who simply refer to ‘the military government;, a similarly neutral term. Overall, police narratives offer a depoliticized account, between naïve and mythical, conveying a sense that the government of El Proceso just happened, almost as a natural event, in a certain time in the past. Such neutralization facilitates the acceptance of the dictatorship and its methods as an unavoidable, necessary evil. Still, memories of the dictatorship run deeper – if frequently filtered through standards of what is and what is not acceptable to say in democratic Argentina. Sometimes, police voices arise to defend the dictatorship over the democratic regime. During the dictatorship, a bonaerense commissioner claimed ‘of course, there was much less violence’ than in the present. ‘At the time’, he said, ‘for better or for worse, whoever committed a crime, had to pay for it’. Today, ‘nobody pays for any crime. Or, only one out of a hundred does’, he concluded. Police ambiguity, when not veiled support towards El Proceso, including those attempts to describe it in ‘neutral’ terms, betrays the state’s own ambiguity towards the dictatorship and the police. Congress has yet to replace major laws regulating the Federal Police and the police of the Buenos Aires province that were promulgated by the dictatorship. That everyday policing still depends on norms passed by individuals who have been tried for crimes against humanity sends an ambiguous message to the members of the police regarding the legitimacy of different regimes. Preserving these laws, the Argentine democracy authorizes, legalizes and legitimizes the dictatorship’s regulatory framework and authoritarian police regimes.

Seguridad: Cementing the community of the unequal ‘We build houses to feel safe, we put bars on them, we live like prisoners, we place ourselves in Sing Sing. We will not be more secure this way. The man who looks through the window and sees bars: this is the problem, and this is how we live’, reflected a member of the Federal Police at the headquarters in Buenos Aires. Fear and demands for protection are founding tropes of modern nation-states. Since their inception, Foucault observes, security dispositifs sought to govern the masses of ‘beggars, vagrants, delinquents,

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criminals, thieves, murderers and so on’ and the events occurring around them, such as crime and disease.153 It took a few centuries, however, for security to display its full potential as a governing principle. Only recently it may have become the ‘sole criterion of political legitimation’, as Agamben contends.154 The rise of seguridad in Argentina represents this trend. A central trope in modern politics, seguridad takes hold in democratic Argentina as an almost autonomous, public good. Whether out of subjective perceptions, experiences of victimization, or strategic reasons, the fact is that, since the mid-1990s, millions of Argentines have embraced the language of seguridad. Every day, newspapers, women’s magazines, radio, TV and conversations spread its micro-politics of fear, consolidating new forms of governance, self-governance and individual and collective identities. If in one of its facets, seguridad shows its teeth as mano dura, it now begins to display an allegedly benign side. As part of this shift, President Fernández de Kirchner defined the once-opposed seguridad and human rights as ‘terms of a same equation’.155 Simulacral as only a community of seguridad can be, the replica of a harmonious original that does not exist, seguridad provides people with meaning and a mode of existence.156As we will see in Chapter 4, in the hands of the police seguridad sets mechanisms of exclusion from citizenship and humanity operating prior to the application of the law. Thousands of armed police officers do the state’s groundwork, endowed with prerogatives that turn them into privileged agents of governance and manufacturers of social reality. That simulating community takes a dramatic toll of life and liberty, as the case of Argentina shows, seems just consequent with a politics that develops over the fractures of an unequal and fragmented society by choosing not to address the existence of the fracture.

Chapter 4

Police Governance, Gente and Delincuentes ‘The system places us in a situation of permanent incoherence’, a policeman acknowledged, conveying discomfort. We are in his office. A semi-empty, austere office, with walls painted white or perhaps in cold, impersonal colours – light green, light blue, the game of the greys. A few patriotic portraits hang on the walls, including the Argentine founding father, General José de San Martín, and other national symbols. Offices like his often have a crucifix and a small Virgin Mary on display. In addition, at least one desk has small piles of papers awaiting signatures. The size of the room, the landscape through the windows – indeed, the very existence of windows providing views of the outside and natural light – and the niceness and quality of the furniture change according to the hierarchy of the office. The aspect of the place speaks to the pedigree of the neighbourhood. In one room, someone confesses, ‘helping a woman in labor is the nicest thing that has happened to me. The rest has always been all tragic, with pain, accidents, deaths, robberies. Nothing to celebrate.’ In the same room, or perhaps in a different one, a voice claims: ‘I’ve seen the lowest, the most notable, I’ve seen everything. In the street, in the city, in small towns.’ In yet another room, hundreds of miles away, someone tells me, ‘Then, you reach a point that you say ‘What is the limit, where is good and where is evil?’ Such statements express a distinct perspective and a view of the world and human nature, combining intense cynicism with sparks of naïveté, a highly idealized vision of how things should be with a dark account of how they are. These are the voices of the Argentine police. As a ‘governmental technology peculiar to the state’, Foucault noted, the police form part of the modern ‘art of government’ guided by raison d’état.1 The concept of police evokes at once broad police power – namely, a set of state institutions and regulations – and patrol agents. It is the latter, as an embodiment of the former, and the filigree of their discursive practices, that constitutes the subject of this chapter. ‘One sole policeman represents the institution anywhere in the nation’, a member of the Federal Police explained. They are immersed in ‘the everyday life of doing seguridad every day as the

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policeman’, as a commissioner from Córdoba put it. In their polyphony, as part of ‘the political economy of ruling’, to borrow from Otwin Marenin,2 these agents administer the micro-politics of seguridad in the streets. Police agents are given ‘a gun to dispose of the lives of the people’, a commissioner from Córdoba stressed. ‘We are civilians with arms’, a policewoman from a small town in Mendoza added. ‘We are and we are not civilian… for some things we are civilian and for others, police’, a bonaerense officer noted in regard of the police’s unclear status. Interpreting social reality perhaps no less confusingly than other groups, unlike the general public, police agents enjoy unique prerogatives. With guns in their belts, they can intervene in the most diverse circumstances, for countless reasons, taking away liberties and lives. ‘Many functions are carried out in a decentralized way… policing works in an individualized fashion’, observed a member of the Federal Police. Patrolling the streets, often without supervision, preventively intervening, selectively enforcing the law, constructing certain groups as suspect, criminalizing situations and people by searching and frisking, and arresting individuals for ‘probable cause’ and ‘reasonable suspicion’, the police materialize their understanding of social order in ways equivalent to informal policy-making. Ultimately, their prerogatives enable them to extend their domain from the public square to the intimacy of the household and, as Shearing and Ericson put it, to ‘all aspects of organized life’.3They are the ‘most elemental and visible’ street-level bureaucrats. Men and women, officers and subordinate personnel – some with decades of experience, others just starting – in powerful positions within large metropolitan districts, patrol officers in poor, marginal, semi-rural areas, cadets at police schools, educated commissioners, officers in uniforms, elegant business suits, or undercover clothes, they reach all corners and peoples. ‘And there is a moment when, really, your heart leaves your body and nothing really matters to you anymore’, a detective from San Isidro explains. With somber overtones, the police claim to know first-hand some core truths about human nature, politics and the world. Theirs is a powerful claim. They present us with a hopeless view of humans as unruly and prone to evil. Generalized distrust, a skeptical if not hopeless obsession with the world, love for details and minute descriptions, a bureaucratic, impersonal approach to scenes and people, and a deep respect for authority and social hierarchy combined with suspicion of everything and everyone cut across police narratives. Furthered in literature, police traits at times make it difficult to distinguish fiction from reality, to decide whether and to what



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extent real cops inspire fictional characters or the other way round. It may not matter much, though. As a commissioner from a province in the south observed, ‘what is supposedly fiction, always, if there is something shown in fiction, it always ends up coming out in reality, they are connected’. Crossings are frequent and multiple. A bonaerense agent in the Conurbano asked me to find him a writer to help him write a novel as he has so many stories to tell. Another interviewee, a commissioner from a southern provincial capital, remembering a series of horrible crimes and accidents involving little girls, confessed that he writes police tales so as ‘not to look at my own ghosts’. In their realism, police stories often echo the darkest passages of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Whatever such political philosophers may describe, individual police officers claim to have seen it themselves, to know it, in ways that may take one’s heart away. Police discursive practices illuminate a dimension of grassroots state governance that thousands of individuals meet every day, sometimes with major consequences for their lives. Yet, despite their daily participation in the government, police agents’ voices, perspectives and insights tend to be dismissed. In a seminal essay on the police in Latin America, Peter Waldman reminds us to take seriously ‘their worldview, their value system, and their everyday problems’.4 The previous chapter proposed to regard seguridad as a new governmental dispositif allowing the institutions and values of democracy to coexist with inequality and exclusion without calling them into question. Guided by the voices of police agents themselves, this chapter enters their world of grassroots governance to map representations informing police practices. Power to define the ways in which governmental policies reach the people and to channel, neutralize and even reverse the intended effects of laws and policies on the ground turn the police into everyday gatekeepers of citizenship and humanity. Transforming initially neutral notions such as population, individual, or (a generic) people into worthy and worthless beings, police agents carry out a true policing of human nature. ‘At the heart of statist practices’, as Rancière notes, by distributing beings along a hierarchical chain of worth and functions, manufacturing subjectivities and social bonds, the police evidence their ontological productivity.5 This chapter draws on a corpus of interviews held between 2001 and 2008 in nine Argentine districts to explore police agents’ arguments, tropes and seguridad stories in their hermeneutical productivity. Police perspectives are essential for making sense of ground exercises of prerogative power affecting citizen rights and the quality of the government. In what follows, I first characterize the police episteme and recurrent tropes framing police

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discursive practices in Argentina, then outline the dispositif of access to rights, citizenship and humanity, with its categorizing of forms of life and territories. Determining individuals’ standing vis-à-vis gradients of the (in)human appears as a pre-eminent governing role of ‘the man in blue’, whose discursive practices this chapter scrutinizes before moving on to assess its impact on the regime.

Institutions, meaning and practices The police power of describing, labelling, categorizing and narrating – a power of ‘legitimate naming’, as Christopher Wilson puts it – has the potential to determine fate for many.6 This narrative power crystallizes in police reports – those unique pieces of writing that define identity and criminalize individuals. ‘And this is a power of ours, because the judge reads what we have written’, a young officer from a small town in Mendoza concluded. The extent to which police produce events, agents and causal links through these reports rather than merely describing them is never easy to assess. The same occurs regarding the police’s role as the main source of news about crime, which gives their perspectives on the lower classes and the human condition salience in daily life. Some tropes, shared by police officers across countries, have given rise to notions such as police culture. They include emphases on discretion, the uniqueness of the circumstances confronted every day in the streets, and instinct and experience as valid sources of knowledge. More narrow clusters of images and narratives define sub-cultures. Some tropes remain uniquely local. The latter, and the specific articulations between the latter and the former, offer clues about differences in the exercise of police power – a power otherwise as universal as the modern state has come to be. No police sub-culture develops in isolation, as Waldman notes, but rather in intimate connection with judges, politicians, bureaucrats, prison guards and, we know, also with larger groups within society. Due to the unique prerogatives embedded in policing, police practices offer a fertile ground for informal policy-making, refracting policies and qualifying the spirit of written rules. An informal policy may or may not be deliberate. If some policies are kept informal because of their outrageous illegality, as when police officers organized death squadrons, others result from certain ways of seeing and perceiving. Police representations matter. Re-enacted by those in charge of policing as well as by other actors, their ‘scripts’, stories and metaphors allow us to make sense of the ways



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in which the police exercise their prerogatives and – whether deliberately or accidentally – take lives and erode democracy. Conjugating actions, meaning and the use of force, the discursive practices of these Argentines delineate a basic model of police governance impacting on citizenship and the regime. Piling up fragments of knowledge of a different texture, intertwined with memories, experiences and stories taken from real life or fiction, we find scientific and legal reports as well as remarks claiming to be just the product of instinct or the senses. Genres and formats vary. Yet such stories, tropes and images share a common core, (re)producing perspectives and modalities of beings through script-like repertoires of routines that individuals internalize, negotiate and re-create in their interactions. This is the universe of police – the police episteme. If an episteme organizes perception and allows to distinguish between valid and invalid knowledge, the police claim to know deep truths about the social world defines one such episteme. Images and values conveyed through metaphors, those ‘boundary-drawing, boundary-maintaining, ordering and othering “mini-narratives” ’,7 legitimize police categorizations and their linked institutional practices and uses of violence. Actions and meanings weave institutions together, enabling us to better understand how institutional arrangements emerge, undergo transformations and cease to exist. Vivien Schmidt shows how we internalize institutions as discursive objects through shared ideas and beliefs. Valverde presents institutions as coagulations of practices. ‘Encoded’ in practices, storytelling acts selectively by enacting certain tropes and facilitating their institutional circulation.8 Significant correlations have been found between authoritarian representations and the use of force among the police.9 Accordingly, in Argentina, in periods when mano dura rhetoric thrives, episodes of police abuse and killings by the police appear to peak. Drawing insight from various traditions, from George Lakoff’s findings on the practical implications of metaphors, to Foucault’s arguments on the productivity and immanent value of surface discourses, I assess my interviewees’ expressions and arguments for their hermeneutical possibilities to inform practices.10

Rights ‘You realize you are putting on the street a person with authority to regulate citizens’ constitutional rights’, reflected a bonaerense commissioner in La Plata. Effective citizenship presupposes the rights to life,

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bodily safety, legal equality, protection and basic individual freedoms. Recognition of rights is key to being treated as fully human and as a citizen. Yet these rights are not ‘available to all citizens on an equal basis’.11 Of course, no society claiming to be democratic these days can openly discriminate against its own members, yet hierarchies also reproduces through informal policies unaddressed in plans and programmes. The effective exercise of rights depends on the recognition of citizenship or an equivalent status deserving legal protection. As P. A. J. Waddington put it, ‘distinguishing criminals from citizens is part of a wider strategy that excludes certain groups from citizenship, for once this is achieved the exercise of coercive authority can be conducted almost without restraint’.12 Argentina is no exception. The enjoyment of rights remains the product of a contingent decision of those administering access – in particular, of the police. In charge of these prerogatives, at the capillary terminals of the state, police agents mold reality directly, on a case-by-case basis, like no other. An individual’s lot in part depends on how he or she is perceived and labelled: as part of ‘the people’ or as a ‘criminal’. Trained to ‘treat with people, be the criminal, be the victim in society’, as a commissioner from Misiones put it, police agents contribute to defining the categories of criminals and citizens that they claim to merely distinguish. According to the CELS, in Argentina, the police ‘handle public safety in a different manner according to geographical categories and spaces’.13 Acknowledging this dynamics, the 2010 CELS Report stated that in the nation ‘it is as if only members of the middle and upper class deserved protection’.14 The same year, in March, the United Nations Human Rights Committee expressed a concern that ‘many of the rights enunciated in the Pact are not uniformly protected’ in the nation. Every day, police practices contribute to defining the conditions for people’s exercise of and access to, citizenship and rights. Theirs are some of the voices of Leviathan. If data gathered by human rights organizations give us a sense of the scope and territories where police governance prevails, the voices of police agents offer insight on its dynamics and otherwise opaque rationale. By distinguishing among the people, operating in a cone of shadow prior to the law, the police administer a bio-political mechanism of governance producing exclusion and inclusion from citizenship. Distinctions between higher and lesser forms of life, tropes and figures such as gente, the people and delincuentes (criminals), lie behind police violence and their victims’ invisibility. They help to produce dehumanizing oppositions and to transform individuals into cliché characters from ‘fear of crime’ seguridad



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dramas. Police forms of direct governance thus decisively influence the way in which citizen rights ‘expand and contract in democratic systems’, as Armony observed.15 If data gathered by human rights organizations give us a sense of the scope and territories where police governance prevails, the voices of police agents offer insight on its dynamics and otherwise opaque rationale. Although encounters between police agents and citizens can open room for negotiation, the person’s class standing, cultural capital, potential connections and legal knowledge are decisive on whether such room exists at all. No invocation of rights suffices to protect individuals deemed worthless. ‘If we examine the etymology of the word police, it means taking care of the people… It comes from politeia, the city, the community, this is to say co-mmu-ni-ty, in common agreement, something like this’, a commissioner from Corrientes explained. Along the same lines, a commissioner from Córdoba noted that ‘the policeman… is the defender of society’, adding in more personal terms, ‘back in school, I took an oath to give my life for my fellow folk’. His words coincide with those of his colleague from Corrientes. No government, says the latter, can change the function of the police. ‘More rights can be recognized’, laws can get ‘a little tougher’, and yet the core police function will always remain the same: ‘to take care of the people, their property, [and] the population’. From what or whom people need to be protected goes without saying. As Dubber observed, the police seek the identification and ‘elimination of threats internal and external, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate’ to preserve state order.16 To help, serve and protect are core to police officers’ self-definitions. Likening the police to a public servant ‘who is there to help those in need’, a commissioner from Posadas defined himself as destined ‘to enforce the law and protect the life and properties of the people’. Part of the danger lies with the people themselves. ‘I am here to protect the rights of the citizen… the right of property is one of them’, a commissioner from Córdoba explained. Who threatens the (propertied) citizen? The delincuente, the criminal – ‘one of the negative parts in this society’ embodies the threat. But the criminal must be sorted out from the people. Hence, the people referred to by the police, we soon discover, are never just people. Policing carries within it a fracturing of the concept of the people between those who need protection and those who pose a threat to the former.

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Anti-Heroes: General police tropes ‘I am a police officer. I speak like a police officer’, stressed a commissioner from Corrientes. Police commonalities, often referred to as ‘police culture’, can be productively redescribed in light of the sets of tropes and shared narratives they build upon. In turn, individual choices, often subconscious, develop between the ideological frameworks shared within communities. The strictures of the career, the maintenance of social order, the value of experience, instinct and intuition, emphases on the risk, sacrifice, and protection of life, the need for discretion, the significance of the uniform, tropes of heroism, give the police distinct traits. ‘If I died and were re-born, I would be a police officer again… There is nothing better than this’, a commissioner from Rosario asserted with enthusiasm. Vocation is a major trope among the police. ‘My true vocation, my heart goes with being a police officer’, an experienced commissioner from Rosario confessed. ‘It is a vocation, blood makes you act’, a younger bonaerense detective explained his choice of the profession despite the risks. Allusions to hearts, souls, passion, love, blood and sacrifice arise as police officers recall the reasons for joining the force: ‘I made more money before…’ a young male police student commented, ‘but this was my vocation’. All interviewees stress the sacrifices involved by being in the police. According to an interviewee from Rosario, the police ‘are in permanent contact with human suffering, with human misery’. A policeman from Córdoba concurred: ‘The police work for human misery… for, when do they resort to us? Death, accidents, robberies… after the tragedy… they forget us completely.’ Using oranges as a metaphor, a commissioner from a provincial capital in the south concluded that in the life of a police officer there are ‘more often bitter than sweet ones’. Only true vocation makes sacrifices bearable as ‘a cross that you carry with enthusiasm’, according to a Federal Police detective. Many explain that they joined the police out of economic need. However, over the years, they saw their vocation flourish. Ultimately, they all coincide, one may join the police for countless reasons, but one stays only out of vocation. It is a true calling. Not unlike anti-hero detective characters, such as Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, ‘the policeman has problems with his family, he is alone’. The police station ‘is his second home’, one interviewee explained. A young, attractive policewoman described how her working conditions make it impossible for her to keep a boyfriend. All the interviewees reported that police officers can spend ‘twenty-four or forty-eight hours… either at the police station or sleeping on the car in the street’. Despite all



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these personal sacrifices, ‘what one does is never enough’, never sufficiently appreciated. Unlike the hero, the anti-hero has no great power. No epical dimension accompanies his fights. In many ways a flawed character, because of his cynicism, brutality, or selfishness, the anti-hero possesses a noble soul. ‘We risk two simple things: life or liberty’, stressed an officer from Córdoba. The police officer earns ‘the lowest salary… the one that has the least, and yet at some point the one who offers the most, for he gives away his own life’, an experienced commissioner from Paraná added. Aware of their bad reputation, a commissioner from Córdoba explained, ‘we are not well appreciated, but in the moment of giving our life’, the police agent will be wherever he is needed. In the police imagination, the real heroic character comes to light in the end. Giving life, in the figure of the martyr and the hero, is central to the police identity.17 The essence of the police is ‘carrying a gun and wearing the uniform’, a commissioner in Posadas explained. ‘The police officer, incredibly, lives with the uniform on’, a colleague of his from a southern province added. Revered by everybody in the police, the symbolically loaded uniform represents power and authority, standing as ‘a synonym with order’ as another commissioner explained. Wearing her uniform, a policewoman confessed to feel empowered. All of the interviewees stressed that the police expect people to ‘show respect’ for their uniforms. Yet the uniform also represents danger and a burden. ‘Whoever wears this uniform,’ one commissioner explained, ‘his or her duty is to help you, on any matter, on whatever you ask.’ But the uniform can easily turn the police agent into a target. ‘In Buenos Aires’, a female police agent from Posadas noted, rather than ‘something you wear with pride’, the uniform ‘makes you fear, because people see a police agent and they hate him’. The Argentine public does not trust the police. In the 2008 LAPOP survey, 63.6 per cent of Argentine respondents expressed no confidence in their local police. Asked about their expectations for the police to solve a crime, 42.5 per cent responded ‘little’ while 31.2 per cent responded ‘none’. Seven out of every ten respondents showed no trust in their police’s investigative abilities. Perhaps even worse, 50.2 per cent of the respondents believed that their local police were themselves involved in criminal activities. Responding to concerns like these, the police complained about ‘bad apples’: ‘It is not all of us, you see, not all of us’, a bonaerense insisted. Others expressed frustration about citizens’ lack of sympathy and understanding. ‘The policeman ends up being the scapegoat, the one blamed for everything that happens [to the citizen], but he is also the person who

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will solve some of their problems, who will protect them. Then, people see him as a necessary evil’. The police’s idyllic views of the past, the nation, the law, the community and the family stand in sharp contrast with their dark perspectives on crime, criminals, human nature and the world. ‘People remember us only when they need us; they see us as the boogie man’, one officer observed. Another interviewee concurred that they receive just ‘blows, blows, and blows… from the people, from politicians, from everybody’. Many among the police assume anti-hero perspectives. The reasons for distrust are many and have a long history. People ‘give us hell because we were there,’ a bonaerense detective acknowledged, with ‘there’ alluding to the last military dictatorship of El Proceso. Under the dictatorship, members of the police seconded army personnel as the largest group of perpetrators participating in kidnappings, torture and forced ‘disappearances’. A number of police stations served as clandestine centres of detention in which victims underwent torture and often also found the cruelest death. One interviewee, a commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast, referred to this involvement as ‘the years of the de facto government, the years of subversion, terrorism, when we had to act, many of us very deeply involved, others peripherally’. If the military used the police ‘as cheap labor for their worst activities’, as a policeman interviewed by Mercedes Hinton acknowledged, before the March 1976 coup the police also took part in death squadrons such as the Triple A. That flurry of state terror, death camps and ‘disappearances’ under El Proceso grew out of Isabel Perón’s carte blanche to the armed forces to repress and ‘annihilate’ subversion. The state-sponsored death squadrons of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, the Triple A, were organized by members of the Federal Police under the monitoring of José López Rega, Juan Domingo Perón and his wife and Vice-President Isabel Perón’s Rasputin-like adviser. Members of paramilitary, police death squadrons decided on their own whose lives to take and how. Only now are some of those policemen brought to trial. ‘We are paying for the broken dishes of El Proceso’, one of the interviewees observed.

Police categorizing: Governing the grassroots ‘If we agree that by democracy we mean in some sense “rule by the people”, we need to clarify not only what we mean by “rule” but also – and this is the aspect most often overlooked – what we mean by “the people” ’. Dahl



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pointed out a key question which, while generally suppressed, haunts democracies. A sign of belonging to a political community, citizenship’s scope and inclusiveness expanded with democratization. Still, not all people matter – or at least they do not all matter the same. Regarding how to define the threshold between those who belong and those who do not belong to a certain political body, Dahl concluded that ‘there is no theoretical solution to the puzzle, but only pragmatic ones’.18 Principles of popular sovereignty lie at the foundation of universal democratic claims everywhere, however on the dark side of the equation of citizenship, lines and boundaries are constantly drawn. Even if clear on paper, defining who belongs to la gente is the subject of a permanent struggle. Popular mobilization often results in widened political inclusion and recognition. In turn, routine police categorizing contributes to leave groups of individuals out. Those ‘who have no part’, as Rancière puts it, in particular those not fitting established social categories and identities, find themselves often criminalized and treated as enemies.19 It is they who Rancière judges the true subject of political action. Their existence exposes the contingent character of all categories and hierarchies, puts classifications into question, and invites their examination and discussion. The concept of the people, Agamben noted, discloses a biopolitical fracture with the poor at their core. Political modernity cannot tolerate its poor; they constitute its scandal. Thus, the poor see themselves concealed and denied. Denoting at once an entire group, the body politic and the lesser and minor peoples, the populace, the word people does the trick. The powerful and the minute, the sovereign and the powerless, the poor and miserable people are all pulled, confused and trapped together in the word much like they are trapped together in society. While pre-modern societies discriminated between ‘a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value’, as Agamben put it, modern states, increasingly founded upon principles of universality and equality, cannot openly do so.20 If social mechanisms of exclusion are multiple, complex and administered by a number of social actors, the police, embodying ‘a broad… rationality of government’, materialize such distinctions like no one. La gente, the people, are the initial figure organizing police categorization. ‘We are constantly in touch with the people, and we grow and change to the extent that… people go on changing‘, a Federal Police officer explained. Far from innocuous, however, police’s attunement with the people crystallizes biopolitical distinctions. Police interpretations and decisions transform neutral figures of the human, a generic concept of the people, into categories of citizens deemed worthy of freedom and

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rights to be protected, and evil, worthless, deeply defective humans. ‘You keep on looking at the person, you differentiate between… perhaps un punga [street thief] and a normal person’, explained a member of the Federal Police. Through imagery, narratives, state policies and territories, hierarchies are established and what Charles Tilly refers to as categorical inequalities produced. The latter, identified as boundaries defining groups of people with substantial differences in ‘their life chances… political rights and obligations’, act as major barriers to democracy.21 The police are key in building and rebuilding such borders and barriers every day. ‘The work of the police is about delincuentes’, a police officer from Mendoza observed. ‘You go out on the street and start dealing with the people, with the criminal, with the victim… with all individuals’, commented a commissioner from Posadas. Appearance seems key. ‘We know how the delincuente dresses, how the delincuente walks, what the delincuente looks like.’ One interviewee mentioned, ‘Peruvians dress well’. If, as Esposito observed, ‘either biopolitics produces subjectivity or it produces death,22 police categorization produces both, attaching fate to a series of figures. As the ultimate condensation of dangerous subjects, the category delincuente arises in opposition to gente. Only occasionally do words such as gente refer to ‘bad people’, as in ‘people who go stealing’, or ‘criminal persons’ – terms used by two interviewees. Not only is this use rare, but it also transpires euphemistic overtones. Imagined along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, or other forms of identity, a chain of distinctions builds into a series of antagonistic actors, some of whom are perceived as in need of protection from the others. Those deemed lesser are treated as mere subjects of police governance to be neutralized or eliminated. Job, profession, occupation, are traditional police categories to catalogue people. The police episteme links its hierarchies of the (in)human to individuals’ role in society. Not unlike Plato’s utopia of the well-ordered city in the Republic, with each occupying a pre-assigned place, function serves to assess individual worth. ‘Idleness’ threatens the poor and productive, whom Adam Smith refers to as ‘the labouring poor’, ‘the industrious poor’, or ‘the sober and industrious poor’.23 Both for Smith and the police one must have a profession or occupation that contributes to reproduce social order. ‘This is where the goodness of the policeman, the school teacher, the doctor, or the priest lies. It is the same for everybody, you see? To perform your function well’, observed a commissioner from Rosario. ‘As they say, “water wets, the function of water is to wet”. You can colour the water, you can heat it, but one way or the other the water always wets’, a Federal policeman noted, betraying a rather rigid understanding of function.



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Many in the police stress the importance of the family. According to a bonaerense commissioner, ‘kids who do not have good family emotional support’ more easily turn to crime. ‘Basically, it seems to me that crime is born in the family’, he concluded, blaming criminal and unruly tendencies on the family, in what appears as an established police trope. Through distinctions like these, at once interpretive and practical, police agents help to materialize life hierarchies and the boundaries of the democratic polity. At stake is nothing less than admission to the law, deciding who gets recognition as a subject of what rights. The latter, which Arendt judged a key problem not solved by human rights declarations, remains at the foundation of all political systems. Progress made in the international arena stumbles upon the prerogative of nation-states to grant citizenship and to guarantee people’s effective enjoyment of rights. In turn, within nation-states, the police stand out in administering rights in everyday life. The lack of appropriate marks among those perceived as suspicious, especially if young, male and poor, tends to make individuals powerless. It is these individuals who epitomize categories of those who ‘do not count’, philosopher Rancière explains, as they ‘have no qualifications… for being Police subjects and territories

Vecinos

Barrio

Doña (Don)

Subjects Territories

Gente

Nación

Gente humide Calle

Comunidad

Subjects to protect

Villa miseria

Zona

Dangerous subjects

Ciudadanos Niño

Individuos de mal vivir

Adolescentes Neutral subjects

Personas

Víctimas

Campo Ciudad

Punguista

Delincuencia

Hombres

Guante Blanco Sospechoso Adolescentes pobres

Personas de bien

Gente

Población

Individuo

Figure 4.1  Police categories

Civiles

Delincuentes peligrosos

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taken into account’.24 From the perspective of the police, making distinctions between people seems to be experienced as part of their crime prevention duties of identifying criminals and protecting law-abiding citizens from them. Yet, their labelling of individuals, especially of those perceived as possessing a criminal nature, speaks of a bio-political dispositif of governance embedded in police practices. Expressions, metaphors and elisions contribute to defining identities by the police. Figure 4.1 lists some of the most frequent categories utilized by police interviewees. One after the other, all societies under the spell of the Western tradition replicate like mechanisms. Initially neutral, descriptive, categories describing the population develop respectively into positive labels characterizing subjects to protect, e.g. the citizen, and others, morally negative, dismissive and dehumanizing that portray dangerous subjects. In its first more neutral sense, gente or people, used generally as ‘civilians’, ‘population’, ‘persons’, or ‘individuals’, are described at times almost like little children: unpredictable, naïve, irresponsible, forgetful, innocent, capricious, amoral and lazy. People need to be taught and oriented. Not necessarily bad, but always on the brink of becoming so, ‘they do not like to respect stoplights’ or other rules that can potentially lead to accidents and damage other people. Fortunately, most of the time, as one policeman observed, ‘people respect and obey; in general they do obey the police’. Yet in their innocence and carelessness, they are also easily discouraged, become afraid, and are demoralized. Crooks and criminals can easily trick them. Sometimes they are annoying. Overall, people are described as morally weaker than the police, unstable, neglectful and irresponsible. This understanding speaks to the pedagogical dimension embedded in policing. ‘We are permanently in touch with the people, and we grow and change through time, at the pace of people’s idiosyncrasy’, observed a Federal Police officer. The good and worthy, traditionally captured with terms such as la gente, echo the colonial times gente decente (the decent people), those elites whose words and lives truly mattered. In those earlier times, the social status of the accused was decisive, as Barreneche observed. The authoritative word of elite members seemed enough proof to condemn members of lower social (and, hence, moral) categories. Retrieving those traditions, the figure of vecino (neighbour), as Eilbaum noted, defines the subject of police protection par excellence.25 Persona, personas and vecinos (person/s and neighbour/s) all evoke figures that, as natural agents of citizenship, the police need to protect. There are ‘people who work, who are normal’, – note the persistent link



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between occupation and goodness – yet on the other hand there are those ‘who commit crimes’, as they come from ‘unstructured families, with school failures, with drugs’. The police must be there to prevent good people from turning into criminals: ‘There is a point where the honest kid sees that the one who is a criminal always has money, and so he asks himself: “Why live this way?”’ a commissioner from the San Isidro wealthier Conurbano commented. This example highlights one of the moments when police pedagogy seems most needed. Some people resist being led along the good path, ‘a minimal percentage’, noted the same interviewee. Not without a sense of tragedy, the police insist: some people are irredeemable. ‘There is the one who is a criminal out of need, and there are criminals who choose to commit crimes. The enemy is the criminal who chooses to commit crimes’, one bonaerense detective explained. Here we move one step forward in identifying the ultimate threat. Although need does not justify committing crimes, in theory at least it triggers sympathy among some policemen. Thus, one bonaerense detective differentiated between wealthy drug dealer leaders and the poor lifestyle of most of ‘the drug people’. Most of these petty criminals, he explained, ‘live… in houses with dirt floors’. In contrast, towards the opposite end of the spectrum stand those who deliberately choose to become criminals. Choice lies closer to the irredeemable. ‘Those who have an inclination toward crime will always have it’, one bonaerense commissioner stated. As commonsensical as this statement may be, it implies an explanation about crime, human behaviour and society, a theory. The true criminal does not care about breaking the law or about the people, a commissioner from Corrientes observed with contempt, ‘because he has nothing, because he is nothing’. Those in this category appear as monstrous social enemies threatening the foundation of life in common. Through distinctions and gradients, a tree of categories and sub-categories of the (in)human unfolds, ranging from the ‘decent’ citizen to the worthless and disposable, to the dangerous criminal. Lives that fall on the worthy side have recognized rights and protection; others are treated as ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, humans, or gods)’, as Agamben put it, finding the fate of bare life – namely, the ultimate category of the disposable whose destruction carries no juridical consequences. Public threats, as Dubber explains, are traditionally dealt with through police ‘disposal regimes’. Metaphors, metaphorical expressions, elisions and other tropes shape such categories. Once the notion of delincuente fully unfolds in opposition to that of gente, to the extent that the ‘criminal’ appears as a ‘non-person’,

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those falling in this category may be elided or suppressed. Suppressions of political and social antagonists seem to anticipate state terror and murders by the state. In present-day Argentina, most such elisions and euphemisms surface in describing the treatment of delincuentes. ‘But you need to interrogate the criminal’, one policeman said. Explaining that defenders of human rights just do not grasp the challenges at stake, this policeman said interrogation when he meant torture. At the very least, he suggested that police interrogation involves a dubiously legal use of force. Referring to criminals deemed irrecoverable, some interviewees expressed support for reinstating the death penalty in the nation. Even if lacking all legal grounds, the narrative may be relevant. Exploring patterns of arbitrary killings by the police, Daniel Brinks hypothesized the existence of unwritten rules that in some cities encourage the police to kill individuals perceived as ‘violent criminals’ as part of a ‘social cleansing function’. Suppressions, silences and euphemisms accompanying references to criminal suspects could indicate tolerance for such practices. Often even a formal legal term such as menor (minor), an underage youth, is used in a way equivalent to that of criminal or criminal suspect. Individuals who, when part of a higher social class, would be called youths or teenagers are just called minors when poor. In a typical police complaint, a bonaerense noted that younger ‘criminals’ because of their age, are excessively protected by the laws, so if ‘you shoot a minor’ and he dies, ‘the life of the police officer is already in prison’. Note how, in the latter expression, nobody does the killing, the action of dying corresponds to the victim himself and the real tragedy appears as the chances for the police officer to go to prison, just because the law’s excessive protection of minors. Police categories closely mirror the hierarchies of the (in)human through which wealthy and powerful elites approach society. Argentine state forces still betray forms of violence present at the foundation of the nation.26 If everywhere the police reproduce hegemonic views, the close fit between police categories and the exclusionary perspectives of the elites that Ruth Stanley identifies in Argentina may be the product of a deliberate design.27 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, modern police forces were assembled to perform as ‘guardians of the established political order’, thus developing repressive and violent traditions targeting union and political activists and the poor as Marcelo Saín reminds us.28 The police’s strong hierarchical views contrast with Argentines’ egalitarianism and individualism. Argentines’ resistance to ‘authority, hierarchy’, and ‘everyone in his proper place’, made them appear as increasingly ‘ungovernable’ to the country’s elites after 1930, O’Donnell notes. The



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ensuing series of military coups and dictatorships brought increasing state violence. After 1976, the military regime aimed at putting everyone in such a ‘rebellious and insolent society’ back into ‘their’ places.29 The contrasting stances in Brazil and Argentina vis-à-vis social hierarchies explain in part, he argues, the stronger Argentine authoritarianism and brutality since the 1970s. Yet do the police simply materialize these hierarchies in an instrumental fashion, or they also contribute to producing and defining them? Examining the many distinct forms in which policing manufactures a social order functionally suited to the needs of the market, Neocleous highlighted the police’s unique productivity: ‘It is through policing that the state shapes and orders civil society.’30 A market society necessarily generates its poor. Neoliberal market societies, as Argentina has demonstrated, generate even more of them. Patterns of discrimination administered by the police emerge as wider views endorsed by many. In a question asked only in 2002, most Latinobarómetro Argentine respondents agreed that a poor person can never (57.6 per cent) or almost never (34.5 per cent) have his/her rights respected.31 Not having appropriate social connections or education (i.e. ‘not being anyone’) is, together with skin colour, another reason for discrimination.32 ‘We are soldiers, urban soldiers’, a commissioner from Córdoba stated. Writing about the Argentine police, Enrique Fentanes, one of its main organic intellectuals, described the policeman as a soldier ‘exposing his life against an enemy who does not respect the rules of war’.33 This enemy is the delincuente. Death defines the horizon in police wars as well, as the intensity of the antagonism seems no weaker. Yet the police enemy, generally an individual, gets minimal recognition and almost no visibility. Unlike the war enemy described by Clausewitz or Carl Schmitt, the police enemy is neither a peer nor an equal, but just a nuisance to be neutralized or destroyed. The latter is a constant thread in police treatises and doctrines. In the perennial police logic, Dubber shows, some offenders ‘must be eliminated altogether to reassert the state’s superior authority’.34 Police wars are thus imagined as individualized low-intensity battles at the border of or beyond the law against the unruly and criminal suspects in urban territories, in which state agents make life-and-death decisions. The description fits President Menem’s assimilation of common criminals to ‘subversives’, conducive to justifying the ‘trigger-happy’, extra-legal treatment and killing of suspects. The figure of the subversive ‘internal enemy’ conceived after the Cold War securitizing ideologies served to justify counterinsurgency warfare as a massive militarized police operation.

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These days, categories of enmity so murderously exacerbated during the dictatorship are well and alive in the figure of the criminal. ‘The street teaches one the most; the street and the people.’ When it comes to space, the street seems the most generic police category. ‘Problems are in the street... the street is where the police must be.’ The street appears as the main place of police governance, where police agents learn to ‘see’ and gain experience in their struggle against crime. It is the street, one policewoman explained, that taught her temperance. ‘If the police could recover the sidewalk, they would recover the city, the community’, a Federal commissioner observed. The city, he added, has to be recovered from ‘the lowest’, which he claimed to know well. Street life thus appears as the raw matter of power in the task of capturing life through recognition and exclusion. ‘You make distinctions according to the location where people are.’ As with villas, asentamientos and other poor areas, location becomes moralized. There are zones where you are told ‘no, boy, no… here things are handed in a different manner’, a bonaerense detective explained. He then linked the organization of irregular settlements to ethnic mafias, including ‘the Chinese mafia, the Peruvian mafia’. Zoning is central to policing. ‘The culture of the zone makes the police’, a bonaerense detective noted. While all districts contain undesirable quarters, some seem more likely to be stigmatized. In poorer areas of the Conurbano, there are ‘places where streets do not exist’; one interviewee recanted stories about ‘an entire street… that is a war zone’. Crime stories localize condensed representations of evil. Fuerte Apache in the past, or more recently Los Hornos, epitomize such zones.35 In poor neighbourhoods, a policeman from Mendoza observed, people ‘do not like the police, they do not like “the yuta”, as they call us… “death to the yuta”… they do not like us because we are the limit’. Likewise, in central Buenos Aires, a member of the Federal Police characterized the nearby four villas as ‘a highly destitute area where coexistence works in unpredictable ways’. A commissioner from the same force explained that, ‘in a shantytown, it is much easier [for criminals] to get together’. Thus, even though police officers deny stigmatizing people according to location, it seems clear that they ‘read’ and categorize individuals within territorial coordinates. Through their interventions, disciplining ‘life through space’, the seguridad dispositif recreates the hierarchical governance of bodies and souls.36



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‘Authority does not mean pulling the gun and shooting everybody.’ Police Intervention, Tools and Technologies Technology enables police agents to categorize and order lives and territories. ‘It is not just the police, it is the policeman and his environment, the policeman and the tools he has, the situations. A symbiosis emerges between the man, the environment and the elements’, a member of the Federal Police explained. ‘If the police detain the criminal, it is because they failed in the phase of prevention.’ According to this Federal Police officer, people see the police function as arresting criminals. However, a good police officer should be able to maintain order ‘just with his presence’. Police governance, Dubber and Valverde noted, links ‘the pastoriented punishment of wrongdoing with the future-oriented governance of risks and dangers’.37 The Argentine interviewees referred to these concepts as repression and prevention. With its forward-looking rationale, police prevention seeks to eliminate risks and threats to public safety to avoid the occurrence of crimes. In looking for whatever and whoever appears to be out of place, agents engaged in preventive policing deal in principle with unlimited possibilities and end making decisions on what is dangerous and on how to confront it.38 In contrast, their backward-oriented repressive function leads the police to investigating and punishing crimes that have already been committed. In this dimension, policing involves gathering evidence and making arrests in view of criminal prosecutions in court. Reconstructing the circumstances of a crime defines the area of detective work. Good police investigators, a detective from Rosario explained, use ‘many techniques’ at once. Guided by ‘footprints and traces’, they ‘orient an investigation and install an investigative line. Generally, two, three lines of investigation are started, with more or less force’. In theory, the distinction between preventive and repressive aspects of policing seems clear. In practice, as German reformers have learned, they are not easy to keep separate. Undercover operations, in particular, constantly blur the lines between prevention and repression.39 ‘The mission of the police, supposedly, is to prevent and to repress’, a bonaerense observed. However, he also bitterly reflected that, because of the ways in which politicians use the police, ‘these days, we are there just to justify’, suggesting that in the Argentine democracy the police are forced to take the blame for the politicians’ wrongdoings. Regardless of formal distinctions, Marenin notes that the functions of policing ‘are given concrete form by the police as they work’.40 Figure 4.2 below includes strategies of intervention as categorized by the interviewees:

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Police mechanisms

Law

Enforce the law Mediation

Listening

Weapons

Acting at the edge of the law

Arrest Martial arts

Olfato political Sympathy Uniform Visit

Force

Observation

Soft

Dialogue

Going beyond the law

Ridicule

Raise the voice

Killing Physical violence

Mixed Interrogation (+– ‘tough’) Informers

Figure 4.2  Police mechanisms

Although some categories seem self-explanatory (e.g. making arrests, identifying individuals, killing them), others call for a brief explanation, as for example ‘visiting’ people in their homes and ‘making friends’ with them when employed as criminal intelligence methods and – albeit illegal for the police to do – political intelligence. Parties or popular dances in poor neighbourhoods have been organized with similar purposes. Such dances, as a commissioner from a city in Mendoza explained, aimed to take problematic poor kids ‘off the street’ or ‘out of the wrong way’ by keeping them entertained. Such strategies, a few police commissioners indicated, define the core of ‘community policing’. Betraying years of training, courses and lectures, most interviewees referred their familiarity not only with community policing, but also with the ‘broken windows’ and ‘proximity-police’ doctrines.41 Broad and discretionary, preventive policing pivots around notions like olfato policial, which ranks high among the traits that police agents invoke to characterize their profession. ‘There are kids, with just a few years in homicides, who will be able to clear up a crime. They can establish a few things, but not the bulk, which only those with more experience see. This is where you run into the question of olfato’, noted a seasoned criminal detective from Rosario. ‘When you graduate as a police officer, after studying for two years, you receive a uniform. But with the uniform they do not give you olfato’, a retired member of the Federal Police explained.



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By olfato policial (i.e. police instincts), police officers denote the capacity to perceive something out of place. If metaphors convey ‘a carrying over’, a transference of meaning by comparison and analogy, the sense of smell is used here to make sense and legitimize a set of practices otherwise difficult to classify.42 Suggestively, clarifications on the meaning of olfato policial often resort to other senses. Olfato, a female police agent from Misiones explained, is ‘the insight that the police officer has to see a bit beyond’; a Federal officer agreed, stating that is ‘something you see’. A commissioner from Rosario characterized it as ‘a sixth sense’. Olfato consists of ‘pre-judging people… as a resource for the police’, another interviewee noted. One policeman defined it as ‘sensitivity toward cases’, after the guidance of people ‘who know the people, the criminal, as well as criminal forms of reacting and proceeding’. Most interviewees agreed that it is a skill acquired through experience, or ‘a domestic name for experience’ that lets one capture signs allegedly betraying ‘people who are about to commit a crime or have already committed one’. A female police interviewee noted that attitudes, glances – ‘when people are nervous, they touch their faces… a number of little things’ – may identify a criminal for the police. Perceptiveness does not depend on rank: ‘I have had sub-officers who could barely read and write, but who were very efficient in the police function. They had calle [i.e. ‘street smarts’], as one says… having patrolled for so long, in touch with the people, they knew what was going to happen’. Keeping one’s distance from the myth, the police have the ‘wrongly called olfato to distinguish a criminal from a common person. The street makes them that way’, a commissioner from Mendoza observed. Whether real or a mere police fantasy infusing practices, olfato (i.e. police instincts) seems central in everyday policing. In ‘the old school’, a commissioner in Rosario explained, experienced policemen acted as ‘street teachers’. Unfortunately, another interviewee noted, these teachers ‘have been lost, they have been retiring, they have been dying’. A bonaerense concurred. The method consisted of going ‘on the street with the older officer, who knew everything… then, he kept on teaching you’, until reaching a point ‘when you knew when to intervene. There was a point at which you looked at a person carefully, and you knew what kind of person was’, he concluded. Going around the streets, the patrol agent ‘ends up learning the rhythm of the place under their custody. He learns the colors, the forms… then, it is easy to identify outsiders’, a bonaerense officer observed. ‘A certain tuning develops between what you protect and you’, he stressed. As a form of perceiving transmittable through experience, denied by many – yet

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informally acknowledged ‘even by judges’, as one detective stressed – the practical knowledge known as olfato policial seems impossible to formalize in a set of rules. Its exercise invites discretion rather than law. Discretion is a core trait of police power. The police agent ‘often finds himself in the street, in situations rather new to which he has to apply his own criterion’, a commissioner from Córdoba noted. Questions as basic as when and how to intervene create opportunities for discretionary judgements and decisions. In modern democracies, as Marenin puts it, the police ‘retain significant discretion in when and how to apply the law’.43 Performed in the interstices between norms, discretion involves a de facto power to modify the spirit of laws and policies when applying them to concrete situations. ‘Laws leave room for different interpretations… The law is not like math’, a bonaerense elite detective explained. A policeman from central Argentina agreed: ‘There will always be some obscure part in the law.’ Such obscurity, he concluded, always gives police agents ‘a margin’. Discretion, exposing the heart of police prerogative power, will be revisited in Chapter 6. Police voices stress the importance of having good ears. ‘People come here in need for someone to listen to them’, a Federal Police agent explained, which is why it is important ‘to take time… to listen to each and every one’. The police must be wherever they may be needed to ‘neutralize the proliferation of crime’, preventing individuals from turning into criminals. In turn, people themselves are ‘the best source of information’, a commissioner from Rosario concluded. The police have no ‘crystal ball’; they are ‘no magicians’, they cannot solve cases without help, interviewees concurred. They need people’s testimonies as well as other ‘elements for us to investigate’. A commissioner from a city in Mendoza referred to this as ‘the feed’ coming ‘from society’ towards the police. Foot patrol seems key. ‘To patrol [means] to prevent crime’, explained a bonaerense, treating the two terms as synonyms. ‘Walking the streets [to keep] in touch with the people’, a Federal Police officer reflected, makes for better quality policing than what a commissioner from Córdoba describes as just ‘seeing the patrol car pass by’. In neighbourhoods, police patrols are assigned to specific territories: ‘There are three, four corners. You have two blocks, you place a policeman here and a policeman over there… to control motorcycles, people, vehicles and so on. And [you place] another one here to watch.’ Police stories often evoke a better past, linked to the benign figure of the street-corner policeman, portrayed as a friendly ‘guy who stood at the corner, leaning on the postbox, the patrol officer with a belly’. Of mythical



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proportions, the figure of the street-corner police officer pervades selfrepresentations among the Argentine police. In these idealized accounts, the police become reconciled with the people and their local communities. ‘I remember, I read, in the times of commissioner Meneces, in Buenos Aires… a “block police” or guard was in charge. He saw your child when your child was born’, a commissioner in Corrientes explained, offering details of how the policeman ‘integrated to that community’, knew all neighbours, the families, and shared every single event in their lives. Births, weddings, career achievements – the policeman was practically part of the family for all of them, the interviewee claimed. ‘The old street corner policeman still exists’, a Federal Police commissioner insisted that the tradition is far from gone. ‘He is there, standing… with hunger, with cold, with personal problems, he is there.’ We need to pay close attention to street corners throughout the city, one interviewee stressed, to more fully appreciate these agents. ‘The man stands there, and he will be there to risk his neck.’ Figures linked to street patrolling form part of idealized, mythological representations of police-community relations and the police self. Still, a commissioner from Córdoba noted, the police cannot work with the same rules of the past. ‘Thirty, forty years ago, there was a different type of criminal, a military government, very low crime, and the police were well respected.’ These days it is difficult to set limits, one Federal Police detective concurred. For many, ‘when they see the policeman set a limit, it is as if they saw the devil’. The problem, the previous commissioner proposed, is that ‘the criminal does not fear the law’ anymore. Similarly, a commissioner from Corrientes lamented the ‘loss of codes’, leading the young to attack women or the elderly, which he linked to ‘the loss of the culture of civilized peoples’. Against recommendations by human rights organizations, many in the police defend the need for expanded definitions of police offenses and misdemeanours and for ampler prerogatives to enforce them, which they judge necessary to maintain order. It is not that the interviewees rejected rules. The police do follow rules, as Neocleous noted, ‘but these are police rules rather than legal rules’.44 Police offenses, defined centuries ago by William Blackstone as going against ‘the rules of propriety, good neighborhood… good manners’, as when individuals were not ‘decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations’, are well and alive in a number of Argentine districts.45 In 1996, the city of Buenos Aires abolished its regime of police edictos that made it possible for the police to arrest and charge hundreds of thousands of individuals on ‘pre-criminal’ figures, such as drunkenness

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and indecency.46 After successive reforms, room for police intervention on unclear legal ground still exists. Police offenses ‘are not crimes, but they have an impact on social life’, a commissioner from Córdoba, a province that maintains edictos, observed. Defining them as ‘little infringements... minor behavioral problems’, a member of the Federal Police noted that, if the person expresses regret and remorse, the police agent may pardon him or her. Thus, a commissioner in Córdoba noted that prowling, ‘when someone is in a certain place and cannot justify what he is there for’, merits intervention from a police perspective. Detentions for identification and for background checks proliferate under such regimes. They allow the police to carry out discretionary detentions without judicial oversight, overlooking standards such as those set by the Inter American Court of Human Rights after the Bulacio case. One interviewee who was also a lawyer acknowledged that the enforcement of police offenses may violate individual rights, thereby showing awareness of the contradictions between law and police. The police may have to become ‘more civilized’, a bonaerense detective acknowledged. Yet ‘we also need that touch of mano dura, otherwise, the day after tomorrow, if you get a police who gets easily scared… who freaks out, everything will fall apart’, concluded a detective from Rosario. The image of hands seems linked to discussions of police prerogatives. The hands of the police get ‘tied up’ with laws and regulations as reforms limit police powers, giving ‘the criminal more advantages than the decent’, a bonaerense commissioner explained. Many say that hands can be as tough as needed to fight crime effectively only when laws and regulations do not constrain police faculties. Behind this belief lies the assumption that police hands need to be set free, with only minimal limitations, or given the amplest discretion and increasing prerogatives to carry out their mission. ‘Unless there is fear of the law, the criminal will do whatever he wants’, one interviewee observed in support of the need for mano dura. These police voices worry about limits placed to police power by those they judge to be overly concerned with the ‘rights of the accused’, as a commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast put it. ‘These days, only criminals have human rights’, a young policewoman from Córdoba bitterly concluded. A seasoned police agent in eastern Argentina agreed: ‘The most difficult part of being a police officer is arresting the criminal. Unfortunately, with the laws and the human rights we have these days… they [the criminals] enter through one door and leave through the other.’ Many in the police organization criticize citizens supporting what one bonaerense defined as ‘human rights



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fundamentalism’. With this singular expression, he betrayed his own hostility towards human rights. Another bonaerense, a detective, complained about President Fernández de Kirchner’s emphasis on human rights: ‘it is like brainwashing… they go on inculcating it, inculcating it’. Still a third bonaerense, a commissioner, laughed with sarcasm at the group of citizens whom he labelled as ‘the caviar Left’ – well educated, relatively wealthy, of higher status, and progressive individuals. If such citizens are so strongly committed to rights, he argued, it is just because thanks to their class privilege they themselves are not exposed to crime and inseguridad. Yet, suggesting that progressive positions favour disorder and crime, when the point is reached that ‘the criminal has better conditions than the decent, […] we are going to have many more criminals [and face a true] structural demagogy’ conducive to the ‘loss of democracy’, he concluded. The idea that democracy in Argentina has led to a loss of balance often emerged in the interviews. ‘The problem is the law. In democracy, human rights, freedom and an excess of freedom are confused’, a commissioner from a provincial capital on the Paraná river noted. Linking democracy to demagogy and judging the freedom in the country to be extreme and favouring chaos were common themes among the interviewees. Some objected. ‘I know that there are reactionary minds still casting their opinions that we need to watch out because knowing our rights can turn us into libertines… These are reactionary minds, I am sure,’ a commissioner from Rosario expressed in his defence of freedom. CELS traces links between mano dura discourses and human rights abuses by the police. Whereas no new Ruckauf-like governor calling to ‘fill in criminals with bullets’ has emerged, the security forces decode politicians’ allusions to the need for mano dura in ways that increase ‘institutional violence, mistreatment, abuses, arbitrary detentions, excessive use of force, torture and summary executions’, CELS reported.47 Sometimes, mistakes occur, a bonaerense detective noted. ‘Within the margins of error there are always innocents, right? This is how we get to war and innocent people die… but, well, it is the error that we stipulate.’ Such ‘margins of error’ have been behind thousands of deaths since the restoration of democracy, as it was referred before. Between July 2008 and July 2009, the organization counted 12 per cent more killings by the police. During 2010, the rising trend continued. That the Federal Police inflicts a higher proportion of deaths than the bonaerense also calls to examine regimes of police governance.

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Thin blue lines, grey thresholds and edges ‘The policeman is a malleable man, a man who adapts to the law’, a commissioner from a major Argentine city observed. ‘One does the job the best one can, always trying to stay within the law’, reflected an experienced agent from Paraná. When one is a cadet… it seems to you as if this were like black and white. A line that divides, right? One is in the middle. Through time, in practice, one realizes that this is not black and white, that there are many nuances of grey in the middle. And that it is in this middle where you have to transit.48 Governmental moments embedded in policing proliferate in the interstices between laws and policies. Thresholds and lines abound in police stories. They bring citizens closer while separating them from those defined as outsiders and outcasts. In a way, policing seems to be all about tracing lines – between decency and indecency, good and evil, ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ zones, the docile citizen and the subversive dissident. Police agents occupy themselves with placing both people and objects where they belong. The police agent ‘needs to think like a criminal’, a member of the Federal Police explained, ‘to be able to say “this place is likely to be broken into”, but, well, not do it. The one who transposes that line goes into the evil side.’ How can one learn to think like a criminal better than from criminals themselves? As one policewoman observed, the police complement olfato with informers. Police patrols ‘have a thousand informers’, she noted, ‘petty criminals’ who, in exchange for being left alone, give the police information ‘that can lead to prevent some bigger crimes’ or to chase dangerous criminals. Furthermore, ‘there are many people who have done wrongs, repented, and now come and go’ bringing information. ‘Someone has to do it, do you understand? This helps a lot to know how those on the other side think’, she explained. Sometimes, ‘to investigate, you have to cross the line’, she concluded. ‘Here it is normal, those from Investigations rub elbows with them [the criminals]; it is as if they were part of them, because they have to infiltrate [criminal organizations].’ The same interviewee described political intelligence operations carried out in her city: Investigators have to do that, they have to mingle, they have to make friends with them [criminals]. That, for sure, must create some internal conflict, because you are one of them… you are just a step from... you see? Then, you return, and you have to do your work. And perhaps



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during your free time you have to stay in the other camp, and then come back. You have to know how to handle it. In Argentina, the law bans provincial police forces from performing political intelligence. Yet they continue to do so, as the female police agent interviewee reported in reference to political groups at the university, labour unions and grassroots activists. As the world of undercover police agents and informers, with their exchange of petty crime immunity for information seems prone to illegalities, reformers suggest the need to eradicate such networks. Alternatives to the use of informers include statistically based systems of criminal intelligence operating through crime databases, inferences and predictions, mathematical modelling and mapping. One police researcher and instructor recalled his satisfaction after a group of police officers from the Conurbano arrested a serial rapist based on the predictive capabilities of a mathematical model he designed. Along these same lines, a commissioner in Córdoba explained that ‘we have an important intelligence network’, designed to work in the investigation of drug trafficking. Yet, he lamented, it ‘is functioning to 1 per cent of its capacity, as we have no resources’. Arguing for scientific-based criminal intelligence analyses, the bonaerense investigator above indicated that infiltrators and informers may be still the only way to gather information about complex forms of organized crime. In the Argentine system of criminal justice, a bonaerense detective acknowledged that ‘there are things that one has to violate a bit… to move from acting legally to being just’. In occasions, acting justly requires ‘twisting things a bit’, he concluded. Policing beyond the law adopts various forms. Sometimes ‘one is at the edge, and you do not know what to do’, one policeman explained. ‘Law has a little open door, you see?’ noted a bonaerense detective. Another area of common references, often euphemistic, among the police surrounds the question of ‘policing “outside the law” ’, or the alleged need to disregard laws and human rights in the treatment of criminals.49 Working ‘at the edge between the legal and the illegal’, the police agent needs oversight, explained a commissioner from Córdoba. Granted, the oversight in question here is the superiors’. Still, others suggest that for the police to do their work, demands for oversight should be dropped. ‘At times, to be a good policeman, one has to have walked at the edge of crime’, contended a commissioner on a provincial capital in the northeast. Going beyond the law or falling at its ‘edge’, as interviewees referred to it, forms part of the experience of policing. Metaphors of crossing borders and boundaries abound in police narratives. Good, effective policing seems to

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require sometimes moving through the ‘grey area’. Such euphemisms badly conceal support for illegal practices such as torture. One concerning sign in this regard was that even university-educated applicants to the Pol2, the force created by Arslanián in 2004, justified the death penalty (52 per cent); one out of three favoured torture, and most described the delincuente as an individual who looked poor, according to Kessler.50 Such trends transcend the police. ‘La gente, what they want is not to be robbed and killed. They do not care whether the law is enforced or not’, noted a former military officer in charge of seguridad in a municipality within the Conurbano. Regarding whether breaking the law may be acceptable, according to the LAPOP 2008 survey, 37.32 per cent of the Argentine respondents found it acceptable for the authorities to go beyond the law when chasing criminals.51 Disaggregating the data by province, support for the police to act outside the law appears to be considerable, as Table 4.1 shows: Table 4.1  Tolerance for illegal policing (‘On occasions, they can disregard the law’) % San Luis

57.1

Jujuy

54.2

Misiones

53.8

Corrientes

51.4

Mendoza

50.0

San Juan

50.0

Chubut

50.0

Chaco

47.1

Buenos Aires

37.3

Santa Fé

37.1

Neuquén

34.6

Tierra del Fuego

33.3

Salta

31.6

Catamarca

30.8

La Rioja

30.8

Entre Ríos

28.9

Córdoba

27.4

Santiago del Estero

26.7

Río Negro

26.7

Tucumán

24.4

Formosa

20.0

Source: LAPOP 2008



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‘Torture in the army is okay… they have to torture [the enemy] to learn where the positions are… Those who join, soldiers, know that they will be tortured if they get caught’, a bonaerense detective noted. But this should not apply to ‘common citizens like us. No. For this, the state provides you with great investigators.’ Despite his observations, torture seems an entrenched tradition among the Argentine police, after they turned the picana eléctrica – or electric cattle prod, originally used to move animals – into an instrument for torturing suspects in interrogations back in the mid-1930s. Coming ‘directly out of Argentina’s burgeoning beef industry’, the picana, Rejali notes, follows the widespread pattern of adapting tools typical of a country’s economic activities for torture purposes.52 The picana, which dark jokes celebrate together with other Argentine inventions such as dulce de leche, is just one visible sign of what became a long sinister tradition of police repression and violence targeting common criminal suspects and political dissidents. Rejali refers the cases of the two first Argentine victims of torture with the picana – Esteban Filetti, in Buenos Aires by 1935 or 1936, and Humberto Vidone, in Córdoba by 1939, both of whom died.53 Using picanas, the police applied electrotorture in teams of two, incorporating medical supervision to prevent the death of the victim. Dunking prisoners’ heads in barrels, known as submarino, has been recorded in Argentina since the 1930s. Together with Chile, the Argentine police appear to be the first to have used ‘bagging’ – covering the victim’s head with a plastic bag and sealing it to produce asphyxiation – in the 1970s.

Militarization? After the first military coup against Hipólito Irigoyen in 1930, successive dictatorships distanced police forces further from civic life by appointing them military chiefs. Rigid hierarchies, organizational autonomy, political policing and torture became normalized. Sinister traditions such as ‘the police raid, planted arms, application of the fleeing felon rule, coerced confession or torture, the “free area”, and disappearance’ were just exacerbated under the military dictatorship of El Proceso, as Julie Taylor notes.54 We know that police forces provided the dictatorship with the largest numbers of perpetrators after the army.55 If, as Taylor pointed out, ‘the police dictatorship in Argentina was based on traits exaggerated by Argentine history, these traits are also present in the institution of the police in other Western societies’. The

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possibility to ‘penetrate civil society’, as Neocleous noted, for which ‘the military was and remains ill-equipped’ was in fact one of the motives behind the organization of modern police forces.56 Indeed, the ‘counter-insurgency’ tactics targeting individuals as enemies, infiltrating communities through political intelligence and interrogation techniques based on torture, that the Argentine and other military learned from the French repression in Algiers as well as at the infamous US run School of the Americas, ultimately echo secular police techniques of controlling the population. In the film The Battle of Algiers, widely used in counter-insurgency training in Latin America back in the 1960s and the 1970s, the character Colonel Mathieu famously defines ‘the police method’ by stating: ‘The method is interrogation […which] becomes a method when conducted in a manner so as to always obtain a result – or rather, an answer.’ Euphemistically alluding to torture, vindicated by French General Paul Aussaresses as a truthful representation of their own practices in Algeria, the message is clear. As states defined a part of their own population as an enemy, the military learned from those who know how to locate individuals and to ‘interrogate’ them: the police. If military dictatorships were so effective in suppressing all political opposition and taking thousands of lives, if they could wage unilateral ‘wars’ on their own populations, it was thanks to ‘the police method’, l’interrogatoire. Indeed, without the police, the ones who knew ‘how to operate in the terrain of a neighborhood’, the military could not have carried out such a minute, extended repression, as a commissioner from a provincial capital on the Paraná river explained with pride. It was they who were ‘sent’ by the military to ‘mark places’ and to ‘kick in houses’ front doors’ so that squads could take people away. Qualifying the military hegemony, he noted that, more than a ‘militarization’ of the police, what took place was a transvasamiento, or a decanting, exchange and mutual learning. The military formally subordinated the police while adopting police methods to individualize, chase and interrogate ‘subversives’. As he acknowledged, the dictatorship’s policies of ‘disappearances’ relied to some extent on police knowledge, intelligence, participation in death squads, kidnappings and torture, as well as on a number of police stations serving as clandestine centres of detention. In the end, a bit resentfully my interviewee reflected, while the police did a part of the groundwork, the military took all the credit. Perversely condensing hybrid features, El Proceso reveals itself not just as a military but also as a police dictatorship, a regime that drew on ideas and practices rooted in



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police power, organizations and techniques.57 Arising out of the observations of my interviewees in coincidence with Taylor’s own insights, the image of a ‘police’ dictatorship highlights the specificity and crucial role of police power within the last Argentine military regime and state terror in general. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should privilege the police rather than the military, nor should the image of El Proceso as a ‘police’ dictatorship be seen as taking away any responsibility from the military’s aberrant human rights violations carried out in Argentina and elsewhere. In fact, as shown by Operation Condor, one of the most sinister and extended terror networks, a number of actors throughout the Americas – the military, intelligence personnel, police and even some politicians were complicit in planning and carrying out kidnappings, ‘disappearances’, and assassinations in the region. Security policies, and the National Security Doctrine provided the main transnational framework for their convergence.58 An appropriate concept to illuminate the coordination of police and military techniques in repressing citizens seems to be Kate Millett’s notion of the ‘interconnecting grid’.59 There is a distinct police role in facilitating authoritarianism and state violence, however, that the previous scholarly emphasis on ‘militarization’ tends to ignore, and that seems necessary to highlight given the continuities of police violence under democratic regimes. The image of the police as ‘someone who is against you, as an abuser’, crystallized under the dictatorship, a commissioner from Córdoba observed. However, almost three decades after the restoration of democracy, as perpetrators of crimes against humanity continue to be indicted, torture is well and alive in Argentina.60 Abuses take place in police stations and police cars, in places inaccessible to the public view, in grey areas and situations specific to police governance. CORREPI, CELS, Amnesty International, the UN Committee on Torture continue reporting numerous cases evidencing the widespread torture of suspects among the police. As research by Huggins, Haritos-Fatourous and Zimbardo demonstrated, torturers, or ‘violence workers’, become so through training.61 Dissociation, emotional detachment, learning to suspend one’s own ethical judgement, performing cruel acts all come to be considered as good, ‘professional’ skills among a set of specialized state bureaucrats. They and their subordinates are one of the gifts of Leviathan.

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Threshold: Practices building order, practices building institutions ‘There was never a systematic study of the police in Argentina’, a commissioner from a southern provincial capital stated. In fact, a burgeoning research agenda has developed in recent years, with which Argentine police institutions still seem reluctant to engage. If institutions, as Valverde put it, are ‘coagulations of practices’, organizational and discursive patterns keep traces of their formative conflicts.62 Institutional traits imprinted in key historical conjunctures, such as during the organization of states, show resilience over time – a tendency to persist, return and overdetermine new institutions and reforms as they are introduced. This is especially true about police forces. Patterns of practices, narratives, identities and traditions tend to perpetuate themselves. Their reproduction seems favoured by repertoires of representations transmitted through generations both formally and informally. One telling image in this regard is that of a cadena (i.e. chain), denoting power’s communicability and transmissibility. Within the police, it denotes the chain of command. Verticality is necessary, a commissioner from Córdoba observed. ‘Often we say we must civilize the police… Perfect. But from the moment that we say “El Jefe”, verticality must exist, with a subaltern who respects and subjects himself to the one who conducts.’ Sometimes, a member of the Pol2 noted, the chain does not work well, as when ‘one gives an order and below they get a different one, it is not well transmitted’. Such governmental chains can also be easily corrupted. Thus, as a policewoman from a provincial capital in the northeast observed, ‘politics is these days so dirty [that] most politicians and representatives are corrupt. In all circles, it seems to me, they are all chained, in a long chain to which they are all linked, and the police are also one more link.’ Whether corrupted or not, chains are overall chains of governance. If only one-third of crimes are reported, only a part of these ever reach trial, and again only a fraction leads to a judicial sentence, as one policeman noted; thus, the challenge of learning about ‘unreported crime forms part of community policing’. When close relations with the community exist, he explained, a vecina (i.e. neighbour) will bring information to ‘the nucleus’, to the neighbourhood government representative, who will in turn share it with the police. In this close relation that needs to exist, with the policeman regularly visiting the merchant and the industrial, so they can tell him about their



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problems and he then transmits in detail… to make a chain that goes back and forth to reach the government, so behavior can be modified and adjusted. The poor in particular, he continued, ‘should feel that the policeman is their friend, the one who gives them confidence to survive… to use the tools of the law, of the state. “My friend the policeman will tell… that I have this problem.” I was referring to this chain, right?’ He continued with a detailed description of the multiple links of the chain. Every day, at the micro level, the police are privileged agents checking for the proper functioning of other networks of power. Individual and institutional narratives refract and reproduce one another. Official police histories displayed in institutional books and websites replicate the suppressions and euphemisms of individual police narratives. Stiff and thin, official police histories are mostly ahistorical collections of anecdotes, normative statements celebrating police figures and authorities. Such narratives and forms of self-representation give individuals a view of the past mostly as linear evolution which inexorably justifies the present. They also give agents a sense of mission. Violent events and problematic segments of the past are suppressed or alluded to only through euphemisms. As discussed in the previous chapter, this occurs with the last military dictatorship. Referred to mostly as ‘that time’, ‘those times’, or ‘the past’, almost three decades after the restoration of democracy the police seem unable to transcend the euphemistic. ‘Times came, the time of the dictatorship, many errors were made… the issue of guerrillas, of urban war. Many people were hurt, and many now under democracy try to take revenge’, a detective from the Federal Police noted. References to wounds, without making clear who inflicted them upon whom, are common. ‘There is hatred here, coming from an ill-fated time’, the same interviewee explained. He observed that the police are not truly appreciated due to ‘thoughts arising from rancor and prejudices of old times’. Like him, many members of the police support democracy without ever really questioning the horrendous crimes committed by the dictatorship, not to mention the role played by the police. ‘What happens is that the Argentina is used to remember all that… wound… the conflicts that happened.’ Almost blaming citizens for remembering the past, the words of this bonaerense detective are common. ‘Unfortunately, we still have things from ‘76 that remain with us’, a commissioner from a city in a southern province acknowledged. ‘If you do not have your history, and you do not remember anything, we’ve got

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a problem. There is a generalized amnesia. I think there was a serious break in the times of El Proceso’, a young, very well-educated bonaerense officer commented. Although a number of members of the police are often critical towards the dictatorship and its dark legacies, their voices do not seem to have made it yet to the highest ranks. Despite the dissent, the Argentine police remain a child of authoritarian political traditions. Nowhere are authoritarian narratives and practices reproduced as in police schools. ‘Already since the school we are organized hierarchically… we either give orders or obey, there is nothing else’, a commissioner from the south reflected. Preserving the caste-like system of officers and ‘sub-officers’ surely helps the cause. A commissioner from a major city acknowledged that their schools remain ‘in a hybrid situation’, without links to the university system or approval of its programmes by the Ministry of Education. Police schools are inaccessible, secretive and opaque to outsiders. A commissioner from the Federal Police described ‘the school of cadets’ as ‘the institutional kindergarten, [and] the purest, sanest part of the institution’ as well as an ‘institutional laboratory’. Such idealized views contrasts findings on police education. At the Juan Vucetich police school, anthropologist Mariana Sirimarco found a panoply of violence administered on students with the explicit goal to transform their feeble ‘civilian’ bodies into police bodies. Through discipline, instruction and punishment, the training seeks to destroy all traces of civility in the cadets. ‘They torture you, but it is training’, a member of the Federal Police told Sirimarco.63 Traditionally, the Federal Police stands above all the rest: ‘I will tell you the difference between the police of the province and the Federal Police. The Federal [police] is like a sphere, they protect everything well… They get training, they are forced to go to school… They have little books. We do not have little books.’ Introducing family tropes, the interviewee concluded that the Federal Police are ‘a kind of older brother of the provincial police forces – an older brother that presented those police officers with much more education. Their education level was higher than that of the rest of the police.’ Whether more or less benign, forms of police intervention often appeal to tropes pivoting around the family. On the one hand, the police describe themselves as ‘a family that gets together’. On the other hand, they confront the challenges of fixing what smaller, real families do wrong, in a familial chain ascending from the bottom up that Dubber described as idiosyncratic of police governance. As Dubber observed, the police ‘marks the point of convergence between the private and political realms of government, or, rather, the transference – or expansion – of one



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onto the other.’64 In this respect, we see the police correcting what deficient families have done incorrectly and, ultimately, eliminating disorderly elements impossible to redeem. Claims framed in terms of seguridad tell stories. Imagining itself as a ‘community of the decent’, the Argentina of seguridad defines some of its children as dangerous bastards if not as hidden, latent enemies. Police agents are instrumental in materializing such definitions and identities. Sorting individuals into decent citizens, dangerous criminal suspects, and everything in between, police’s discursive practices recreate the social universe as being in need of policing against a background of beings left in the dark. Neither citizenship, nor rights, nor humanity are recognized as such to beings defined as lesser. Police’s ontological categorizing of individuals is done prior to deciding which laws, if any, to apply. This is just one way in which fictions materialize into institutions.65 Far from the ‘bad apple’ police theory of things, with their biopolitical categorizing, does this not speak of the existence of a regime? How can such a hierarchical view of the (in)human coexist with democracy? How do the direct, one-to-one forms of governance that materialized through policing revisited in this chapter make a dent in society at large? How do police discursive practices influence the democratic regime? These are the main questions addressed in the next chapter.

Chapter 5

Democracy? The Police, the State and their Regimes People in power, what they want… you have to try to make things appear as if they change, for them not to change. (Commissioner, Río Negro) The interview takes place in a café, on a sunny winter day. The commissioner from Río Negro observed: ‘The police were utilized as part of El Proceso…The soldier appeared as the policeman’s older brother.’ To take over the streets, he explained, the military ‘needed the police. Thus, the police were absorbed… all police chief positions in the provinces, even in the capital, were assigned to the military.’ Over time, ‘some in the police liked it. The police became militarized. The policeman got military boots, a helmet, a military uniform, war arms, he marched and paraded, his manners became like the military’s’, he acknowledged. Then, proposing for us to ‘jump from ’76 onto ’83’, he continued; The army went on withdrawing. When they withdrew, two different societies were left in Argentina: on the one hand, the civil society and on the other hand, the military society. There was a third component: the police. It was as if we were with the military, hence [they said] ‘we will join the military society’. But for the military we are just a parody, because we wear a uniform, we have a hierarchy, we say ‘Yes, Sir’, but we are not like them. Indeed, we are civilians on the side of the people, and we have nothing to do with the military. Then we said ‘Well, let us go with civil society’. But as we went with civil society, people said ‘No, why do you come here if you wear military boots, and you have a hierarchy?’ We did not have anywhere to go, we were between the sword and the wall, really, and the sword was ours. We were not wanted by either of them. This commissioner’s quasi-mythical account portrays police complicities’ awkward fitting in between the legacies of the military dictatorship and the demands of democracy. Almost three decades into democratization, this still



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seems to be the case. ‘The police are not very democratized. Democratization, just to offer an image, yes, but not in essence’, acknowledged a commissioner from Córdoba. How can we tell whether and when democratic principles have reached such an essence and what would such essence look like? Military leadership of coups in Argentina and elsewhere gave rise among students of politics to the opinion that the key problem at stake was ‘militarization’. In a ‘due obedience’ self-justifying rationale, some policemen echo the argument. ‘We had to act… orders… came from an area related to the army. We had to follow them, because we were under a de facto government’, a commissioner from Rosario observed. Yet both the police and those who study the police know that the military is just part of the problem. In the case of Argentina, the role of the police reveals important aspects that a prior excessive emphasis on ‘militarization’ led scholars to overlook: the dictatorship’s reliance on the police forces and their repertories. More broadly, the police’s minute knowledge of the population and zones, their appreciation for hierarchical order, significant discretion and unclear relation to the law, their use of force and tendency to assess individuals and groups as resources or threats, are traits that make them suitable to sustain authoritarian and totalitarian state policies, as the term ‘Police State’ eloquently captures. These insights indicate the need to revisit entrenched assumptions linking ‘militarization’ to authoritarianism in political science while treating the police as a neutral organization. ‘Every form of government needs policing’, a Federal Police officer asserted. How is policing a democracy different from policing a dictatorship, however, he did not say. Regime definitions, the study of democratization has made apparent, challenge us especially at thresholds.1 If, as Marenin – one of the pioneer comparativists in studying the police – observed, ‘the quality of policing is the quality of ruling’,2 the bonds between policing and ruling need unfolding. Regime type can make a significant, often dramatic difference in policing. Beyond the police heart of authoritarian regimes, however, police power exhibits some inherently problematic traits. For example, far from what one might assume, Rejali found that regime type ‘does not explain why torture persists or not’.3 Torture, often in charge of the police, does not vanish with democratization. In the end, Valverde notes, police power is ‘neither despotic nor democratic’; rather, it ‘can be both, even at the same time’.4 Everyday practices of governance embedded in policing frequently contradict the democratic character of regimes. It is in this light that Neocleous noted that ‘similarities between police powers in liberal democracies and other regimes’ may be as significant as their differences.5

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The previous chapter identified a bio-political mechanism of governance and access to citizenship embedded in policing. Operating on a one-toone basis, police labeling of individuals along various categories serves as a filter determining their access to the law, actual enjoyment of rights, and inclusion or exclusion from citizenship. Differential de facto recognition results in the protection of some judged worthier and the treatment of others as a threat to the former. Among those deemed undesirable or dangerous, some are criminalized, prosecuted and taken to prison. Others die in police hands, sometimes extra-legally after having been tortured. If, administering rights, life and death at the bottom of the state apparatus, police governance has the potential to affect the lives of citizens so deeply, how does it influence the character of a government, its political regime? Where should we locate police governance within accepted concepts of the government in political science? Grounded on their prerogatives, police agents’ views of social order influence the ways in which democracy is (or is not) lived in a community. Categorizing people and territories in a discretionary cone of shadows prior to the application of norms and explicit policies, police routines qualify the reach, scope and character of the regime and contribute to delimiting the boundaries of the political itself. Based on insights gathered from interview materials with the police, blending concepts from political theory and theoretical works on the police and police power with recent scholarship on regimes, this chapter examines the effects of policing and other exercises of police power on the government. Thus, I contend – rather than a factor only externally conditioning the course of democratization – the governing practices embedded in policing constitute a dimension of the regime or form of government, one that encircles, predetermines and limits democratic politics. Connecting the world of the Argentine police with research on regimes in comparative politics, this chapter interrogates the impact of policing on the regime. In what follows, after revisiting current regime definitions calling for the recognition of police regimes as a dimension of the government, the second section advances towards the conceptualization of a governmental regime including policing alongside visible political dimensions. Following a discussion of the importance of ‘scaling down’ to local districts in the study of the regime,6 the chapter assesses available indicators to incorporate police governance to the conceptual and empirical study of democracy. By acknowledging the governing role of policing and its weight in the regime, a thriving theoretical tradition has the potential to help nuance the study of democratization.



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Although a few recent studies of democratization have started engaging with policing, the tendency persists to treat the police according to the model of the military or as an auxiliary tool of the judiciary and to imagine the challenge as a question of subjecting the police to ‘civilian control’ and the ‘rule of law’. In turn, the existence of unproblematic, ‘normal’, patterns of policing in established democracies is assumed. It may appear just as logical to link the police to the judiciary and to imagine order maintenance as a straightforward enforcing the law, where the law comes from above to covering the entire social fabric. This is, after all, what we have been told. Depicted as some sort of legal tool, the police in a democracy, it follows, should be subjected to a rule of law imagined as neutral. Thus, even if policing gains some currency among students of democratization, dominant perspectives still do not grasp the specificity of police power. Illuminating the latter calls for bringing the rising critical literature on police power into political science, which is in part the purpose of this chapter. Recognizing governance wherever it takes place, Foucault’s suggestion, leads to view regimes as ‘assemblages of governing practices’.7 Cast in this light, a form of government results from the interweaving of multiple regimes, including those of policing, where police practices contribute to defining a de facto multi-layered regime that complicates established notions about the government and the state.

Democracies and democratization ‘I believe that democracy is just one thing… comes from the Greek, it is a thing of the people. Democracy defines itself. What happens is that… demagogy is brought in by individuals. I do not think that there is more or less democracy. Democracy is just one thing’, a Federal Police officer explained. Despite his faith in the self-explanatory character of democracy, debates on democratization in Latin America underwent shifting emphases. In the 1970s, as Laura Tedesco and Jonathan Barton put it, democracy was treated as ‘a political regime and a set of political procedures’.8 In the 1980s, scholarship focused on the links among democracy, economic reforms and civil society. Finally, different institutions, the quality of democracy, the role of the security forces, electoral mechanisms, administrative reforms and monitoring have come to the forefront. Along the way, hundreds of different uses of the term have been identified in the literature to account for: ‘uncivil’, ‘hybrid’, ‘low-intensity’, ‘disjunctive’,

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‘mixed’, ‘pseudo’, ‘illiberal’, ‘without citizenship’ or ‘uneven’, are just some of the best known, as scholars debate how to assess degrees of democracy. With democratic regimes expanding worldwide from 40 in 1974 to 119 in 2008, undergoing the fastest and most extended process of democratization since 1978, Latin America has served as a key scenario for these studies. However, as Gerardo Munck noted, the ‘significant gains’ of democratic institutions in the region have not encompassed either the rule of law or economic equality, two decisive ‘arenas’ of democratization.9 As we know, policing holds part of the secret of this puzzle. When basic rights are disregarded, violated, or not protected by the police and other state agents, electoral democracy may survive, but as O’Donnell explained, ‘its quality would be depressing’.10 When such a disregard becomes widespread, the democratic character of the regime falters. It is precisely these faulting areas – with significant inequality and exclusion as well as their combination, as discussed in Chapter 3 – that fuel the anti-politics of seguridad. Assessing modalities and degrees of democracy, with inspiration from the tradition of political theory, the empirical study of regimes has developed into an increasingly sophisticated subfield.11 Endorsing representative democracy as the best solution for mass societies, Dahl acknowledged the impossibility to capture the rich democratic historical variants and traditions with just one definition.12 So does Tilly.13 On the empirical side, the question of how to make definitions operational remains. At this point, theoretical questions turn methodological.14 The more nuanced the definition, the more challenging its empirical study. Indicators developed to assess democratization privilege dimensions such as voting participation and free and effective competition for office, while advancing towards the assessment of the basic guarantees and civil and political freedoms. Minimalist definitions of democracy focusing on a few decisive traits like voting, political competition, and basic rights are easier to measure and well suited to run comparisons. This is in part why they are dominant in the discipline. To better delimit the object of study and increase methodological rigour, some propose treating democracy as a method of accessing office rather than as a form of governing. Thus, for example, Sebastián Mazzuca argued to exclude questions of ‘exercise’ or of governmental performance.15 A shared assumption among these scholars is that administrative and police bodies are, or should be, neutral, apolitical instruments subordinated to elected authorities. According to Munck, minimalist definitions are useful to identify regimes that are not democratic, as no government unable to meet minimalist tests can possibly pass more ambitious standards. Yet they set too loose of a net and are in need of



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refinement to exclude non-democracies. Furthermore, distinctions such as the one proposed by Mazzuca leave problems of democratic governance in the dark, untouched, including the realities of life in existing democracies, such as the impact of policing on democratic life. Leaning in the opposite direction, a number of political theorists advance thicker concepts of democracy, in which political participation, deliberation and the recognition of multiplicity gain a weight of their own. Such theorists advocate for some forms of direct democracy or combinations of forms, including direct participation, to enhance political life, and they conceive democracy as a permanent process of progressively eliminating all forms of exclusion, subjection and inequality.16 Placed somewhere in between, ‘the true question’ – as O’Donnell observed – ‘lies in the quality of democracy’ linked to citizenship.17 Citizenship involves legal rights and obligations, a social dimension (e.g. access to employment, education, health services, decent housing), equality and inclusiveness. Both citizenship and democracy are undermined not only ‘when the voter is coerced’, as O’Donnell notes, but also when a poor family sees their home ‘illegally invaded by the police’. Abuses such as these epitomize ‘low intensity’ citizenship, he explains, the condition experienced by those de facto not recognized as citizens after election day, denied access to basic rights, left unprotected vis-à-vis police violence and searches, and humiliated by state bureaucracies in such a way that they become ‘not only materially, but also legally poor’.18 In Argentina, legal discrimination against the poor and members of indigenous groups appears to be worse than in the rest of Latin America.19 When judges, the police and street-level bureaucrats – through formal and informal mechanisms – discriminate, stigmatize, criminalize, exclude and reproduce inequality, electoral democracy may survive, but its quality suffers. What elements set a regime apart as democratic? What variants of this peculiar political species can we recognize? Empirically, the question becomes one of distinguishing regime types while assessing degrees of democratization. If, on the minimalist end, calling ‘democratic’ any electoral form of regime including some competition between political parties falls short of any classical definition, one thing is clear: democracy defines an always-expanding horizon. Munck described this as ‘a process consisting of multiple thresholds’, which involves an effort at once conceptual, empirical and methodological to map different governing territories.20 In a way that helps better capture the dynamics shaping police practices on the ground, recent scholarship contributes with the study of informal rules and institutions. As Susan Stokes explained, one lesson learned

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is that ‘formal institutions in some instances will not work in the way they were meant to unless the appropriate informal rules are in place’.21 Similarly, Brinks identified informal police rules encouraging the extralegal ‘execution’ of criminal suspects in Argentine and other South American jurisdictions.22 Clearly, neither politics nor laws nor formal institutions alone will suffice to tackle the puzzle of anti-democratic exclusions within democratic regimes. The power embedded in policing, its ‘techniques and practices’, holds part of the secret as to why – despite promises of equality, freedom and participation – democracies can be so exclusive. Of course, this is not new. Aristotle, in his Politics, noted how the extension of citizenship varied with the regime, with periods of expanded franchise and movements disenfranchising the poor.23 Regimes A political regime includes procedures, principles and rules – both formal and informal – that define distinct forms of government ranging from the open, inclusive, democratic and participatory to the vertical, hierarchical, elite and authoritarian. Broader, the regime or form of government comprises governing practices recognized as political, others treated as non-political, administrative and police and the mechanisms differentiating between and reproducing the two. Whereas the study of regimes is a classical theme in political science, only their political dimensions tend to be considered. The power embedded in the regime’s administrative, and police dimensions tends to be addressed separately and – except for studies such as those on the quality of democracy – most often not integrated in the assessment of the government. Representations of what amounts and what does not amount to ‘political’ are contingent, a matter of contention with significant consequences. Casting issues as merely administrative or as police matters takes away their visibility, while policing helps to reify set distinctions between the political and the non-political and takes the governance of the latter into an opaque territory of power with little to no room for contestation and accountability. Taking a broader perspective, in a way that questions boundaries taken for granted in ‘normal’ political science and challenges the narrowly institutional, Foucault defines a regime of practices as ‘programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of “jurisdiction”), and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of “veridiction”)’.24 The Foucauldian concept of regime stresses the plural character of governance, its territories, strategies, technologies,



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practices and agents. Besides the government in its conventional sense, of the state and others, it comprises the governance of truth, imprisonment, sexuality and the self. Combining the macro with the micro, encompassing the whole of society while reaching every single individual, the Foucaldian concept of regime revitalizes the ancient view of the government as organizing both polities and souls. In charge of a multitude of agents, as Plato first noticed, the government of the city parallels that of the individual soul.25 Captured in expressions such as ‘multiple regimes of governmentality’, governing, introducing and maintaining order, involves intervening over the soul, the body, the family, groups and society through different modalities – some openly political, some not. In theory, political rule inhabits the public sphere and non-political rule the household or otherwise private realms. In practice, however, realms and identities are much more fluid. Considering the discursive practices defining subjects and themes as respectively political, as public yet administrative, or as pertaining to the police, their categorization and classification expose a common set of discriminating mechanisms. It is a governmental regime. Leaving one of its parts out of the analysis amounts to ignoring the politics behind the exclusion of different groups, as well as the multiple barriers – both visible and invisible – built into the interior of modern democracies. Dubber characterizes policing as ‘a well-entrenched, and truly basic mode of governmentality’.26 The tradition of governmentality has been quite receptive of policing and police power. According to Foucault, police power connects all governmental realms, through techniques that transmit principles of government from the top to the bottom of society, shaping all different territories and subjectivities. Various governmental regimes materialize at different levels, ranging from those of formal political institutions to the formless basis where the state seems indistinguishable from society. However, among students of politics, the study of regimes traditionally meant – and still means – the analysis of political rule alone. As a modality of self-governance of the equal, the spread of political rule –which Rancière sensibly assimilates to democracy, is a still relatively recent phenomenon. Following the dissolution of ancient democratic experiments in Greece and Rome, and the loss of early communitarian forms, until recently in history most people lived under some form of despotic rule, treated as resources and governed through force after the model of the patriarchal household.27 Judged inferior, force and the categories of people whom it kept subjected were generally excluded from further analysis. After the figure of the paterfamilias and the rationale of household

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management, this form of government expanded since ancient Greece and Rome into feudalism and the medieval mund. Conceived as ‘a well governed family’,28 kingdoms eventually became hierarchical networks of households with the king as the utmost patriarchal figure. This context helps us to make sense of early modern references to the political comprising just ‘high politics’, or interactions among monarchs, diplomats and the nobility – the only subjects recognized a political voice. The rest of the people, judged ‘lesser’, were governed in a despotic manner, through sheer force, or – as Carl Schmitt put it – through police.29 Regarding them, principles of household management, administration, police and economics, not political philosophy, served as orientation. Even John Stuart Mill, the iconic liberal thinker, judged despotism the best form of government to tame and civilize ‘savages’ and colonial peoples.30 In fact, such beliefs may have been abandoned only in recent years. In occasions, from time to time, they recur. For a different set of reasons, conceptual and methodological, current analyses of regimes tend to focus on elective positions. Scholars concerned with the deficient reach and quality of democracy proposing to include more dimensions in their studies meet resistance framed in terms of parsimony and rigour. Administrative and police bodies are, or should be, subordinated to elected authorities, they are told, and the administration has nothing to do with democracy. Together with a dismissal of the governing aspects of police, political scientists tend to treat both the police and bureaucratic state apparatuses as politically neutral and as at least normatively subjected to the law. Yet it is through the governing processes delivered through these apparatuses that exclusion thrives. Democracy presupposes full recognition of individuals qua political agents, but this is an always unfolding, contending process.31 The actual inclusiveness of the polity relies on a myriad of everyday administrative and police decisions (such as the ones discussed in Chapter 4) that often constrain democratic regimes. Even if a democracy significantly expands rights and guarantees, one’s individual recognition as an actual bearer of those rights depends on police agents or on other street-level bureaucrats. Police and administrative mechanisms play a key role in the reproduction of exclusions. Nuanced, complex, applied on a one-to-one basis, the rationale does not differ substantially from the occasional disenfranchise of the poor identified by Aristotle. If forms of regime differ from each other, the philosopher notes, so do citizens, in such a way that ‘the vulgar mechanic and the laborer must be citizens in some regime but could not be in certain others’.32 Whereas current democracies in principle consecrate the



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universal franchise, police governance indicates the persistence of biopolitical distinctions between those judged respectively worthier and lesser. Moving towards exclusion, regressive regime changes as well as piecemeal decisions by administrative and police agents restrict admission to the polity and patrol its many internal borders. The toll that police abuse takes on democracy is not as immediately apparent or abrupt as a regime change, yet such practices erode democracy and citizenship even after regular elections take place and the regime seems consolidated. If it just seems the fate of the ‘undesirable’, the poor, and the indigent to be treated not as citizens, but as mere subjects of police governance, it is as an effect produced by the governmental regime. In addition to crime-related functions, police governance plays two main roles. On the one hand, it acts as a dispositif, mechanism, or apparatus of access to and exclusion from effective citizenship, distinguishing between agents deemed worthy of legal and political government from the unworthy. In transforming neutral initial notions of the human epitomized in the word gente into categories to be securitized and governed solely through police, the police become a gatekeeper to citizenship and humanity. On the other hand, police governance serves as the main or only form of government of those de facto excluded from the political community, the masses of the policed. Among the poorer in society, many develop a relationship with the government based not on political participation, but on encounters with state agents such as the police. A bonaerense detective ridiculed Argentine legislators in this regard: It is not the same, our democracy and the Greek democracy… Just because two hundred guys decide that five plus five is eight, while only three argue ‘no, five plus five is ten’. Well, as we are in a democracy, then ‘five plus five is eight’; we all vote for it, we raise our hands. He went on to conclude that ‘having some norms voted in democracy is what makes us the way we are these days’, indicating his disagreement with common people being able to become legislators. His words betray a deep disappointment with the demos, the government of commoners, and some craving for elite rule. Ironically, the interviewee does not seem to realize that the Athenian democracy was the object of similar criticisms by the city’s elites. A police regime arises from the formal organization of policing and recognizable patterns of discursive practices. Police regimes, as the governmentalities of the lesser, coexist in tension with the political. They define its

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outer borders and set limits to the expansion of the democratic polity and democratic citizenship. They transform socioeconomic inequalities into political ones. They simultaneously oppose and complement the political by filtering citizenship and taking on the governance of those left outside the political community. The discretionary core of police power gives individual police agents as well as the police regime relative autonomy. In part because of their autonomy, discretion and secrecy, security apparatuses and police organizations define an especially opaque dimension of the regime that calls for further scrutiny. Expanding the notion of the regime would illuminate, and help to better grasp decisive aspects limiting democratization. Whereas the endeavour raises conceptual and methodological challenges, one solid step that can be taken is to include policing as a dimension of the regime. Policing, as Monique Marks argued, serves as a major ‘indicator of the equality of democratic institutions’.33 Taking and preserving life, guarding the access to rights and citizenship, police power defines the ground of the government. The more heterogeneous and unequal the society, the more contentious the representations of order, the stronger the refraction and impact of policing on the political regime and on the lives of the people seem to be. Although exercises of police power are numerous, police officers constitute its most obvious outlet – one to which the most vulnerable categories of the population see themselves constantly exposed. ‘With the arrival of democracy, when democracy came, other than removing three or four police chiefs, there were no changes in the structure of the police’, one bonaerense commissioner observed. The Argentine police constitute an entrenched reservoir of authoritarianism with deep and direct linkages to the dictatorship embedded in the country’s democracy. Core laws of the time of the dictatorship still regulate police forces such as the Federal Police or the bonaerense. El Proceso’s legal legacies within the Argentine democracy go hand in hand with the perpetuation of authoritarian police regimes on the ground. Governments may become democratic, but the political system is only a part of the overall regime through which both individuals and societies are governed. The impact of abusive and authoritarian policing on citizenship and democratic life calls for its inclusion in assessing the regime. Insofar, our discipline has mostly represented it as a problem of a weak rule of law. Yet a substantial part of what lies on the ground, giving concrete, practical meaning to the rule of law consists of governing practices by the police. In Argentina, police reformers and counter-reformers expose alternative forms of governing policing. Moving away from the police’s authoritarian



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tradition, Arslanián led the most serious attempt to reform the bonaerense police, making an effort to transform police practices on a permanent basis.34 Influenced by that experience of reform, analogous measures and programmes implemented at the federal, provincial and local levels made progress in disarticulating criminal networks with police participation. However, rising fear of crime furthered by the logic of seguridad led many to support harsh police policies and the reversal of reforms. In the Buenos Aires province, since 2008, ‘regressive’ measures increased police prerogatives and restored police leadership to the bonaerense force.

Police, politics and the government ‘There are people, in this neighborhood for example, who do not want to talk with the politician. They just want to talk with the police’, a policeman from Córdoba explained. Police and political authorities compete for the government and the governance of policing. A commissioner from a provincial capital in the south described the dynamics between ‘a police force that pretends to be professional’ and ‘those with political power’. He drew a diagram on a piece of paper, explaining that ‘political power is the pole above, power. The police institution is the pole at the bottom. Power, the nexus, is represented by the chief of police. The chief of police is the lowest segment of political power and the first segment of the police institution.’ Whereas politicians try to make ‘this segment [the police] go down more and more… as if they were pushing’, to turn the governance of policing ‘political’, the ‘group of the professional police try to bring up the ceiling, to make the position of the chief of police professional’. Tapping into a long tradition of police professionalism, this interviewee’s narrative contradicts human rights organizations and reformers, who claim that the governance of policing should not be a police but rather a democratic policy matter. Battles over governing policing take place throughout the state apparatus, decisively at its bottom where the state fuses with society and police agents turn into grassroots rulers and policy-makers. Acknowledging the importance of the informal and lower ranks within the organization, a commissioner from Córdoba observed that reforms ‘must look for actors within the forces’ who are able to ‘find the form of synchronizing, articulating the culture’ of democracy with the police. Any attempt to modify patterns of governance involving policing need to focus on the grassroots.

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The survival of authoritarian police policies seems almost paradoxical at a time when Argentina receives praise for carrying out trials against former human rights perpetrators, increasingly including members of the police. In 2008, a bonaerense detective explained: It is as if there is some resentment in society. Governments prior to this one took decisions to get to pacification. At the moment, it worked. But now, this new government, for five years, it has been like reviving differences… I do not know why they do it. But, there are people who did not live through that time, they have no idea of what happened in’76, or ’78, they know nothing. Most of my police interviewees objected to democracy’s discourses and practices of human rights as undermining seguridad, as prioritizing ‘the rights of criminals’ instead of ‘the rights of the people’. As one interviewee put it: Democracy is good… here in Argentina during the time of the military, we had a lot of chaos… What happens [now] is that, with democracy, which I think is very good, there are these human rights, which do not let the police work as they should. They protect more the thief than the police. Because the policeman, here in Argentina, has no unions, nothing to protect him. The thief, instead, this policeman observed, has all the guarantees. Although the interviewee did not attack democracy, he did target one of its Argentine emblems, by suggesting that democracy would be good were it not for human rights. Of course, we all know, without human rights democracy would not be democracy. Almost three decades after the restoration of democracy, the rising seguridad agenda threatens its horizon in unusual ways. Granted, no authoritarian regime change seems tolerable in present-day Argentina. Even some in the police say they have learned a lesson. In case of a coup attempt, a detective from Rosario explained that the police would not accompany [the coup leaders]. No. The police will not accompany. Never again. Why? Because the experience of those years, with everything that happened and that happened to us is clear. It is very clear. Here, this did not benefit us at all… If, a few years from now, God forbid, for any reason the nation underwent a revolution, well, that would be a different matter.



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Thus, there would be no police support for coups in Argentina unless the danger of a revolution were to appear on the horizon. Such a response is not surprising. Social revolution continues to be one of the police’s main obsessions. Preoccupation with the threat of revolution occurs in police doctrine and publications. To keep the poor under control – to make them orderly, docile and productive, one by one if necessary – a major police function implies keeping them politically disorganized. Indeed, this is the point where regular police work slides into political policing, which as explained in Chapter 4, police forces continue to perform in Argentina, even illegally. The Argentine police’s democratic loyalties seem dubious at best. The police ‘respond to the government. Not to the state, but to the government. Unfortunately, it is this way’, a commissioner from Río Negro observed. Epitomized in references to the last military dictatorship, police narratives on regime change tend to follow a linear pattern of ‘different times’. Not taking responsibility for the politics of their own institutions, most of the police interviewees argued that they have to obey ‘the powers that be’, that they are ‘an instrument of the current government’, and that – one bonaerense concluded – ‘one has to respond to the officials in charge’. The argument, of course, serves to justify just any kind of political alliance. To the extent that the hegemonic worldviews expressed by these members of the police continue to judge non-democratic regimes as unreliable, the Argentine democracy will be solid. Still, the micro-politics of seguridad legitimizes authoritarian and exclusionary demands on the ground in ways that strengthen the autonomy of the police regime and its most problematic, abusive and violent modalities of governance. The latter are still on the rise. Thus, we see full enforcement of human rights at one level and mano dura and human rights violations targeting the poor and excluded at a different level – all surrealistically coexisting. Under the sign of seguridad, policing openly contradicts the democratic quality of the political regime, staining it with hybrid traits.35 It is part of the overlap of the police and the political regimes. A commissioner from a main Argentine provincial capital stressed the importance of freedom vis-à-vis ‘the ideological patrolling carried on by Argentines [the Argentine police]. It is very strong, because… I am a dissident… uh, but if one has a thinking outside the box… within the force, one is identified as a leftist’. It seems clear that there is no room for ‘leftists’ in the Argentine police. Thoughtful and ethical individuals who make perfectly fine citizens may be stigmatized if they also happen to be members of a police force in Argentina.

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At the point where all governance practices converge, a form of government results from the uneasy encounter of different regimes, including those of policing. The problematic impact of police practices on the quality of citizenship and democratic life evidences the need to map the ways in which they operate and their different effects. Exercises of police power must be considered along usual dimensions such as political participation, competitiveness and rights. Undergoing an impressive methodological development in recent years, the empirical study of regimes in comparative politics offers the resources to cope with the challenge.

A ‘democratic’ police? ‘This is a democratic police, the one that we have in our city now. It is a democratic police, we follow the law, we are to the service of the government.’ The words of this commissioner from Rosario, defining his force as democratic just because it serves a democratically elected government, sound a bit off, yet they seem coherent with the dominant expert views. Leading international experts and scholars give currency to the term ‘democratic policing’. As Marenin concluded, the ‘basic values and policies being promoted under the model of democratic policing are largely non-controversial by now’.36 Openness and accountability are two such values. Experts – Professor David Bayley notably among them – write books, papers and guidelines, speak at conferences and advise governments on training programmes to democratize police forces from ‘new’ democracies.37 However, a theoretically articulated concept of ‘the democratic’ animating this literature is not available.38 Rather, the tradition pragmatically treats police forces in established democracies as democratic, approaching the democratization of policing ‘abroad’ as training to make those police forces resemble their assumed-to-be-democratic counterparts. The contrasts seem striking between the acritical policy-oriented approach and the critical literature on security and policing, mostly skeptical towards the state.39 Policy-oriented concerns with reforming the police under democratic auspices appear unmatched by any thorough effort to study the meaning of democratizing police forces. Treated as self-evident, as in no need of further analysis, ‘democratic policing’40 so far amounts mostly to an ideological term. One contribution that moves in a different, theoretically sound direction to capture traits of the democratic relevant to policing is Sklansky’s.



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Defining democracy as the ‘opposition to patterns of unjustifiable hierarchy’, Sklansky proposed to assess the contribution of policing to the regime based on whether it reinforces or goes against ‘unjustified patterns of private domination’,41 in ways that strengthen legitimate public authority without abusing force. This definition grasps substantive aspects of democracy as a permanent process of eliminating all forms of exclusion, subjection and inequality. It is truly in this sense that a democratic regime confronts the challenge to subordinate police power, making the exercise of police prerogatives cohere with inclusionary political values, purposes and goals. Whether and to what extent this can be achieved is a matter that calls for institutional experimenting and research. In the meantime, revisited in light of the democratic tradition, police power raises questions of uneasy response. Policing involves the (re) production of order as defined in a given political community. Any definition of democratic policing calls for a definition of democratic order. Yet there is no univocal definition of democracy available. Moreover, considering the core traits of police power as the form of governing the lesser through force, it is not clear whether anything such as democratic policing is not only achievable but even thinkable. In light of this complexity, the treatment of democratic policing as straightforward in the policy-oriented literature seems simply astonishing. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot assess gradients of police governance, forms of police regime and different combinations of the police and the political. However, rather than rushing to proclaim any form of policing as democratic, it would be prudent to start the other way around – namely, by identifying those that clearly lean towards the other extreme. Sometimes, contrasting formal and informal regimes materialize at various different levels. Following on the steps of recent studies on the quality of democracy, their assessment could benefit from ‘scaling down’.

Scaling down ‘Reality in Argentina is brave, harsh, cruel. After one hundred fifty years, after two hundred years, we come to discover that Argentina resembles very much, what García Márquez said. We are still living in the Middle Ages... the provinces are still feuds. Provinces in Argentina are feuds… There is a group of feudal lords, power circulates only within a sector, and the rest of the inhabitants are left watching… with pain, I must tell you that sometimes the police represent the sector of the powerful.’ After so many

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years of democratic rule, life in some places can be experienced as feudal. Confirming this perception, as previously noted, the UN Human Rights Committee found that ‘many of the rights listed’ in international declarations adopted by Argentina with constitutional force are not consistently protected through the nation. The use of police stations to hold detainees awaiting trial, frequent deaths in the hands of the police – often of minors – abusive police prerogatives allowing to detain individuals for mere identification, routine violence in overpopulated prisons, widespread use of torture, and the reluctance of the judiciary to recognize these cases for what they are guarantee impunity to perpetrators. Threats and violence against witnesses in human rights prosecutions complete a concerning picture. These accounts capture what O’Donnell once described as a degrading state legality wading from blue into green and then brown areas.42 Abusive patterns of policing proliferate in the latter zones, overlapping with pockets of authoritarian governance and giving the regime hybrid traits. Democratic institutions echo such unevenness. As Larry Diamond acknowledged, democracy varies ‘significantly across sectors and institutional arenas’, cities, and regions. In an effort to grasp these nuances, some recent literature has advocated for disaggregating the analysis of regimes into smaller units, such as provinces or towns.43 ‘Scaling down’, with a view of comparing sub-national districts, has thus gained acceptance among those studying regimes and the quality of democracy.44 The author of one such study, Susan Stokes, concluded that ‘local democracy works better in some parts of Argentina than in others’. Stokes found significant differences in political cultures across regions, which she likens to ‘political accents, dialects, even distinct “languages” ’. Even when formal rules are the same, the implicit and the unwritten may vary, explaining for differences. In regions where democracy works well, people expect individuals to abide by informal rules of accountability.45 For example, in Mar del Plata, Stokes observed, people exhibit higher standards of accountability and possibly achieve a higher quality of democracy than those in cities like Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Misiones. Based on her regional comparative research in Argentina, Stokes concluded that ‘democracy functions better there (and probably in all democracies, new and old) when informal rules enforce accountability’. If in areas with a higher democratic quality people’s standards of accountability seem higher, those living in regions where democracy does not fare well assume for their neighbours to participate in clientelistic networks. According to Stokes’ study of Argentina, regional and local variations in informal rules matter the most in explaining ‘substantial differences in the quality of democracy across towns, cities, and provinces’. The one condition



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that Stokes identified as a determinant in account of regional differences is social equality, concluding that ‘equality promotes democracy’. Thus, it is not wealth per se, but its distribution that Stokes found to work well to predict respect for the law, accountability and quality of democracy. Somos iguales, ‘we are equal’, was written in red on the ephemeral and polemic concrete wall built between San Isidro and San Fernando. ‘San Isidro feels superior, but this is not how one builds a nation’, noted Mirtha Coria, a neighbour from Villa Jardín, objecting to the wall.46 Building a wall to protect its dwellers from a poor section across the street perceived as criminal, such an extreme measure epitomizes what the rationale of seguridad does to democracy at the local level. Studying regional and local districts seem key for identifying informal policies and institutions as well as patterns and regimes of practices. Differences of the kind identified by Stokes seem traceable to regimes of policing. A bonaerense detective accounts for the differences between patrolling various districts within the same province, in a way that echoes arguments suggesting to ‘scale down’ in the study of democracy.47 ‘Within the police, there is a culture… a zonal culture’, he states, which I saw in the provincial police. It surprises me, I handle it as a zonal police culture… every partido [zonal districts in the Buenos Aires province] is like a society… each partido has its own society with different social levels. The police agent… he gets used to it and handles that society, as he knows… I speak of culture and of zones, because it is not the same the police who are all around the city of Buenos Aires than the police from La Plata, or the Mar del Plata police, or the police from Bahía Blanca, or the police from the countryside. It is not the same. It is a different culture. More civic… Zona Norte [the wealthier northern Conurbano] has the best culture, you can have a seat to talk to a person and tell her ‘see, what happens is this’… There are zones where this is not possible. Whereas this interviewee referred to the province of Buenos Aires, others also reflected on challenging experiences of patrolling dissimilar regions, cities and neighbourhoods in Argentina. Moving towards the darker side of the picture of police governance, Brinks identified distinct patterns of killings by the police in Buenos Aires and the city of Córdoba, which cannot be explained by formal, legal, or institutional reasons.48 In his study, Brinks hypothesized the existence, in some districts, of an informal institution based on unwritten rules that would encourage the police to kill criminal suspects either by rewarding killers or at least by

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granting them immunity from prosecution. This seems part of what Dairoqui referred to as the ‘“other” institutional policy’ entrenched within Argentine democratic institutions.49 In a grey framework of ambiguity, daily exceptions and emergencies brought by inseguridad let the police regime overdetermine the political, as lawlessness take over people’s nominal rights. Thus, while democracy has come to stay, it exposes cracks at its foundation that affect its quality and the quality of citizenship. At the very bottom, police officers’ discretionary judgement constitutes the last link in the chain of governance and may redefine a regime as authoritarian at least by zones. Developing a more accurate picture of the often contradictory elements of democracies such as Argentina’s calls for more sensitive concepts and instruments able to capture forms of governance on the ground. ‘If an elected government cannot govern because the military or some other actor dominates the political system, it is not democratic’, Mainwaring, Scott, Daniel Brinks and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán concluded.50 How do the decisions and practices of police officers affect the political regime, its policies and the quality of democracy? In light of the patterns of police abuse and violence identified in Argentina, going back to Munck’s notion of thresholds, one question arises: how much police abuse and violence define the point beyond which no government can claim to be democratic?51

Tracking police governance Exercises of police power shape the conditions of democratization on the ground. How can we assess the impact of police practices on the regime? Acknowledging the existence of a police regime in parallel to the political could substantially contribute to this endeavour. To grasp these opaque aspects of governance, to the usual indicators on voting participation and free and effective political competition for office, we need to incorporate data on people’s effective access to rights at the local level. Arbitrary deaths by the police constitute the most dramatic, extreme, indicator of authoritarian police governance. In Argentina, as previously mentioned, only human rights organizations collect – or at least make public – information on killings by the police. In official state records, these deaths remain hidden behind the country’s overall homicide rate. Research on the impact of police practices on the regime would benefit from concerted efforts to pass international normative compelling states to discriminate and report the number of individuals killed by their police and security forces, with the oversight of independent human rights organizations.52



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What else, besides such an extreme indicator, can we build upon to assess the role of police practices in the daily performance of governance? How is policing accounted for in indicators used to assess democratization? Sometimes, general references on policing tend to appear as part of estimates on the rule of law. Considering the information publicly accessible, under the title ‘right to life and security’, the sole indicator chosen by the important United Nations study Democracy in Latin America is the number of homicides. Besides, despite its anti-left political biases and methodological problems identified by Mainwaring, Brinks and Pérez Liñán, the Freedom House collects data on policing that would be strategic to examine in a disaggregated fashion.53 In particular, the section devoted to civil liberties in their questionnaire includes several items referred to political policing and the police. They ask for example whether governments engage ‘in public surveillance’, and if they respect academic freedom and freedoms of association and assembly. Items ask whether the police arrest, harass, or detain demonstrators ‘to prevent them from engaging in such actions’ and whether the police are ‘under direct civilian control’. Under the title ‘rule of law’, the questionnaire lists ‘effective and democratic civilian control’ of the police ‘through the judicial, legislative, and executive branches’, asking if law enforcement agents are free from the influence of non-state actors. The survey also includes ‘political terror, unjustified imprisonment, exile, or torture’ as well as police ‘arbitrary arrests and detentions without warrants’, fabricated evidence, mistreatment, brutality and torture. As it has been noted, the methods that Freedom House analysts use to assign a value to these items, to weight indicators, and to give countries a score are not sufficiently clear.54 Still, without entering a methodological discussion, it suffices to note that gaining access to their data on policing in a disaggregated fashion, country by country – and hopefully also district by district – would have a significant impact in illuminating police practices, regimes and their impact on democratization worldwide. The World Bank Governance Indicators, another important study, links the police to the rule of law. An explanatory paper accompanying the results lists all their sources, including items from surveys assessing the quality of police as a dimension of the variable ‘rule of law’.55 Indicators range from trust in the police drawn from regional public opinion surveys such as the Latinobarómetro, to ‘effectiveness of the police’ assessed by members of the business community through the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Survey (GCS). Other items included refer to people’s safety, ‘popular observance of the law’, the accessibility and availability of the police to citizens, as well as questions about victimization and

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police corruption. As in the case of the Freedom House, the procedures for aggregating items and assessing their weight remain unclear. Yet, again, if this data on policing were available in a raw fashion, it would provide the study of policing and democratization with additional valuable sources. A newer index of electoral democracy, IDE, developed by Gerardo Munck, includes dimensions such as ‘equality and protection against discrimination’ and the ‘right to life, bodily integrity, and security’.56 As in the case of the United Nations index, the data used to assess the right to life are just official homicide rates, with all the problems and limitations discussed before. A methodological document accompanying the study discusses how to best assess different types of citizen rights (i.e. political, civil, social) and whether to summarize information. The document proposes to define three indexes rather than just one to avoid losing substantial information. Unfortunately, the IDE includes no indicators about policing that would permit to estimate the influence of police power in electoral processes. The Institute for Democracy and for Electoral Assistance (IDEA) does include policing in its guidelines for assessing the quality of democracy. Yet their apparent treatment of the police as a tool and a mini replica of the military takes a bit of a toll in the IDEA questionnaire. Grouping the police together with the military and the security forces without discriminating the police’s specific role, questions ask about the existence and effectiveness of ‘civilian control’ as well as for accountability and diversity in the composition of the forces. Of course, these are all important things to know, even though counting with more disaggregated data would be most beneficial. One useful feature of the IDEA document is the section ‘what to look for’.57 Regarding the military, police and security forces, the study recommends examining legal dispositions regulating mechanisms of immunity and control, as well as the practical effectiveness of such mechanisms. Furthermore, IDEA lists ‘negative indicators’ seeking to assess support for coups, excessive political presence, or veto power by the military, police and the security forces. Other sections call for gathering information on ‘deaths and injury to suspects or those exercising their lawful civil and political rights’ potential abuses of citizens, public trust in the police, conditions of detention, gender violence and the accessibility of police services in a community.58 Again, gathering such data and making it accessible to researchers would help make substantive progress in assessing police governance. Regarding survey data available to the public, besides one or two victimization studies that inquire about treatment by the police, major surveys such as Latinobarómetro and LAPOP assess general questions about trust in the police and police corruption. Auspiciously, in its 2008 edition LAPOP



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devoted a more nuanced set of questions to policing, asking about trust in the police also at the local level and whether respondents had been victimized by the police during the previous year. In Argentina, 129 respondents, or 8.7 per cent of the sample, expressed to have suffered police mistreatment, in what constitutes the worse record for the 20 surveyed countries of Latin America.59 Table 5.1 shows the results by province. Table 5.1  Surveying police mistreatment Q: “Did a police officer mistreat you verbally or physically, or hit you in the last 12 months? How many times?” Yes (times) Province

1

2–3

4–5

7–10

Buenos Aires Santa Fé Neuquén Córdoba Tucumán Corrientes Mendoza Salta Misiones Entre Ríos San Juan Formosa La Rioja Río Negro Santiago del Estero Jujuy Chubut San Luis Chaco Catamarca Tierra del Fuego TOTAL

30  8  4  5  4  4  5  4  2  2  2  2  1  1

28  4  3  2  2

3 1 1

2 1

2

 1

 1  1

 1 1  1

76

42

6

5

No

Total

 633  110   17  122   37   33   61   34   36   45   22   17   12   29   29   26   16   12   37   13   12 1353

 696  123   26  129   43   39   66   38   39   47   24   19   14   30   30   27   17   13   37   13   12 1482

Subtotal 63 13  9  7  6  6  5  4  3  2  2  2  2  1  1  1  1  1

129

Source: LAPOP 2008

Based on this data, in 2008 in Argentina 5.13 per cent of respondents indicated having been mistreated or attacked by the police once, 2.16 per cent twice, 0.67 per cent three times, and at the end of the scale two pairs of individuals report to have been mistreated or attacked 8 and 10 times, respectively. Although four individuals in a sample of 1,482 may seem statistically negligible, such police attacks on the same people evidence patterns of abuse discussed in previous chapters like those involving

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arbitrary detentions, torture, trigger-happy killings, or ‘disappearances’ such as Luciano Arruga’s. These data clearly indicate the need for further research. The same survey asks how much respondents would trust the police to solve a hypothetical crime, whether the police in the neighbourhood protect criminals, and if a member of the police has asked for a bribe in the last year. Finally, respondents are invited to identify the jurisdiction of their police. Unfortunately, LAPOP did not include most of these questions in its 2010 edition.

Bringing in the interpretive Better statistics and disaggregated survey data would dramatically improve Table 5.2 Documented arbitrary killings by the police and security forces in democracy, per cent, cases by million, and distrust of the police, by province Province

Buenos Aires Santa Fé Córdoba Ciudad de Buenos Aires Mendoza Corrientes Santiago del Estero Tucumán Entre Ríos Rio Negro Salta Chubut Jujuy Neuquén Catamarca La Pampa San Luis Chaco La Rioja Misiones Formosa Santa Cruz Tierra del Fuego San Juan TOTAL Argentina

Cases CORREPI (documented arbitrary killings by the police since 1983) 1526 447 265 243 166 81 80 79 75 51 46 38 35 33 32 27 27 26 22 22 20 20 16 15 3393

Source: CORREPI 2011, 2010 Census, LAPOP 2008

Percent cases CORREPI per province

Cases CORREPI per million (2010 Census)

44.97 13.17 7.81 7.16 4.89 2.39 2.36 2.33 2.21 1.5 1.36 1.12 1.03 0.97 0.94 0.80 0.80 0.77 0.65 0.65 0.59 0.59 0.47 0.44 100

97.66 139.92 80.08 84.07 95.46 81.6 91.53 54.55 60.67 79.85 37.87 74.64 51.98 59.86 86.99 84.65 62.45 24.63 65.93 19.97 37.72 73 125.78 22.02 84.57

% do not trust local police (2008) 78.12 90.65 63.46 78.12 86.89 86.21 64.29 73.68 71.74 72.00 67.86 66.67 61.90 87.50 63.64 n/d 92.31 32.43 70.00 48.39 66.67 n/d 42.86 95.45 75.18



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our possibilities to assess police governance as a dimension of the regime. No less important is the hermeneutical dimension of practices. Whether researchers define their units of analysis around values, narratives, storytelling, utterances, metaphors, or other tropes, key words and expressions, they all express distinct governing traditions. A number of methodological tools – from discourse analysis to computer-based content, metaphor, metonymy, or semantic network analyses – make it possible to map the hermeneutical aspect of practices empirically.60 The growth of studies on policing in Latin America is approaching the point where a critical mass of studies will make it possible to establish some basic consensus. Defining key dimensions, indicators and tropes or terms to monitor and appropriate thesauri and systems to map them will be as important as utilizing information disaggregated by local district. With nuances and differences in the exercise of police prerogatives traceable to narratives, there seem to be good reasons to expect them to serve as hermeneutic, interpretive predictors of patterns of practices or regimes. Table 5.2 summarizes relevant available data on the police by district. Killings, abuse and torture by the police, as fragmentary as their collection may be, need to form part of regime assessments. In addition, indicators about people’s trust on the police and perception on the fairness and character of the police need refinement. Adding a few key questions on police treatment of the poor, different genders and members of indigenous communities and of other ethnic groups to established surveys such as the Latinobarómetro, LAPOP, or to national victimization surveys would provide rich data to assess police regimes and their impact on the government. Rather than simply assume the existence of democratic policing, operationalizing definitions such as Sklansky’s would be appropriate to move the discussion beyond the merely normative or ideological. A comparison of main formal policies, laws, regulations and patterns of police practices, disaggregated by regional and local units, would allow to identify authoritarian areas of governance and to assess the form of regime. Drawing on such data while systematizing a collection of interpretive records, tracking metaphors and typical expressions framing police practices on the ground, would provide us with raw matter of strategic value to assessing police regimes and their impact on citizenship and democracy. Given the consequences of policing for the access to and quality of citizenship, it needs to be included as an additional dimension in the study of regimes. Mapping a police regime in parallel to the political regime would make networks and patterns of governance visible. More data are needed. One first endeavour, calling for a team effort, will involve

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assessing quality, reliability and accessibility of the information already available. On this basis, recommendations can be made on data collections and indicators as well as on the potential advantages and disadvantages of developing indexes of police governance. As we illuminate those grassroots police practices through which the state touches the body of individuals, administers their rights and liberties, and at times takes their life away, determining access to citizenship while delimiting the scope of the polity, the horizon of democratization will expose new nuances. The task calls for revisiting and refining our conceptual and methodological understanding of regimes. The governmental regime comprises political as well as police governance as well as the mechanisms establishing and reproducing these realms and their boundaries. For Aristotle, the distinction between the political and the non-political stood as natural; contemporary political theory exposes these categories, and the differences between them, as discursively and politically constructed. Excluding police governance from consideration in the analysis of the regime amounts to excluding the study of the contingent distinctions through which power barriers continue to be built towards the interior of our modern democracies, thereby reproducing the exclusion of different groups who are subsequently subjected to police rule alone. While the survival of police governance indicates persistent biopolitical differentiation between the worthier and the lesser, the expansion of democracy presupposes the universal recognition of adults as political agents accompanied with the corresponding extension of political rule. The conceptual and empirical recognition of territories of police governance is thus necessary to identify the sites where political, democratic rule is most needed. This argument calls for an interrogation of dominant forms of policing as intertwining with the regimes, ‘scaling down’ into comparing districts, cities and neighbourhoods, crucial for identifying different police regimes. Although all efforts must be welcome in building indicators to assess the police regime, we should not lose perspective of the hermeneutical processes involved in the exercise of discretionary prerogatives by the police. In this regard, Tilly reminds us of the value of narratives: As pleasant as it would be to manipulate quantitative measures of democratization, de-democratization, increase in state capacity, and decrease of state capacity, in the present state of knowledge, detailed analytical narratives… promise more for general explanations of democratization and de-democratization. They promise more because they allow us to



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match detailed changes in relations among political actors to alterations in their presumed causes… the crucial matching of arguments and evidence will come in the form of analytical narratives.61 Tilly’s observation seems decisive in the study of policing, particularly if we consider the role of metaphors and narratives in defining categories of individuals and conditioning their differential treatment by police agents. Police forms of governance call to examine concrete hermeneutical and biopolitical processes qualifying forms of life and inclusiveness at the basis of the regime. In turn, elaborating indicators to assess this particular dimension of the governmental regime will benefit from integrating the quantitative with the interpretive and hermeneutical. This chapter identified a governing dimension in which police practices qualify and redefine citizenship, the regime and the quality of democracy. Assessing police governance as a major dimension of the government does not come however with a promise to advance anything like ‘democratic policing’. Studying a field is a form of intervening upon it, always with consequences. Monitoring brings about change, but not necessarily the one we desire. Thus, for example, Rejali assessed the ‘global, human-rights monitoring regime’ put into place with the consolidation of the international human rights movement in the 1980s. Rather than the eradication of abuse and torture by state agents, monitoring made them to adopt and perfect methods of what Rejali called ‘clean torture’, or forms of torture that do not leave bodily traces. This is why, in the way of a perverse ‘Esperanto… of torture’, electric torture has become widespread.62 Outrageous practices such as torture continue to take place, regardless of regime type, indicating the need for us to move from the regime into the state. As Tedesco and Barton noted, the recent study of Latin American politics has focused perhaps too much on ‘the adjectivisation of democracy’. Such emphasis has overshadowed the importance of the state ‘for understanding the political, economic and social structures on which democracy is based and functions as a political regime’.63 A number of the most difficult challenges confronting democratization come from the state. Regimes democratize, but the state over which they are implanted is still a security dispositif, a Leviathan, based on excluding some for the sake of protecting others. The next chapter interrogates police power in light of the tradition of political philosophy and the state itself as a giant policeman.

Chapter 6

A Sovereign’s Multiple Heads ‘We are like a comet, like the tail of the comet… The comet is power and the tail goes fluttering around. You do not get detached because you are fastened to it, but you keep on moving up and down, back and forth.’ A member of the Federal Police accompanied the description with the movement of his hands. Few images capture so eloquently the rationale of police power vis-à-vis the government. Looking at the scale of the nation, tens of thousands of police agents seem as insignificant as the particles leaping around a comet’s tail, yet the powers they exercise reveal something core to the state. All main state elements are present in encounters with the police. Without this swarm of agents of order, our modern states would likely collapse. ‘We are a prolongation of the state’, an officer from the Federal Police explained. The state and the police are so closely intertwined that, as Neocleous concluded, a theory of one of the terms presupposes a theory of the other.1 Yet the theoretical status of police power remains unclear. Since ancient times, political philosophers rarely occupied themselves with examining tasks such as containing crowds, chasing suspects, protecting public buildings, or maintaining order in the streets. Acknowledged to ‘naturally inhere’2 in the government, treated as necessary but of low status, as in need of no philosophical foundation, policing has been given pragmatic justification at best. In part as a result, we often find ourselves running into problems raised by puzzling exercises of police power without fully capturing its defining traits. Carl Schmitt once noted that ‘modern state and modern police came into being simultaneously and the most vital institution of the security state is the police’.3 The state – that ‘gigantic mechanism’ offering protection – indeed meshes with policing until turning indistinguishable from it. Policing, as Neocleous argued, is key in the state’s ‘fabrication’ and everyday reproduction of social order. Policing structures and gives continuity to modern states, which Skocpol defined as ensembles of police, administrative, and military apparatuses coordinated by an executive power.4As a dispositif promoting and coordinating some forms of power



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while disorganizing and destroying others, the state has police apparatuses forming its backbone.5 Once coagulated, governmental apparatuses and institutions gain a life of their own. Like canvases, they ground law and ‘turn determinant in the definition of forms of regime’, as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens note.6 In the way of true police apparatuses, through their non-elective agents, states often constrain the scope and possibilities of governments. ‘What would a governor do without the police?’ a commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast asked. ‘The police power, we agree is vested in the ruler. But we are the ones who exercise it.’ Every day in the streets, the police define how people access their freedoms of speech, meeting, or association. As a police commissioner from Rosario explained, ‘you put in the street a person with authority to regulate citizens’ constitutional rights’. The police critically define the reach of the state in society. Of all the forms of power involved in governing, Dubber concluded that ‘none is greater than the power to police, and none less circumscribed’. Whereas other state bureaucracies also target individuals and regulate interpersonal and social relations, the police administer legitimate force – the one trait that Max Weber judged distinctive of the state, and decide in matters of life and death. ‘We are close to life and death, to inexplicable death, the one that could be prevented, to evil without limits’, a detective from Córdoba observed. At times, they are the ones taking life. Being in the police, ‘you have to do things that others do not do… To kill a person, to do the worst, you have to do it either to defend yourself or to defend others’, an officer with the Federal Police explained. Jean Bodin argued that the ‘power of life and death, that is of condemning to death, or of pardoning those who have incurred this sentence’ defines the utmost mark of sovereignty, of the ‘absolute and perpetual power’ that a commonwealth entrusts to a ruler.7 According to Preston King, Bodin’s sovereign is an office, a function of government whose titular ‘gives law and takes it away’ and decides ‘what is and what is not to be done’, in ways that no positive law can limit.8 If historically associated with the figure of the monarch, being an office, nothing prevents this power from adopting different institutional shapes and being placed in different hands. Like Bodin, Hobbes judged the prerogative to take life the core trait of a power ‘as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it’ that recognizes no limits.9 Hobbes explained that the one invested with that power can do ‘whatsoever he shall think necessary’ for preserving and restoring peace and order, as epitomized by the giant artificial man on the cover of

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Leviathan. Ultimately, the essence of sovereign power ‘is actually the right to kill’, Foucault noted.10 Denominations vary. As Skocpol noted after Nettl, ‘continental Europeans think of “sovereignty” as residing in centralized administrative institutions; Britons focus on political parties in Parliament; and US citizens refuse to designate any concrete body as sovereign.’11 Yet exercises of this exceptional power anteceding and subordinating law – sometimes called sovereign, sometimes prerogative, sometimes sovereign prerogatives – surface across societies. The police have in their hands this same power. From the moment that the police stop an individual on the street, the life of that individual is literally in the hands of the police officer, at his or her mercy. Policing, this chapter contends, defines a major terrain of exercise of sovereign prerogatives. Once upon a time thought of as unique among kings, allegedly eliminated by revolutions and parliaments, prerogative reappeared in modern executive decrees bypassing laws and declaring states of emergency. Despite the shift in scale, this power does not seem substantially different when exercised at the bottom of the state apparatus. Expanding in recent years, clashes between the extra-legal and the legitimate in the exercise of prerogative by top executive authorities renewed scholarly and political debates. But such discussions expose only part of the problem; there is more. Sovereign prerogatives also accompany routine bureaucratic functions in the hands of a multitude of low-ranking agents, especially the police. These agents’ attributions materialize the same power exercised by top executive offices. Addressing this shift, Mladek noted that ‘sublime sovereignty, once rich with imagery and pomp, now makes way for more anonymous powers, whose effects, though muted, are no less devastating’.12 That this power unfolds in allegedly minor, subordinate exercises of policing calls to revise our ways of thinking of both the state and the government. Its grassroots exercise complicates hierarchical representations of stateness, more so since the split of prerogative among different bodies favours its invisibility and conceptual neglect. If it seems strange for theorists to have started delving into these questions only recently, it may be in part, as Esposito observes, because of the modern dominance of popular sovereignty, which favoured ‘a concealment and a juridicization’ of sovereign power and its mechanisms.13 Thanks to converging research agendas, in particular to the legacy of Foucault, exercises of sovereign prerogative by low-ranking state agents started gaining conceptual visibility among political and legal theorists, as did police power. In a 1972 interview, Foucault objected to representing



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power as concentrated at ‘the apex’ of a hierarchy, which he judged reifying and obscuring. His remarks seem particularly appropriate given the dominant treatment of policing. Pyramidal metaphors representing state power reinforce the image of policing as unproblematic state extensions, not unlike the way in which Hobbes referred to magistrates as ‘artificial joints’, as if mechanically administering the law at the foundation of the state apparatus.14 Such representations, still prevailing, capture only part of what the police do while missing the considerable scope of their faculties. In the same interview, Foucault invites us ‘to abandon the model of Leviathan’ by turning the Hobbesian viewpoint upside down, looking instead for power at those terminal points ‘where it becomes capillary’, emerges as ‘less and less juridical’, and captures individuals by shaping them as subjects.15 Redirecting our attention from the head and sovereign ‘soul’ of the monster to the little humans imagined as constituting its body, sites traditionally perceived as ‘low’ expose ‘infinitesimal mechanisms’ of power. Albeit small, such mechanisms are no less relevant for understanding the dynamics of state power and governance than traditional ones. In fact, if the sovereign head is the site where decisions of life and death are made – and also often executed – the actual workings of sovereignty rely on a multiplicity of such sites, which may be productive to represent as heads as well. Recognizing this power delineates a figure with multiple sovereign agents. Along these lines, this chapter argues that police practices shed light like no other onto deep, semi-hidden governing layers where sovereign prerogatives are administered every day. What does a state whose utmost form of power (i.e. sovereign prerogative) is exercised in multiple simultaneous points look like? Echoing the need to ‘ “rethink” the state’ in Latin America, from a perspective informed in political theory that incorporates the voices of police officers, this chapter brings the police under the light of state power.16 Governmental dimensions of policing such as enforcing laws, maintaining order, using force and administering life and death – often in an ambiguous relation to law or even against it – illuminate and delineate facets of the state. Like modern states elsewhere, the Latin American state appropriated functions previously performed by other groups and created others of its own, as Oscar Oslak reminds us. The incompleteness of this process in the region makes state interventions more visible and violent,17 and this in turn makes its police more visible and violent. To those who exercise, study, or suffer the effects of police power, the arguments put forth in this chapter may seem obvious. To those who

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instead conceive of the police as mere law enforcement, they may appear counter-intuitive. If the reader concurs with me that the police have in their hands a major form of power, one of the consequences that follows is the need to revisit established ways of conceiving of the state.

Police prerogatives ‘If the policeman respects the law, complies with the law, and enforces the law, there is no problem’, a seasoned commissioner from Mendoza observed. After the organization of professionalized police bodies in 1829 in England, modern democracies present police agents as guardians of the law. Policing seems instrumental to the rule of law which, arising in the struggle against absolutism, calls for a form of government based on written public norms that apply to all individuals equally. Together with the traditions of the Spanish ‘Estado de Derecho’, the German ‘Rechsstaat‘, and the French ‘état de droit’, O’Donnell observes, the rule of law reminds us that nobody is above written norms. To be ‘democratic’, however, the rule of law needs to make authorities accountable and guarantee ‘the political equality of all citizens’. 18 Accordingly, the English term ‘law enforcement’ evokes images of permanently checking on citizens abiding by laws and always lawfully intervening against those who choose to break them. Casted as auxiliary agents of a state represented as a legal, rational, pyramidal organization in which officers at the bottom merely apply decisions made at the top, the police are expected to administer norms fairly. Police abuses tend to be framed as the deed of ‘bad apples’, as explained by a member of the Federal Police: An old adage says ‘the police are like a box of apples. There are very good apples, and apples that are rotten’. But, then when you approach the box of apples, you don’t say, ‘this apple is bad’. No, you say, ‘this merchandise is bad’. We form part of a box, of a group that is an institution. When there is a bad official, nobody says ‘this policeman’. They say ‘the police’. Do you understand? To prevent abuse and corruption, most would agree, the police must be made accountable and subjected to the rule of law. Yet as soon as we approach the practical implications of these principles, problems surrounding the rule of law become manifest. ‘It is a whole story the question of compliance with the law. A whole story’, a bonaerense officer



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reflected. While, of course, ‘there is no law without enforceability’, as philosopher Jacques Derrida noted, enforcing the law entails much more than mechanically applying a discrete and univocal set of rules.19 In what reveals to be neither a neutral nor a simple process, problems arise around the use of force. How does force affect the spirit of the law? How bloody can the law get without becoming haunted and undermined by its own force? Not concerned with questions like these, the commissioner from a small town in Mendoza concluded: ‘If… we respect the law, as much of an exercise of violence as we engage in, we will have peace of mind’, explaining that ‘excesses will not be excesses if they are anticipated by the law’. In the perspective of this officer, more than a form of governing alternative to violence, the law seems to habilitate it at least for those savvy enough to know how to be violent and still remain shielded under the law. This notion of the law as a container of ‘excesses’ does not seem to be what reformers and scholars have in mind when praising the rule of law. Still, much of what the police do has simply no link to the law. ‘To be a police officer is to be standing, and then… there is nothing before you’, an officer from the Federal Police vividly conveyed, reflecting on the legal incertitude he often confronts while on duty. He probably would concur with the officer from Mendoza that the main role of the police is to maintain order. ‘The police are a synonym with order. The uniform is a synonym with order. The color blue, that the administrator wears so that his community is perfectly organized’, he explained. Seeking to preserve order, prevent conflict, and neutralize or dispose of nuisances, the police prioritize prevention, where ‘many small corrections’ seem preferable to a few dramatic ones. The good policeman, as a Federal Police interviewee noted, is the one who ‘acts preventively, who does not wait for crime to occur… but who works instead to prevent [it].’ Often falling behind or around the law, and even prior to it, in what borrowing from Austin Sarat should be called ‘alegal’ territory, practices comprised under prevention and order maintenance tend to escape legal constraints. ‘Legal, illegal, no, the term does not apply’, another Federal Police officer observed. Even when judged normal, a number of decisions made every day by police patrols cannot be strictly delimited through law, but stand in an indefinite legal status instead. ‘Beyond the law? Well, you see, it all depends of which law’, a bonaerense member of an elite division noted almost carelessly. At best, the police maintain order without breaking the law. They follow rules, a commissioner from Córdoba contended, if only of a ‘police-administrative’ order, which in his province comprises a misdemeanours code and provincial

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law. At times, as a bonaerense officer explained, ‘it seems that the order of the superior were above the very law, so the agent goes and breaks into [a home] knowing that there is no warrant’. Although this order would be clearly illegal, others fall in between, in a grey area. Formless, pervasive and discretionary in its ‘defining undefinability’,20 as Dubber expressed it, police rules and the police power elude strict conceptualization. The ‘law’ of the police may or may not coincide with the rule of law. In the way of ‘pragmatic guidelines’, police rules seek to maintain social order, Dubber noted, out of concern with efficiency and not necessarily with the legitimacy that can only result from consensual governance.21 That ‘police is not justice’, Foucault showed, was known to seventeenth-century jurists.22 Acknowledging that police rules and laws were ‘of a different order’, in his Spirit of Laws Montesquieu judged law and police incommensurable.23 Police power, in sum, seems ‘essentially boundless and, as such, beyond meaningful constitutional scrutiny’, as Valverde concluded.24 Traceable back to the fourteenth century, as a word accompanying the development of doctrines, treatises, magistracies and organizations, the police originated out of the need to recreate mores and manners, and to control the masses released by the dissolution of feudal order in Europe. Already in the fifteenth century, Knemeyer shows, the word Polizei indicated the existence of order within a community.25 Following its birth as ‘emergency legislation’, by the seventeenth century the Polizeistaat, the ‘police state’, made achieving and preserving order its priority.26 After Polizei’s assemblage of techniques for the integration of individuals, the doctrine of reason of the state settled guidelines for the development of police.27 Distancing themselves from God, the Church and the prince, theorists overlooked all transcendent hierarchies and justifications of power and built a self-sufficient narrative of state sovereignty. These ideas spread through Europe in hundreds of police treatises. In the seventeenth century, police defined a part of the government as important as the army, the justice system and the collection of taxes. Since the eighteenth century, it developed into an impressive number of regulations with a positive focus on the care of life. As Foucault demonstrated, police treatises stressed a distinctive moral function of overseeing the proper development of life in ways that contributed to the strength of the state by setting the right relationships between men and things. Controlling the poor, making the population embrace ‘modesty, charity, loyalty, industriousness, friendly cooperation, [and] honesty’, and promoting people’s happiness by channelling pleasures appropriately were main themes encompassed by governing life through Polizei.28 From its origins, Dubber noted, the police



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possessed a ‘necessarily preventive character’.29 In the road towards the consolidation of the nation-state, police techniques were further perfected to enhance life as functional to the state and to neutralize and destroy anything that appeared to threaten the state’s might. Eventually, during the nineteenth century, as police tropes and the imagination of criminals and detectives consolidated, modern nations assembled professionalized police forces. To date, repeatedly characterized as hard to classify, the prerogatives enjoyed by the police are generally subsumed under the notion of discretion – the power to judge and make decisions on the spot. A ‘grey zone’ of behaviour that eludes formal regulation, room for discretion arises at the gaps and silences of what the law does not explicitly regulate, or from the need to accommodate a particular case to multiple norms. Discretion seems needed due to the impossibility of fully enforcing all laws in situations that admit ‘guidelines, but no firm principles’.30 Discretionary power permeates all bureaucracies. Discretion and autonomy, as Lipsky first observed, lie at the roots of the policy-making capacity of street-level bureaucrats like the police. The circumstances of working in the streets, their authority to use force, and other unique prerogatives make discretion an even stronger trait of the police.31 Lower positions linked to patrolling provide ample opportunities for discretionary exercises, turning police agents’ judgement into last link in the chain of state governance.32 ‘If for the police themselves, for a chief officer, controlling his subordinates on the discretionary power they exercise in the street is difficult’, then for the political authorities it will be harder, a commissioner from Córdoba observed. However, it is not just a question of ‘bad apples’. Discretion and autonomy are unavoidable in policing. Ultimately, a complex play of influences and autonomy makes for enduring patterns in the exercise of police discretion. Especially concerning in Argentina seems the recurrence of police abuse and violence, on the rise since 2008. Cases collected by human rights organizations such as CORREPI betray some common rationale, even perhaps unwritten, informal policies, that produce similar outcomes in different locations across the nation.

Sovereign prerogative: The police power ‘The policeman has powers and attributions that common people do not have… such as the power to arrest, the power to decide’, a young bonaerense officer observed. ‘We have been given a gun, we have been provided with

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an attribution... that we have to know how to use. The same way that we have to know how to use the gun, the baton, we also have to know how to use the attribution that the state gave to us’, a commissioner, the head of a police school in a provincial metropolis explained. Not only police officers have the authority to carry guns, but in many districts throughout Argentina, they are forced by law to do so, even while off duty, under what is known as estado policial (i.e. police status). In defining the situation at hand as one in need of intervention, interpreting the law and choosing among alternative rules to apply, passing judgement, and frequently executing their ‘sentence’ by themselves – even killing, in what amounts to summary executions carried out on the spot without access to a fair and impartial trial – the police have in their hands the most undifferentiated and comprehensive form of state power. If anything characterizes the ‘essence of police power’, Novak explained, it is the boundless ‘prerogative of the sovereign to act quickly and expediently so as to eliminate threats to the health, safety, and security of the people’.33 Through the police, emergency powers surface in the hands of minute agents at multiple terminal points of the state apparatus. With a focus on declarations of states of emergencies and exceptional measures, Pasquale Pasquino and John Ferejohn’s analysis would concur. Situations leading to the declaration of a state of emergency ‘a century ago’, the authors observed, are dealt these days by most liberal democracies just with ‘more or less ordinary policing techniques, beefed up with a few extra powers permitting the detention of suspects without charges, and perhaps suspending their access to lawyers’.34 The common lineage between the power of the sovereign, emergency powers and the power of police seems well established. Perfected police bodies and police technologies make it possible for liberal democracies to treat the most diverse challenges through ‘normal’ policing without the need for the executive to declare a state of emergency. Indeed, to be a police officer ‘is to feel powerful. It is the nicest thing ever’, confessed a smiling commissioner from a city in Mendoza. Police agents’ decisions to intervene and on which norms to apply in different situations determine how policies and laws reach the people. Channelling, neutralizing and even at times reversing the spirit and effects of those same laws and policies, their decisions may involve the suspension of basic individual rights and carry the most drastic consequences for peoples’ freedom, rights and lives. Such exceptional police faculties can be used ‘to serve and protect’, to be put al servicio de la comunidad, to the service of the community, as the Argentine Federal Police motto claims, or to abuse



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and harass. In any case, a focus on police power evidences the exercise of extra-legal prerogatives not only at the top, but also throughout the state apparatus, complicating and qualifying the pyramidal dimensions of the state. ‘We depend directly on the provincial executive power’, a commissioner from a provincial capital in the northeast stressed. Hence, he continued, ‘we have to, first, guarantee that rules and laws are enforced. Besides that, we have to guarantee the security of the provincial executive, of the governor… furthermore, we are direct auxiliaries of the justice system.’ Protecting the head of the executive, the law, helping the judiciary, preventing crime, chasing transgressors and preserving order, the police combine functions and forms of power that, as Taylor rightly notes, democracies treat as independent. By simultaneously ‘legislating, adjudicating and executing’, a multitude of police agents act in ways that resist a clear subsumption under the division of powers consecrated by modern constitutionalism. ‘The power to police has always been, and has been designed to be, free from principled constraint’, Dubber noted.35

Sovereign prerogatives: The tradition ‘Do you know when you become aware that you have power? When you confront the extreme case’, a member of the Federal Police explained. As agents of emergency rule in the streets, the police are familiarized with what political theorist Wendy Brown refers to as the ‘prerogative dimension of the state’.36 Prerogative, Brown explains, defines the state’s distinctive trait: ‘legitimate arbitrary power in policy making and legitimate monopolies of internal and external violence in the police and the military’. Comprising measures at once arbitrary and legitimate, prerogative has been revisited from different philosophical traditions. A constant thread through the works of Bodin and Hobbes shows the sovereign as the highest authority after God, exempted from earthly laws. Paralleling traditional kingly attributions, after the Renaissance modern states claimed the sovereign prerogative to dispose of the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike, invoking the ancient Roman principle of vitae et necis potestas that recognized the pater familias power of life and death over his children. This tradition provided the grounds for modern sovereignty while bridging it with its archaic manifestations.37 Although modern political thought tends to imagine itself as a ‘clash of positions exemplified by the “absolutist” Hobbes and the “liberal” Locke’, as Neocleous observed,

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key elements traditionally associated with the ancien régime reappear, transformed, in the Lockean thinking.38 Generally overlooked by those stressing Locke’s contributions to liberalism, such elements and the ambivalence of his argument lurk within the tradition. Let us see. Just a few decades apart from Hobbes, at the peak of the Glorious Revolution, Locke consecrated the pre-eminence of the rule of law. The philosopher determined that exercises of power beyond right equal tyranny.39 ‘Wherever law ends, tyranny begins’, he established, observing also that ‘the ruling power ought to govern by declared and received laws’. Although such arguments supported the tradition of governments based on law, perhaps nobody else has echoed the tensions between legal and extra-legal governance, which Dubber referred to as law and police, as Locke himself did in his defence of prerogative in the Second Treatise. Frontally attacking the religious and patriarchal justification of absolutism in the work of Robert Filmer, Locke simultaneously restricted the concept of sovereignty while authorizing and reinforcing sovereign traits. On the one hand, he claimed the uncontested supremacy of law as the only legitimate form of rule. On the other hand, his argument extends powers originally thought of as exceptional far beyond the body of the prince, institutionalizing them as attached to the executive and as if deserving democratic legitimacy. The legal and the extra-legal reach maximum tension within the Lockean argument, in which an understanding of sovereignty as lawmaking based upon consensus overlaps with a defence of extraordinary powers of an assumed ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ character. Thus, even if one may sympathize with John T. Scott’s claim that Locke envisioned a ‘sovereignless commonwealth with several coexisting claimants to supreme authority’, Locke’s defence of prerogative reintroduced sovereign privileges and provided new ground for legitimizing the extra-legal.40 This tension, as Dubber argued, results from Locke’s attempt to articulate two disparate, incompatible forms of governance based respectively on law and police – a core problem that Dubber accused political theorists of neglecting and that was discussed in Chapter 5.41 Despite making legislative power supreme, limiting the executive to implementing ‘the municipal laws of the society’, Locke granted the executive exceptional powers not bound by law, prerogative. Prerogative, he explained, is the ‘power to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law and sometimes even against it’, or the power of ‘doing public good without a rule’. This discretionary power, which the philosopher also described as a form of ‘arbitrary power’ or ‘latitude left to the executive power to do many things of choice which



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the laws do not prescribe’, is needed to preserve the common good, he argued.42 For if laws can limit potential abuses of power, they are unable ‘to foresee’ or regulate the unexpected and, therefore, cannot provide for those situations. Locke, as John Dunn observed, judged the law especially blind to anticipating those circumstances that seem crucial for the fate of a political community. It is the ‘largely unavoidable and uncontainable contingency of politics’, as Clement Fatovic put it, that appears to make prerogative necessary.43 Hence, by allowing the executive to use discretion according to foresight, it becomes possible to confront ‘all accidents and necessities’ and thus protect the people. Locke described prerogative as emerging from nature, as an archaic form of power, and a sediment of the first historical forms of government developed before the foundation of states and political communities that has not been captured or subsumed by law. Thus, Dunn stressed its condition as a ‘residuary power’, a remnant of life in the state of nature of the same kind than the ‘individual executive power of the law of nature’ grounding positive laws, a condition that makes prerogative ‘legally indeterminate’.44 Originating prior to law, prerogative thus involves not only latitude in applying the law, but also an exercise ‘beyond the law altogether’ in those situations in which no norm seems clearly applicable, as Fatovic explained.45 Considering the unspecific traits of this power, which can be exercised over an unlimited number of matters and ‘contra et extra legem’ (contrary and beyond the law), Locke recommended restricting its use.46 Prerogative, the philosopher argued, should be used only in view of salus populi, or ‘to do good’ for the people. For practical reasons, he recommended entrusting this power to the hands of the executive. In addition to prerogative, Locke proposed endowing the executive with another natural type of power, which he called federative. Federative power includes ‘the power of war and peace, leagues and alliances, and all the transactions’ with foreign agents, encompassing ‘the management of the security and interest of the public’ regarding external threats.47 The importance of federative power for security and the defence of the commonwealth seem proportional to the difficulties of systematizing its exercise through ‘antecedent, standing, positive laws’. In the Lockean argument, both prerogative and federative power constitute residues of the power that individuals possessed in the state of nature. Like prerogative, federative power remains unconstrained by laws or by any function of government. Furthermore, despite identifying executive and federative power as ‘really distinct in themselves’, to avoid ‘disorder and ruin’ Locke called for placing the exercise of these powers in the same hands.

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Prior to the law, unlimited and unchecked, whether extra-legal, illegal, or simply alegal, prerogative resists ‘jurisprudential categories’, as Fatovic rightly observed.48 No norm can establish the sound use of prerogative and no dispute involving its exercise find a solution within the legal system. Only prudential considerations apply. In the end, Sarat explains, prerogative protects law from ‘the unthinkable that might destroy law itself’, as when executing an innocent individual or doing other forms of injustice under the law. Thus, prerogative’s ‘lawful alegality’ or ‘legally sanctioned lawlessness’ serve as a safety device to counter the system’s own wrongdoings.49 Its alegal, prudential character does not prevent prerogative from being as legitimate as the law, however, if we agree that the ultimate end of the government is the common good, which can be served through different means. ‘Government by law is not the only legitimate government’, Pasquino concludes, distinguishing after Locke between the legal and the prudential.50 The latter, comprising both the prerogative and federative powers referred in the Second Treatise, claims legitimacy based on ancient, untraceable roots. Guided by prudence, the exercise of prerogative appears to complement rather than contradict the law in the pursuit of the common good. Ultimately, Vivienne Brown observes, the sense that if ‘absolute power is used for the good of the society, there can be no argument against it’, seems prevalent among those endorsing Lockean views on prerogative.51 The justification of this power, however, continues clashing against Locke’s own strict defence of the law. Attempts to reconciling them often result in the pragmatic subsumption ‘of law into the state’s order’, as the reason of state rationale overpowers law.52 Hence the identification of Locke as ‘the pivotal figure in the expansion of Reason of State’ by Sheldon Wolin is as valid, or more so, than views on Locke as the father of the rule of law.53 Prerogative just looks too much like the power of the sovereign. It clearly does if one follows Carl Schmitt’s characterization of the sovereign as the one ‘who decides on the exception’.54 In his view, as emergencies put the legal system into crisis, the decision that closes the situation makes its agent sovereign. Under this description, an exercise of prerogative would equal sovereign power. But other theorists disagree. Fatovic, for example, argues that – rather than constituting anybody into a sovereign – prerogative simply amounts to an act done ‘on behalf’ of the true sovereign, the people, along the lines of what Locke refers to as the ‘appeal to heaven’. Thus, the people’s survival, health and welfare, captured in the nebulous



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motto salus populi suprema lex, provide prerogative’s only guideline and justification. The ultimate judge in this matter can only be the people themselves, Locke argues, who he assumes ‘have reserved that ultimate determination’ to decide whether ‘where there lies no appeal on earth… they have just cause to make their appeal to Heaven’.55 Through this last resource, people’s judgement limits a form of power outside the law, prerogative, with another: armed insurrection. Here, Locke introduces his most radical moment – the ‘residual threat of revolution’, as Dunn puts it.56 Yet as radical as the image of the people in arms appears, this is the sole resource that Locke offered for people to counter abuses of prerogative. Other than in those rather exceptional circumstances when people revolt against the state, confronting bloody repression, the exercise of extralegal power by the executive finds no restraints. Ultimately, regardless of how Locke may have conceived of such exercises, perhaps along the lines suggested by Fatovic, the extraordinary power not bound by law involved in the exercise of prerogative does not differ in essence from the power characterized by Schmitt, nor for that matter from previous classical characterizations of sovereign power such as Hobbes’ and Bodin’s. In all cases, the good of the people is interpreted and defined by the individual in charge. Locke restricted the exercise of prerogative. Based on an assumption upon which he did not elaborate, despite identifying ‘other ministerial and subordinate powers in a commonwealth’, he limited prerogative to the head of the executive power. As if taking for granted that lower-ranking officials will not exercise this power, he subjected them in full to the law. Equating their transgression of the law to tyranny, the philosopher called for resisting abusive officials even with force. Of lower magistrates, he explained: We need not speak, they being so multiplied with infinite variety, in the different customs and constitutions of distinct commonwealths, that it is impossible to give a particular account of them all. Only thus much, which is necessary to our present purpose, we may take notice of concerning them, that they have no manner of authority, any of them, beyond what is by positive grant and commission delegated to them, and are all of them accountable to some other power in the commonwealth.57 Depicting lower-ranking state officials as numerous and as performing disparate petty functions, Locke dismissed them as unproblematic. The authority they exercise, he explained, is ‘delegated’ and they are accountable

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to some other officers. The point sounds sensible, almost obvious. It just seems to make sense. Yet is not authority delegated in all cases, as Locke himself argued when comparing the government with a fiduciary? Should not all authorities, even higher ones, be made accountable? While in principle this is the case in modern democratic republics, which proclaim to make all of their officials accountable, accountability tends to take place a posteriori. But this affects all levels of authority. Why, then, should we just assume that prerogative power cannot be delegated to any other figure than the head of the executive? Locke presented us with an insightful discussion of prerogative and the problems surrounding the extra-legal in ways that anticipate contemporary arguments.58 Yet the contingent, arbitrary boundary between the king and lesser magistrates that he established finds no clear justification. Nor do clear-cut oppositions between law and prerogative. In fact, from the Lockean argument it follows that prerogative is allowed rather than countered by the law, easing its exercise ‘beyond a unitarian sovereign figure’, as Arnold has suggested.59 Regardless of whatever makes the power of lower-ranking officials undeserving of analysis in Locke’s eyes, one can perhaps understand the lack of visibility of such agents to a philosopher at the end of the seventeenth century in England. The use of similar arguments in the present seems instead less understandable, considering the incredible expansion of state administrative bodies. The power exercised at the ground of the state apparatus is neither minor nor clearly limited and subordinated as Locke’s argument pretends. Nor necessarily do exercises of power other than those consisting of mechanical applications of rules fall into the ‘bad apple’ argument. Indeed, the exercise of this power, involving major consequences on the lives of individuals, claims legitimacy through arguments and assumptions invoking the same necessity than those used to justify exercises of prerogative by state leaders. How should we treat exercises of power like those discussed by Locke when performed at other levels of the state apparatus, other than by using the same conceptual framework? As evidenced in the survival of the death penalty and the discretionary concession of mercy, prerogative exercises of taking and sparing life continue to exist in modern constitutional republics, Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain observe, if just split and specialized into different offices.60 In the United States, for example, the judiciary exercises the right to take life and the executive power the prerogative of mercy. In a more ‘diffuse’ manner, as Arnold puts it, a number of lesser officials also administer this power every day.61 This is the



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case of police agents who, more intensely and thoroughly than any other lower-ranking state bureaucrats make most daily decisions involving life and death, the classical attribution of the sovereign. Except for Locke’s decision to recognize the exercise of prerogative to top authorities alone, the distinctive power in the hands of police agents belongs to the same genus than the one characterized by the philosopher. The old prerogative survives. Normalized and widespread, it infuses the government and its bureaucratic life. An emanation of the same power exercised by kings and presidents, prerogative noticeably lies in the hands of the police, awaiting recognition by students of politics. Prerogative, discretion and federative power, as Ellen Franken Paul observes, describe dimensions of ‘a power of regulation... that we now call the police power’.62 Recognized in spectacular displays by kings and presidents, its less visible administration by grassroots state agents such as the police seems equally important for the preservation of the state. Extending, complementing and frequently replacing extraordinary top executive interventions, police prerogatives reveal themselves as fundamental in liberal democracies as kingly prerogatives were in the ancient regime. They all contribute to a ‘unified political strategy in the fabrication of social order’, as Neocleous notes, involving extraordinary measures and emergency powers that the legal system tolerates and legitimizes.63 The exercise of this power may even reach beyond the state, comprising non-state, private agents who replicate prerogative exercises. With them, as shown by Dean’s analysis of governmentality, the scope of the extra-legal and the exceptional in regular governance gains visibility.64 On a daily basis, sovereign prerogative exercises take place in the streets. Yet what seems apparent in the streets remains obscure in theory.

Sovereign prerogative: The police ‘Police is not justice’, but ‘the king acting directly on his subjects… in a non-judicial form’.65 Commenting on a 1608 treatise portrayal of police magistrates as resembling more ‘the prince than...the judge’, Foucault characterizes police as ‘the sovereign exercise of regal power over the individuals who are its subjects’. Seventeenth-century Europeans knew that no checks, other than the loose guidance of the general welfare, surrounded police authority. Police, it was clear, emanated ‘directly’ from the king, as if extending his hand through instruments such as ‘the regulation, the ordinance, the interdiction, the instruction’, Foucault

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refers. Ultimately, he notes, police power appears as ‘a permanent coup d’état’, able to constantly undermine the law through personal decisions and the use of violence.66 If under absolutism police power seemed to extend ‘the direct action of the monarch’ what status does it have these days? Whose arm, other than the alleged arm of the law, do police agents extend when qua sovereigns in the streets they decide to suspend the law or to take life? Not only the shape of the agents performing sovereign prerogative exercises appears to be in question. Modern societies, Foucault argues, moved from ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ into ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’.67 The shift accompanies the development of bio-political technologies, letting the state actively govern the lives of individuals and populations through health and birth controls, sexual education, sterilizations and even genocide. Alternative technologies influence police power, through which the care and destruction of life mesh with sovereign decisions on a daily basis. Still, as Foucault’s later work made clear, continuities and overlaps between the sovereign and the bio-political can be traced back in history to ancient times. The vitae necisque potestas, the right of taking and giving life recognized to the Roman paterfamilias, stands as the oldest antecedent of sovereign power. Whether a sediment of the patriarchal household turned into the model for governing kingdoms treated as the king’s household, as Dubber suggested, or a residue of ancient monarchical rule reaching Athens from the Middle East, as Westbrook argued, the vitae necisque potestas simultaneously manifests core elements of sovereign power and bio-politics.68 ‘A strange thing’, Foucault observed, the right to decide about life and death constitutes its object as ‘neither dead nor alive’, in a vital limbo, with rights to live and to die only definable by the sovereign.69 Now, if it is clear that sovereign decisions can end lives, how could sovereignty possibly give life or restore it? Exploring ancient texts such as the Bible and Hittite and Israeli laws, Westbrook demonstrated that to ‘make live’ alludes to God, to legal ‘death’ or exclusion from the law, and to the king’s prerogative of pardon or mercy. By pardoning the condemned who ‘is legally speaking dead’, the sovereign brings ‘him back to life again’.70 Furthermore, that in Rome the prerogative to make decisions on the lives of children and slaves was entrusted to the paterfamilias shows an ancient precedent of sovereign prerogative exercises by individuals other than rulers. The continuities noted by Foucault after the vitae necisque potestas led Agamben to conflate sovereignty with bio-power, showing that at the core of the sovereign prerogative lies a decision on the status of



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life. Acknowledging such emphases, Agamben recognized a bio-political rationale in earlier figures such as the homini sacri and foundational texts – in particular, Aristotle’s Politics. The exclusions from humanity grounding definitions of the human in the Aristotelian text anticipate the analogous plays of inclusions and exclusions extending into the present. Sovereign power expands and reproduces through such decisions, both by taking fresh lives and subjecting the living. In all cases, Agamben suggested, the rationale of sovereign power meets bio-politics.71 In fact, before the recent publication of Foucault’s final lectures with bold remarks linking police to the king and the exception, it was Agamben who presented the police as embodying the ‘figure of the sovereign’.72 Entering a dialogue with Schmitt, at the core of sovereign exercises Agamben did also find an extra-legal decision. Yet the decision he identifies seems specific to the status of life. Sovereign decisions, Agamben suggests, are those that qualify life as worthy or as worthless, threatening and less than fully human. Such distinctions eventually influence which forms of life receive protection and which ones become marginalized and destroyed. Both recognition and exclusion result from the same bio-political mechanisms of capturing life. They make their agents momentarily sovereign. Cast in this light, what defines the police then is not the enforcement of the law, but their exercise of sovereign power ‘on a case-by-case basis’, as Agamben puts it, through the categorization and differential treatment of individuals and groups.73 Distinguishing between forms of life, making summary decisions on the fate of many, police practices define a territory in which, Agamben famously noted, the fusion of ‘violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else’. In the countless lawless ‘limbos’ opened by police intervention every day, whether atrocities occur depends just on the ‘civility’ of police agents who ‘temporarily act as sovereign’.74 Truly, as Feldman observes, Agamben’s argument portrays police ‘discretionary decision making’ as actual sovereign power.75 Invoking the common good, police transgressions of the law, or police emergencies, look like a ‘delegated version of ‘princely’ prerogative power in a liberal order’, Feldman acknowledges while assuring the reader that police power equals neither sovereignty nor prerogative.76 The existence of legal and organizational limits to police discretion as well as people’s conscience and defence of their rights vis-à-vis the police prove to Feldman that in democratic societies the police are not as powerful as Agamben suggests.

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While recognizing that no rule or narrative on rights can prevent police discretionary excesses, Feldman concludes that the police are somewhere in between, neither as subjected to the law as in ‘popular legal consciousness’, nor ‘the sovereigns operating in an anomie state of exception as Agamben would have it’.77 Placing the police halfway between the servants of the law and sovereign prerogative – as a milder sovereign? – Feldman argues for the need to move beyond alleging clear-cut distinctions between inside and outside of the law. ‘Lesser’ emergencies such as those in charge of the police, he notes, do not necessarily go against the law; they also take place by switching between different types of law, for example, from the criminal to the administrative. Feldman’s suggestions seem provocative. Still, unlike what he suggests, Agamben does not rely just on Schmitt’s concept of sovereign power. Various strands of ancient and modern political thought converge in grounding the argument, starting with the old principles of the necisque vitae potestas. No extraordinary circumstances seem needed for the police to demand more latitude in carrying out arrests without search warrants. The perennial threat of common criminals, treated as a series of little emergencies, suffices. ‘The judge, the prosecutor, is the one who gives the search warrant and decides what needs to be done. But he decides it at best forty-eight, or seventy-two hours later, when precious time has been lost.’ As suggested by the words of this Federal Police officer, the claim for warrantless arrests exposes the role of exceptions and emergencies as elements of normal police governance, building on arguments that parallel the Lockean justification of prerogative invoking the common good. Furthermore, his image of the police’s switching between laws into the administrative invites qualification. As Dubber conclusively showed, modern administrative law in the United States developed as part of the ‘legalization of the police state’. By the early twentieth century, the science of police transmuted into the science of administration, as evidenced in the work of Ernst Freund.78 Some of the norms receiving the name of law are re-fashioned rules of police, often in tension with the rule of law. Furthermore, the possibility for rights consciousness to limit police abuse depends on the perceived status of those claiming them. Whereas knowledge of their rights may effectively protect upper- and middle-class citizens from abuse, it may not work as well for the poor. ‘Kids know their rights, but in the police station they [the police] do not respect them… the police take them anyway,’79 Isabel, the mother of Martín Basualdo, a young victim of the police who remains ‘disappeared’ since 1994, explained.



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If police power is as much about taking life in a bloody and spectacular manner as it is about protecting, molding and disciplining it, and if sovereign power entails bio-political categorizing and the differential treatment of life, the police – it seems clear – are some of its key agents. Violent police facets coexist with more benign, milder ones, as distinct but complementary dimensions of the same movement through which power meets the living. Drawing on this fact, Agamben gives visibility to the ‘investiture of the sovereign as policeman’, thus opening a new territory of empirical and theoretical research.80 Esposito agrees. Sovereign authority has displayed a bio-political dimension since ancient times, he observes, while ‘biopolitics carries within it the sharp blade of a sovereign power’. Whereas every particular bio-political configuration calls for elucidating its specific regime, Agamben’s and Esposito’s contributions highlight nuances and continuities, links, and overlaps with other forms of power. In particular, Esposito points out, the knowledge and techniques developed under the old science of police, those offered by the tradition of the ‘art of government’, and Christian technologies for the pastorate of souls are all modalities under which bio-politics infuses practices of the modern police.81 Students of police power concur in identifying the police as an amalgam of ‘various modes of power’, condensing the politics of sovereignty and combining the administration of death with milder forms of biopower, discipline and pastoral power.82 Regarding the latter, it was Foucault who first unveiled how the rising modern state expropriated and adapted governing techniques of individualization and universal reach first assembled by the church. Modelled after the relation between a shepherd and his flock, pastoral power infuses police practices. Formless and even ‘ghostly’, as Walter Benjamin famously noted, as a form of power that fuses legislative, judicial and executive functions while accompanying them with violence, police power recognizes no boundaries.83 Capturing these traits, Derrida characterized it as ‘violence without a form (gestaltlos)’.84 No checks, other than the loose guidance of the general welfare, surround police authority.85 In its formlessness and lack of limits, police power seemed coherent with the power of the absolutist king, maintaining ‘its essence, its idea, its spirit’ in a way that contrasts with what occurs in modern democracies. The rules of modern democratic republics, based on a separation of powers that presumes the elimination of sovereign prerogatives, force police to be ‘exercised illegitimately, especially when instead of enforcing the law the police make the law’, allowing police violence to reach paroxysmal, nightmarish levels.86

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Permeating the apparatuses of modern states, police power contradicts democracy more than any other regime. Now, if as both Foucault and Derrida observed, in the ancient regime the police power almost naturally extended the arm of the king, what happens to this power when the king is gone?

After beheading the king: Prerogative exercises ‘The King is dead. Long live the King.’ This formula gave continuity to sovereign power despite the monarch’s death. Kings die, sovereign power does not. For centuries, rituals transferring power from a dying king to his wax effigy materialized sovereignty’s perennial condition.87 Eventually, the paradigmatic execution of Louis XVI meant to put a definitive end to this power, yet the beheading of the king did not involve the vanishing of sovereign prerogative. What exactly happened to this power, whether and how it changed, are questions that have not been sufficiently explored in theory yet. In one of his most widely cited lines, Foucault noted how, ‘obsessed’ with sovereignty and the sovereign, political theory has still ‘to cut off the king’s head’.88 An invitation to move beyond traditional, kingly views of sovereignty, Foucault’s words also raise questions about the fate and transformations of sovereign prerogative. The recent revisiting of both prerogative and police power has started to shed some light on these problems. To begin with, we have learned that prerogative ‘might be in the hands of different persons’, as Westbrook noted.89 Cutting off the king’s head sought to empower the people and make us the real sovereign. The same was the purpose of all other independence and revolutionary movements following in the steps of the American and the French revolutions. With the king gone after being executed or just repudiated, ‘his prerogative was simply transferred onto the new sovereign: “the people of this State”’, Dubber observes.90 Thus, when revolutionaries proclaimed ‘the law is king’, as Thomas Paine did, they were also implying, Dubber notes – whether knowingly or not – that ‘the prerogative police power of one man, the king, now belonged to a group of men, the people, who had assumed the power to police’.91 However, rather than taking ownership, cancelling, or transforming its exercise, most people soon saw themselves victimized by this power. The law, intended to either displace or democratize sovereignty, ultimately made itself instrumental to the purposes of normalization, as Foucault observed. If traditional narratives of sovereignty translate power



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in terms of rights, bureaucratic apparatuses rely on administrative and disciplinary norms that, while appealing to law, are made of a different matter. Meanwhile, an additional element – fear of the poor – favoured the colonization of legal and republican institutions by police arrangements. Recent scholarship offers insight into how this happened. ‘One generation fought the American Revolution for liberty; the next generation restricted that liberty’, Mark Kahn observes, exploring the course through which the same principles supporting monarchical and colonial administration reappeared in the United States soon after independence.92 Invoking the need to preserve public order, following Blackstone, the American framers ‘enthusiastically embraced a mode of governance that was innately connected to the royal prerogative’, Dubber concludes.93 Thus – and this takes us back to Foucault’s original question – bourgeois liberal revolutionaries found themselves reinstating the principles of the Ancien Régime to build their own republics. Not only rights, but also figures such as that of the ‘dangerous individual’ raised after concerns of ‘social defence’ expanded in the nineteenth century. The rationale behind such new forms of exclusion, Andrew Neal notes, appeared in the passage from Hobbes’ nascent modern sovereign state to Von Clausewitz’s national sovereign state two and a half centuries later. In its national form, sovereignty became increasingly connected to ‘identity, culture, and history’, drawing on Foucault’s later lectures Neal observes.94 Imagined as a quasi-natural, organic entity in need of protection by the state, the nation gained centrality, as laws, disciplines, norms and administrative regulations normalized individuals and populations against its new standards. With its cluster of (dis)identifications, the national served the state to re-articulate the core of sovereign power and sovereignty’s classical themes. Traditional rank hierarchies, clear distinctions between war and peace, and juridical emphases made room for blurrier forms of violence and politics, biologisms, racialization and a concern with potentially dangerous individual and group identities. In particular, the invention of race, which Foucault characterized as a biologicist understanding of individuals and populations perceived as threatening, gave modern nations biological entity and legitimized new forms of subordination and exclusion. The modern racism identified by Foucault reconceptualized danger and enmity as biological. In increasingly indistinguishable ways, political enemies, common criminals and stigmatized individuals and groups appeared as biological threats against whom the state waged war, to the point of becoming the common rationale used to justify the exercise of ‘the old sovereign right to kill’.95 The sovereign

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prerogative to take life began to overlap with norms and biologicist definitions of danger and enmity, while police power reached full expression by combining ‘sovereignty with biopolitics and discipline’, as Valverde explained.96 Sovereign power did not go away; it just hid behind seemingly milder forms. Bringing bio-power to the forefront, racialization unleashed the potential of the state’s power to kill. The sovereign prerogative of taking life re-emerged, strengthened if also often denied and concealed. No doubt its destructiveness reached paroxysm under the Nazi State, where ultimately ‘everyone… had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors’, as Foucault observed.97 But if under Nazism the alchemy of race, bio-power, and sovereignty disseminated the right to kill, it also knitted a macabre dance in which ‘the entire population was exposed to death’. In a final move, Hitler’s order to the German people to destroy their own infrastructure turned the state ‘absolutely murderous’ and ‘suicidal’. The mass genocide and ultimate suicidal operations of Nazism, an achieved expression of necropolitics, relied however on governing tools not substantially different from ours.98 Combining ‘the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower’, they are indeed ‘inscribed in the workings of all States’, as Foucault himself noted, and contained and retained in all democratic societies. In the end, in part thanks to these governmental shifts, the arbitrary prerogatives against which millions revolted on both sides of the Atlantic more than 200 years ago turned out to be embedded in extended bureaucracies and governmental bodies, as in the filigree of prerogative power administered by the police. Far from ‘sovereignless’, as liberal heirs of Locke envisioned, our polities and modern republics have seen an explosion and dissemination of sovereign prerogative exercises. The ghostly traits of police power that Benjamin identified convey the fragmentation, multiplication and survival of originally kingly prerogatives. In the end, only prudential principles can provide guidance for the exercise of sovereign prerogative, whether in the kingdom by the prince, in the republic by the president, or in the street by the police.

Microscopic police wars, microscopic sovereigns Crime is often likened to disease. Whether in reference to drug-trafficking, or to common crime, actions and agents are often associated with disease. Thus, for example, in our interview, a commissioner from the northern



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Conurbano claimed to be able to identify a criminal based on the person’s ‘look’, noting that a criminal condition is something that ‘one gets to know the same way a doctor knows whether the patient is ill just when entering the room’. Similarly, a Federal Police commissioner evoked one of Sylvester Stallone’s characters telling a criminal ‘I am the medicine for your disease’ while suggesting parallels with his own role as a policeman. In the way of a moral disease, crime threatens the social body with contagion. Thus, accompanying spectacular displays of violence, politics, laws, and institutions such as prisons and the police enable states to wage continuous ‘low intensity’ warfare against those judged dangerous, worthless and morally irrecoverable. In fact, the police themselves report being involved in some form of a permanent warfare. This seemed clear in Argentina’s earlier history, when at the turn of the twentieth century the police played a main role in preserving social hygiene and fighting the ‘pollutants’ of anarchism and rebellion of locals and immigrants, the ‘dangerous classes’, as Kalmanowiecki and other researchers showed.99 But this seems still the case in the twenty-first century, at least among my police interviewees, judging for the war-like vocabulary and images invoked in their selfportrayal. Among them, a Federal Police officer characterized himself as ‘a man of arms, used to combat of the people, of a criminal’, and a bonaerense detective confessed to be driven by the vocation to be ‘in the street, after the idea to detain persons, to combat crime’. Evoking similar frameworks, police agents refer to the need to ‘combat’ criminals, allude to ‘the combat front’, characterize a street as ‘a war zone’, and define themselves as ‘urban soldiers’ or as a ‘lesser soldier’ helping the military in a crisis and prepared to engage in ‘situations of combat’ in scenarios arising ‘from the inward frontier’. The image of the enemy seems also recurring: ‘The policeman never knows when the enemy is going to appear. The policeman, any time, he is twenty-four hours with the enemy.’ In contrast to joining the military, which can be for life without fighting, one interviewee observed that ‘the policeman – you think: at any moment, the enemy may appear’. Warfare was also the image used by Commissioner Fentanes, when describing the policeman as ‘the soldier of an army involved in a permanent war’. Portrayed as the ultimate lone hero, the policeman finds himself ‘forced to fight alone, without support, without the stimulating company of his comrades, exposing his life against an enemy, in the form of both common and political criminals, who does not respect the rules of war’. Once again we encounter these tropes voiced from the perspective of the police. By threatening public order, Fentanes suggests, the enemies of the police threaten the nation, which turns crime into a matter of national

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security, and policing into a form of permanent, low-intensity warfare. Summoning public order and the nation together, blurring the boundaries between war, policing, criminals and enemies, Fentanes presented this radical view just a few years before the politicide of El Proceso. To what extent the unilateral ‘war’ that the Argentine state carried out against a part of its own population was due to the influence of the military, and to what extent it responded to the police’s own traditions as expressed by Fentanes calls for further study. Decades later, in democratic Argentina, the alleged police’s ‘permanent war’ adopts the extreme form of an ‘exaggeratedly summary death penalty’, as Taylor puts it, or an informal ‘trigger happy’ policy redirected against delincuentes.100 Every day in the streets, as Chapter 4 showed, acting after the rationale of seguridad, enmity gains nuances after police definitions. For those treated as enemies, the Hobbesian promise of pacification and protection through the Leviathan remains unfulfilled while multiple forms of violence – often administered by the police – disrupt their daily life. The continuity of this silent, undeclared police ‘warfare’ which its victims frequently ignore, came to mind as a bonaerense reminded me that, only in the Buenos Aires province there are more than 50,000 police agents, ‘all of us armed’, as he observed, all of them feeling ‘lords and masters’ of the streets. The image eloquently conveys grassroots exercises of the power of prerogative. For I think no other name deserves the acknowledgement that, as Taylor puts it, ‘at all levels the police legislate and act as judge and executioner, independent of legislative and judicial bodies as well as of their separation’.101 Despite the Argentine government’s ongoing efforts to prosecute those committing crimes against humanity decades ago, police agents continue taking lives in the streets – mostly those of the young and poor – with no major consequences. As these persistent exercises show, far from making the traditionally monarchical prerogative vanish, the reorganization of modern states apparatuses following revolutions and independence movements disseminated and eventually multiplied it. As Timothy Mitchell scrutinized in his study of Egypt, the modern state has replaced ‘a power concentrated in personal command, and always liable to diminish, with powers that were systematically and uniformly diffused’.102 This ‘diffusion of control’ into lower-scale, milder, and pervasive technologies described by Mitchell involves a number of individual agents administering old and new variants of prerogative power. Through them, we witness the prerogative of the headless king-sovereign haunting us, reincarnating at a myriad of points in its exercise by the police. This power turns police officers into



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little sovereigns in the streets in ways that we have yet to acknowledge. Paradoxically, then the Lockean argument, while setting a definitive critique of arbitrary monarchical rule, with its concept of prerogative also provided sovereign power with a new democratic legitimacy.

The state as a police apparatus ‘What happens is that, it is not easy to handle 13,000 men among us… or 50,000… the monster is just too big’, a commissioner from Córdoba reflected. Ways of seeing and experiencing help to materialize social worlds and understandings of power. In the political arena, metaphors play an ‘ontologically creative function’ by grounding fundamental political truths as self-evident, Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo explain.103 Yet metaphors also hide as much as they illuminate. This seems patent in the case of the modern state, often represented by the human body.104 No image yet appears to overpower that of the ‘artificial man… of greater stature and strength than the natural’ – namely, Hobbes’ Leviathan, which Schmitt judged ‘the strongest and most powerful image’ in Western political theory.105 With its elegance and parsimony, stressing hierarchy and representing power as concentrating on the top, from a contemporary perspective the iconic Leviathan appears to simplify in excess our understanding of the state, leaving simply too much in the dark. For if capturing the lawless core of sovereign power, Hobbes’ early modern tropes miss the substantive ‘autonomization of a bureaucratic field’ characterized by Pierre Bourdieu.106 The Hobbesian monster makes policing and administrative governing practices look like the quasi-mechanical enforcement of laws, decrees and orders coming from above while keeping out of the view exercises of prerogative performed other than at the top of the state apparatus. Displacing grassroots governing practices under its own cone of shadows, the Leviathan proves insufficient to represent our present states. If anything, then, cutting off the king’s head in political theory, the blueprint set by Foucault, requires coming to terms with these still dominant ways of representing power, further exploring Foucault’s suggestion to move beyond ‘the model of Leviathan’.107. Yet ‘if we “cut off the King’s head”’, Neal observes, ‘perhaps another, possibly even nastier, head will sprout elsewhere’.108 Indeed, this is what acknowledging widespread prerogative exercises suggests. Once we start tracing the extension of sovereign prerogative, an endeavour to which theorists like Sarat and Hussain or Arnold have explicitly devoted

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themselves and to which Mitchell and Foucault previously contributed, its points of exercise – in the way of sovereign heads – reveal to be multiple. As the monster exposes multiple, nastier heads, its sovereign body transmutes. The ‘abstract’ body of the modern state, as Neocleous characterizes it, indeed inherited the power of the monarch.109 But it has moved beyond the Leviathan. If non-elective public officers such as the police define its countless capillary extremities, as Hobbes already hinted, we also learn how they extend and multiply its heart and head, helping the state to penetrate and mold the social fabric. Through the expansion of bureaucratic and administrative apparatuses, rather than vanishing – as liberalism promised us, ‘the sovereign body remains alive and kicking’, as Neocleous concluded. 110 Haunting us as in a classical terror story, the sovereign soul survives like nowhere else in the milder, modern technological forms of police intervention. Through the eyes and hands of tens of thousands police officers, and especially through their prerogative exercises, it reaches deep into the homes, bodies and souls of individuals. Neither the maze of tenuous disciplinary mechanisms precludes dramatic sovereign displays nor do the subtle dynamics of power operating throughout the body attenuate the brutal aspects of biopower. If, as Foucault notes, the image of ‘the monstrous king, the source of all justice and yet besmirched with crime’111 dominated people’s imagination in the past, a multitude of police agents acting as multiple, undifferentiated centres of prerogative now embodies and multiplies the capacities of that monstrous king.

Marks and scars in the sovereign body Institutions arise as scars of past struggles in the process of state formation.112 Conflict – especially armed conflict – leaves an ‘institutional residue’, Miguel Angel Centeno observes, in the form of military, police and fiscal organizational patterns.113 In his original study tracing parallels among war-making, state-making and organized crime, Tilly demonstrated that modern coercive and administrative state apparatuses resulted from recruiting warriors, collecting taxes, and providing order, services and sources of common identity and loyalty to a population.114 Intertwined with banditry and war-making, policing was key in consolidating statehood. Yet in Latin America, as Centeno notes, modern states emerged out of ‘limited wars’, with violence aimed at neutralizing not enemy armies as in Europe, but rather the demands of subordinate groups.115 This pattern of conflict



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gave institutions a distinct shape. As a result, in their organization during the nineteenth century, Latin American states underwent less administrative specialization, developed a limited fiscal capability, and allowed for significant indistinction between the police and the military. From time to time, new forms of resistance, violence and organized crime lead to changes that reshape the state. The police ‘cannot be static’, a commissioner from Mendoza noted; they need to accompany changes in the modalities of crime and to define ‘new forms of work and crime prevention’. As a commissioner from Rosario observes, ‘criminal behavior undergoes transformations’ and the police must ideally anticipate and in all cases adapt to them Not unlike war enemies, the figure of the criminal has been central in justifying the expansion of state apparatuses. For example, as Foucault showed, if modern prisons were preserved despite their obvious flaws, it was because their main product (i.e. the criminal), ‘turned out to be useful’ by giving states opportunities for intervention.116 More broadly, Tilly’s seminal analysis illuminated modern states as quintessential protection rackets invested with legitimacy. Often manufacturing dangers just to offer protection from them, states feed themselves from enemies, threats, and conflicts, which they use as opportunities to expand their control and networks of taxation, loyalty and governance. Thus, when not readily available, threats and criminals must be created. ‘I am aware, we are a substantial tool of the state’, a commissioner from Rosario noted. Indeed, with its constant identification of threats and criminal suspects, police work creates opportunities for strengthening the state. As state apparatuses expand, they impose distinctive forms of law and order favouring specific patterns of accumulation of capital and reproduction of social relations. In Latin America, during the twentieth century, Tedesco and Barton identify ‘developmentalist, corporatist, populist, bureaucratic-authoritarian and neoliberal’ state formations and patterns of domination.117 Different modalities of state domination influence the definition of threats, criminals and enemies. By criminalizing groups and individuals, the state generates antagonists as well as forced allies and collaborators, such as those caught up in the play of illegalities who end up working as police or intelligence informers, often referred to by my interviewees as a valuable source. Furthermore, as no state monopoly of legitimate coercion has ever been achieved anywhere, not even by the northwestern European states’ ‘near monopoly’ of force, all states rely on alliances with these and other non-state actors, often illegal but tolerated.118 While these traits can be found in all societies, in Latin America, the state’s

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limited fiscal capability illuminates persistent irregular forms of collection often involving the police, as it has been noticed in Argentina.

Prerogative and the Typhon state Every time a policeman is attacked, a Federal Police officer stressed, the criminal ‘is not attacking the policeman, but the state, the security of the state itself’. An isomorphism can be traced indeed between the state at large and its individual guardians, as every prerogative exercise recreates a complete tiny state. Prerogative power runs through the blue veins of what Nietzsche qualified as ‘the coldest of all cold monsters’,119 and prerogative exercises give shape to what Antonio Gramsci described as the ‘fortresses and earthworks’ framing the state.120 Professionalized police agents constitute just condensed salient points in this network. Police prerogative exercises proliferate, as loosely coordinated agents administer this power in countless daily encounters with citizens. Defining the fate of many in an opaque zone prior to the law, the filigree of police power structures the state’s body, reifying one time and again its supporting bonds, positions and hierarchies. In their multiplicity, as the swarm of tiny men on the cover of Leviathan, they serve as links of the chain armour covering its body. Far from mere protection, however, the chain armour gives the body a definite shape. Prerogative infuses the links of the armour, and the armour remains in place after the king’s head is gone. Filling the void left by the monarch, to borrow from Neocleous, ‘an omnipotent political body-machine’ develops and gains a life of its own.121 Minuscule prerogative exercises articulate and revitalize this body, I propose, the same way that sovereign prerogatives revitalized the king’s. Grassroots prerogative exercises cast a different light on the state’s body. As we shift focus towards them, multiple sovereign heads come into the view. In ancient myths, from Egypt to Greece, the most powerful multi-headed monster appears to be the giant Typhon. Portrayed as ‘the terrible, outrageous and lawless’, Typhon’s hundred dragon-like blazing heads are said to reach the stars.122 The heads, covered with snakes instead of hair, exhibit fire-glittering, venomous eyes. A daunting chorus arises from the monster’s many mouths, mixing adult and baby speech, animal and guttural sounds. As if the heads were not enough, Typhon’s legs and arms consist of serpents, some of them topped with dragon heads. With lava boiling out of his mouth, ‘coils of vipers’ attached to his thighs, and



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wings to his entire body, Typhon stands as Zeus’ strongest enemy. A battle between the two, the legend tells us, once shook sea and earth. If Zeus prevailed it was only after tricking the monster. Impossible to kill, the giant remains trapped underneath Mount Etna, with his force tamed into a volcano that ‘quakes and burns because Typhon is imprisoned under it’.123 The story of Typhon offers a productive allegory to rethink of the state in light of grassroots prerogative exercises, especially of those in charge of the police. Like the voices coming out of Typhon’s glaring heads, those of gentle, abusive, or despotic police officers represent distinct faces of the state and uses of prerogative. Recognizing policing as a display of sovereign prerogative suggests that the once unique kingly manifestation has become a massive routine bureaucratic function. A myriad of loosely connected, intermittent sovereign heads, linked by the imagination of a shared community, destiny, norms and traditions, conform the networked body. If exercises of prerogative by top executive authorities seem so controversial, we can only imagine how troubling and conceptually challenging it will be to make conceptual room for prerogative’s multiple agents as they put into question the still prevailing top-down, legal representations of authority in the modern state. Not that hierarchies do not matter, but they are imbricated in a wider net or governance. If what keeps this governmental network together fails, exposing deep cracks in state hegemony, some of their heads may be left to move into new clouds or networks. (Such as, for example, the major drug cartels in Mexico, or the transnational maras elsewhere in Latin America.) Whether, much like the particles in the tail of the comet evoked by the Argentine policeman, these true particles of stateness may move away from the state’s nucleus raises more than just a question of force. It invites further examination of what Diane Davis refers to the alternative ‘imagined communities’ arising among the historically neglected in Latin America, which may at some point enter in competition with states. A bonaerense officer reflected on the lack of state presence within Conurbano shantytowns: Territory, for example. What is territory? ‘Terra-Torium.’ It is a territory that belongs to someone. This is to say, if there is no belonging, the territory disappears. When you refer to a state, you are necessarily referring to a portion of land. And, I think that, with all this about villas… where the notion of belonging disappears, the state disappears.

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With a focus on new forms of organized crime in Mexico that also appear in more or less extended spots throughout Latin America, Argentina included, Davis examines the rationale behind this process. Secular mistreatment and abuse experienced by the people on the hands of the police and the military has eroded public trust. As organized criminal groups co-opt some in the police and the security forces, infiltrating the coercive state apparatus while offering jobs and protection to the poor, people’s loyalties split, new sub- and trans- national communities are imagined, and state sovereignty becomes fragmented.124 Blurry boundaries between legality and illegality, familiarity and otherness, traditionally associated with national borders, now appear within cities, Davis notes, linked to illegal trade. Under such conditions, ‘the state cannot function as a single sovereign entity, nor is it capable of upholding a rule of law’, which promotes ‘fragmentation’ of state power brought about ‘by its own ranks’.125 While this appears to be the case in a number of sites across the region, it is not clear however to what extent this may be new or exceptional. For if we consider the role of irregular armed groups in the emergence of states, highlighted by Tilly, Davis, Centeno and others, current armed non-state actors in Latin America, including private security, paramilitaries, warlords, guerrillas and organized crime, if signalling obvious points of rupture of state hegemony, appear to conform less an exception and more to the historical norm.126 Whether the crisis they bring ultimately fragments state sovereignty or gives rise to its reconstitution, as part of a historical process of reorganization of the state, remains to be seen.127 In the meantime, a framework of analysis that acknowledges multiple sites of exercise of sovereign prerogative and that approaches the state as an extended and mobile governmental network, made possible by the Foucauldian tradition, seems appropriate to illuminate what comes next. Theoretical and doctrinal discussions of prerogative should comprise its exercise by the police.

Conclusion: (Un)Protecting Lives

The coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life is something puzzling… one of the central antinomies of our political reason. (Michel Foucault) Care appears as a central trope in the police world. A detective from Córdoba noted that his work ‘triggers a feeling… of maximal sensibility, when I can help others. Solidarity, compassion. A noble feeling linked to serving, to helping, to contributing to the community.’ Similarly, a bonaerense officer highlighted the police role of offering people ‘emotional support when confronting a tragic event, like the death of a relative… or advice on how to handle the situation’. The police should simply help everyone, another interviewee noted, rhythmically stressing his words: ‘service to the people, service to the state, service to the poor, service to the wealthy, to the sick, to those who are not sick, to the haves, to the have nots, to an alcoholic, to a healthy person’. Evoking images of vocation and altruism, a commissioner from the Federal Police pointed out the importance of serving ‘the community in a proactive manner… protecting and offering [them] conditions of seguridad’. As an expression of the antinomies alluded by Foucault, altruistic and caring police agents show one side of the Janus-faced state power. ‘We want police who take care of us, not police that kill us’, Sandro Bonefoi declared at the funeral of his fifteen-year-old son Diego, murdered by the police in June 2010 in Bariloche.127 When the police abandon, expel, abuse, or kill those whom they are expected to help and protect, the state’s dark face comes into view. It seems darker still when the same individual performs both caring and abusive roles. The antinomy of political reason embodied by the police relates to the ways in which they define and treat ‘the people’ and ‘the community’ compared to those judged alien, threatening, or enemies. Seguridad – which with a focus on Argentina I have proposed to treat as a dispositif linking discursive practices, political imagination, collective actors,

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experts and research around the explicit goal of protecting people from criminals – helps to make society democratically governable despite its inequality and fragmentation. If dispositifs provide a ‘sketch of what we will become’, as Gilles Deleuze once noted,128 pivoting around the antagonism between gente and delincuentes, seguridad becomes a new axis redefining identities, communities and the nation. In previous chapters, the case of Argentina has served to segment layers of police power in order to examine their role in the government. With democracy already established, rising fear of crime has accompanied the development of a governmental agenda of seguridad in the nation since the mid-1990s that gives the police visibility. After revisiting well-established seguridad tropes, themes, evidence and fears, I’ve explored the agenda’s darkest facet, in terms of social disgregation, anomie, exclusion and violence. Drawing on the voices of police agents, the exploration moved from everyday grassroots manifestations of police power, always re-creating identities, stigmas and ontological hierarchies to assess its impact on the regime and the apparatuses whereby the police becomes indistinguishable from the state, defining a mobile network knitted and remade through multiple exercises of prerogative power. ‘I cannot treat all the people the same… neither in the same terms nor with the same manners’, a bonaerense explained, describing how rough he needs to be in villas and other poor neighbourhoods in contrast to how politely he must treat the wealthy. He claims that it is reality that forces him to act this way, otherwise he would lose people’s respect. He seems unaware of the extent to which his own practices may be helping to bring the protagonists of the seguridad drama into existence, by classifying individuals along a hierarchy of worth and reifying and criminalizing them. On a different scale – from neighbourhoods to small towns to society at large – people perceiving themselves as under siege by crime re-enact seguridad’s script. As political imagination turns the excluded into suspects, communities of seguridad find their defining antagonistic ‘other’. Seguridad’s images spread, influencing legal and policy definitions as much as informal policies, police practices and exercises of discretionary power. Thanks to the latter, the police contribute to materializing on the ground, on a case-by-case basis, identities conceived within this broader governmental agenda. As a result of stigmatization, some people will de facto be deprived of the rights and the compassionate help that the previously quoted police officers claim to offer everyone. Worse, most of the excluded, and the deaths of those labelled ‘criminals’ among them, will remain invisible.



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As the unstated component of seguridad, such exclusions set internal borders to the polity and carve out territories of lawlessness that qualify the democratic character of the regime. ‘If we do not have the police, there is no organized community’, the officer from a town in Mendoza noted. The police play a key role in producing the people of the nation. Each day, more forcefully than any other state organ, they define the people and delimit the nation’s legal and political boundaries in two main ways. First, through a policy in part formal and in part informal, by placing individuals into categories of police and political government according to their perceived worth, the police contribute to reproducing the nation, including its exclusions. Second, through different forms of intervention, they help to re-create the need for the state and its monopoly of force and governance. State legitimacy involves accepting the nation as the most genuine kinship containing and grounding all others.129 Through laws, policies, police power and its agents, the state transforms demands for care into demands for seguridad, takes over competing kinships, co-opting, neutralizing, or destroying them, and offers alternative sources for identification. On a daily basis, multiple agents re-create the state’s central position and vertical bonds. In what follows, as a way to conclude, I will discuss both of these roles, two privileged expressions of the micro-politics of police governance linking different layers of society, the nation and the modern state.

Producing the nation ‘I am a police officer, an officer of the nation’, a member of the Federal Police proudly asserted. At first sight, the nation appears as some form of organism that, to borrow from Anderson, seems to move ‘calendrically through homogeneous, empty time’.130 Representations of community tend to reify what we share, romanticizing ‘a people, a territory, or an essence’.131 If this is the case with communities in general, with the help of state institutions national communities intensify this tendency. In particular, a nation needs a people. As no ethnic or linguistic commonality suffices to ground its definition, the state has ‘to produce the people’, and – according to Balibar – make ‘the people produce itself continually as national community’. As individuals embrace their nation, they adopt common names, traditions and a history that they believe goes back to archaic times, even if – as Balibar notes – such elements ‘have been

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fabricated and inculcated in the recent past’. Language, law, education, the school and the family contribute to recast differences in terms of the national, to internalize borders as ‘internal frontiers’ embedded in their identity.132 ‘Are we a nation?’ Dalles asks his fellow Argentines.133 The festivities of the May 2010 bicentennial anniversary left little room for doubt, after bringing six million people to the streets in Buenos Aires alone to commemorate and celebrate. In the most massively attended official event ever, more than two million people stood together for the closing ceremony, while hundreds of thousands mobilized in the provinces. The festivities served as a giant ritual for the renewal of community, far from the dark predictions that in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis anticipated the infeasibility of Argentina. No festivity however, can overshadow the deep contention about the meaning of the nation. A complex mix of imagined communities overlaps in disputing the signifier ‘Argentina’. Still, with variations and re-appropriations, two main strands of political imagination hegemonize definitions of the nation with a polarizing force. To the national ‘founding fictions’ materialized since the 1880s, elitist if modernizing, Peronism opposed its own representations and emphases on the national and popular. Granted, many of us cannot fully identify with either of these traditions. Nor can we avoid feeling their dragging force. Nineteenth-century founding figures, led by Sarmiento, concurred in imagining Argentina as both modern and European, with Europe representing civilization and progress. From Sarmiento’s perspective, Argentina was a desert with a sparse population of lazy gauchos and bloody caudillos in desperate need of civilizing. His motto ‘civilization or barbarism’ presided over the nation’s vertiginous transformation at the turn of the century. Welcoming millions of immigrants, Argentina became a cosmopolitan society, one built however over the expropriation and annihilation of its indigenous peoples. The appeal to ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ identified by Anderson in the formation of modern nations did not reach the indigenous and the poor in the Pampas.134 Moreover, towards the beginning of the twentieth century, cosmopolitan ideals turned into elite attacks on immigration on the grounds of argentinidad. Since then the trend to cast political adversaries as anti-national became pervasive.135 The Argentine poor gained massive political visibility only after marching on the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October 1945, to demand Juan Perón’s release from prison. Perón’s sponsorship of social laws and policies serving as the Secretary of Labour in a nationalist military dictatorship had gained him



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popular support. The protest marked the birth of the Peronist movement and a new strand of imagination about the nation. The event also signalled the beginning of a pervasive, often vicious antagonism, as elite-based representations of the nation portrayed peronism as an ‘invasion’ of ‘barbarians’ to the polity, in terms that remain ingrained in present-day perspectives. ‘I think [Argentina] is in the process of coming forward. I always say: “This is a young country, it will only have two hundred years of independence.” It doesn’t have the millennia of culture of Europe. There are still aboriginal communities here, who… who still live as in a natural state’, a detective from the Santa Fé province observed. He then described the ethnic composition of the nation as follows: Here, to a black individual walking on the street, nobody will say negro [de mierda], nor will it be as in South Africa where they had [separate] neighborhoods for blacks and whites. But… there may be racism. There are many Italians… here, the majority, we are of Italian and Spaniard descent. Then, there are Russians, there are Jews… blacks, just very few. The Chinese, there are a lot of them now. But they are accepted. Aboriginals, who are natives from here… Not that they are not are accepted. But there is a cultural problem with the aboriginals, who also feel segregated. The question of, well, how the nation was forged… of how it was colonized. It comes from history. While acknowledging the existence of racism, my interviewee seems unaware of the racist overtones in his own appreciations that Argentine citizens with an indigenous background live ‘in a natural state’, and pose ‘a cultural problem’. Entrenched in Argentine culture, allusions of laziness and criminal tendencies among citizens and immigrants of indigenous descent appear in police descriptions of criminal suspects.136 Youths hanging out in the street turn aggressive, a bonaerense officer from the Conurbano noted, when les sale el indio – when the indigenous comes out of them. Watching for criminals, according to an officer of the Federal Police, one learns to distinguish a ‘punga from a normal person… you know when someone is Bolivian and when he is Peruvian’, he explained. Those perceived as indigenous, criollo, or simply poor often find themselves needing to prove their ‘working’ and ‘decent’ condition to the police. As a contemporary outgrowth of the elitist project of the nation, seguridad imagines a community that maintains them as subordinated or excluded. A multi-layered regime with distinct forms of governance targeting different sectors of the public advanced by seguridad and administered by the police serves this purpose.

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Granted, a number of signs suggest that Argentina may be heading towards a more inclusive political community. Having given legal recognition to egalitarian marriage, state programmes promise to reach the elderly, the young and the poor, with the intention of reducing the income gap. To the extent that inclusive representations of the nation gain ground, we could expect rising demands for accountability, controls and responsiveness regarding the power of the police and its agents. If a concern with inclusion ever affected the police themselves, we could also see more instances of police power exercised along the lines suggested by Sklansky, to weaken and dislocate ‘unjustified patterns of private domination’.137 Of course, prospects of development and social inclusion set structural limits to this possibility in a society like Argentina. As desirable as this horizon may seem, the Argentina of seguridad has come to stay. Expanding in the last decade and a half, undergoing active and dormant phases, every crime and inseguridad wave has added legitimacy and institutional layers to it. The Secretaría de Seguridad, created by President Menem in the mid-1990s to concentrate command of federal security forces, was moved after 1999 by the Alianza government to the Ministerio del Interior. In 2002, interim President Eduardo Duhalde gave seguridad ministerial status by fusing it with the Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos. Under the Kirchners, seguridad went back and forth between the two ministries, until President Fernández de Kirchner transformed it into a ministry of its own in December 2010. The creation of the Ministerio de Seguridad has been praised as a measure that puts police power under democratic control. Yet its institutional itinerary gives a clear sense of the consolidation of the new agenda. Its initiatives include recruiting large numbers of police agents and the deployment of the police and militarized security forces into poor areas of the Conurbano and the city of Buenos Aires. Interviewed for a newspaper, a resident of one such zones, 14-year-old Ayelén, agrees with having the Prefecture patrolling the site. ‘It is OK that personnel are brought to take care of our seguridad, because we are always stigmatized’, she notes. Another youth, Pedro, observes that neighbours from the villa welcome the Prefects, and that they all ‘now await to be sent education, health, and other things that make for seguridad’. Whether under a more orthodox ‘law and order’ agenda, or after claims of ‘democratic’ policing and security, an increasingly securitized Argentina is on its way. Manifesting its flexibility, securitization now shows us a new, allegedly progressive face. Public goods traditionally conceptualized in terms of needs and rights appear reinterpreted along securitizing lines while the government recasts



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seguridad as a human right. It remains to be seen how this new strand of seguridad defines its threats and enemies, and how it will deal with them. Whether disguised as citizen or human, the persistent modern security rationale slides into the picture as fear takes control or we face the need to protect life.

Transforming care into seguridad Esposito identifies ‘looking after care’ as the single activity that makes possible the emergence and continuation of communities.138 The dictionary defines care as ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something’.139 Our quest for care, the philosopher notes, arises out of ‘the breach, the trauma, the lacuna out of which we originate’.140 In other words, what we have in common is that which we lack. It is from our vulnerabilities that we share; bonds and community develop from acknowledging them. Both a gift and an obligation, being part of a community imposes a duty to share and care for each other, exposing and giving to others ourselves. If demanding care opens up to community, it also defines a point at which the state and its agents enter the scene. Whenever we demand care, chances are that our demand will be appropriated by state dispositifs and turned into the bio-political care of life through seguridad. Whilce contributing to manufacturing identities and the nation, police governance also helps to carve out room for the state administration of conflict and the care of life while destroying those perceived as competitors. Originating in the transition from stateless to state societies, as Robinson and Scaglion showed, policing replaced ‘kinship-based, communal security arrangements’, based on social control with state-led hierarchical, patronclient bonds.141 A similar movement followed the ‘confiscation’ of conflict by the sovereign since the twelfth century examined by Foucault. Alleging ‘infractions’, representatives of the sovereign began claiming themselves as a part ‘injured by the mere fact that an offense or a crime had occurred’, he adds. The sovereign, or those acting on his behalf, imposed the view of crimes as ‘an attack against the law of the state itself’ while demanding compensation. Moreover, they took over judicial procedures and the governance of conflicts. ‘Individuals would no longer have the right to resolve their own disputes’, Foucault observes, as ‘a power external to them’ would do it. Undertaken by the modern state, this expropriation accompanied the process of state formation in different societies.142

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In time a vertical relation of obedience to the sovereign developed in place of the former kinship.143 Recreating its originating movements, the state expands and reproduces by taking over the governance of conflicts and the administration of care. Recasting care as security, presenting the state as its sole provider, and monopolizing the administration of conflict, through countless everyday interventions police agents contribute to reproducing this appropriation and, thus, to reproducing the state. ‘Perhaps there can be a society without police, but with some kind of… with other forms of control, right? It can be police agents, it can be civilian, normal, common people, to take charge’, a policewoman from Misiones reflected. ‘I cannot conceive of a society without police. Some form of police… the police function, someone with the capacity to impose order or to impose certain things to a person’, noted a commissioner from the same province. In fact, members of countless communities have lived without police, many others have policed themselves, and communities abandoned by the state have no other choice these days. As the withdrawal of the state turned significant across Latin America, some groups now imagine their communities in terms of being alien to the nation-state.144 Diane Davis examined such groups in Mexico. At once ‘sub-national and transnational’, with the form of networks, such communities ‘reject standard allegiances’ to nation-states, and compete with the state in providing ‘new forms of welfare, employment, security, and meaning’, prefiguring alternative non-state forms of sovereignty. Davis captures the dynamics of these scenarios in the term ‘fragmented sovereignty’. In Argentina, as state withdrawal accompanied the crisis in 2001, and people saw themselves organizing alternative networks to take care of their own lives, participants coined a different expression: horizontalidad. Denoting ‘a flat plane upon which to communicate’, Marina Sitrin recounts, from neighbourhood assemblies to recovered factories, face-toface interactions gave rise to practices of self-governance, and to an entirely different strand of political imagination.145 Thousands engaged in experiences of ‘direct democracy combined with direct action’.146 Ultimately, it is this imagination that the agenda of seguridad antagonizes and seeks to criminalize and eliminate. Seguridad and horizontalidad betray distinct ontologies, identities and senses of community. Even though a number of recovered factories and cooperatives survive, through co-optation, repression and attrition, the state effectively minimized the self-governance initiatives and their political impact. Back to ‘normal’ times, police practices continue routinely appropriating demands for care and normalizing them as matters of seguridad.



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Appealing to the self-ethnographic, let me offer an example of how this appropriation takes place.147 My own personal experience behind this project started in Argentina, many years ago, one sunny, cold autumn day. I received a call and ran to the house. My mother had left, close to noon, leaving the table set for one, the casserole on the stove, wrapped in paper to keep the warmth, and no messages. The doors were unlocked, and she had taken no keys. Once in the house, family members seemed unsure of what to do. How does one know exactly when the circumstances merit concern and when they do not? What unequivocal signs indicate a situation’s seriousness? Not having answers to these questions, after considering dozens of alternatives, around 3 p.m., I decided to call the police.  It would be a scandal, I imagined, having the police look for her. She should be perfectly fine, just having gone for a walk. Still, there I was, calling the police. They came quickly: two police officers with a dog. They asked me for an item of her clothing, for her pillow, so the dog could get her smell. Then they left. Proving my common sense wrong, she did not return from any walk that night. As it turned out, the situation was serious. Suddenly, I saw myself involved in calling the TV, the newspapers, the radio stations. When someone is missing, the mind does not stop; vertigo takes hold in one unending spiral of images, situations and possibilities. She could be truly anywhere. I had to find her. I went wherever I was told to go and resorted to everyone and everything I possibly could. The media, the police, firefighters, neighbours, a priest who I was told made miracles, a medium. With a couple of pictures of her in hand, I walked through neighbourhoods, in poor areas close to the river, asking people whether they had seen her. Several of us were doing the same. We found nothing. The police continued helping us. From time to time, they stopped by the house to give us updates. ‘No news so far, but we’ll keep working on the case.’ People from a nearby villa decided to help us, too. In particular, a young man in his early twenties, a local leader with incredible generosity, eagerly committed himself to ride his horse along the shore of the river, looking for her, while asking other people in his group to do the same. Both the police and the people from the shantytown kept us updated. Yet one morning, while stopping by his place at the villa, the young man described how the previous night the police had entered their little shacks by force, abusing and threatening people and destroying some of their possessions. In particular, he seemed affected as the police had entered the home of his own grandmother. The officers, he told us, destroyed her dishes and other possessions; they shook her and hit her, threatening her, accusing her of hiding my mother.

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I was shocked. How was it possible for the police – the same exact police officers who had been so helpful, kind and compassionate to us – to be so brutal to these other people who, despite their many urgencies of life, were so deeply generous? The young man, sympathetic with our pain, told the story as if trying to minimize it, mentioning in passing that these things were not unusual in the shantytown. Horrified, I also felt guilty in the realization that the police had apparently exercised so much brutality over these people, particularly against the old lady, in an effort to help us. Expressing my deepest sorrow, I thanked him once more, at the same time understanding that from that moment on, he and his people would no longer help us. Several days later we received a call. It was a police officer from a different town who had learned about our call for help through the TV or the radio. He said he may have relevant information for us. So we went. It was a crisp, quiet, starry winter’s night in June. The place was small, a rather precarious police station in a poor fishing village by the river. The police agent in charge – the same one who had made the call – explained to us that a fisherman had found a body. After performing an autopsy, it had been buried as N.N. [Nomen nescio] in a neighbouring city, he said. Because the report had been made in his jurisdiction, he had kept some of the deceased’s belongings, which he invited us to check. I ignored the policeman’s name and face as much as he ignored mine. Complying with a bureaucratic, quite unpleasant procedure, he brought out a black garbage bag, put it on the floor, and opened it. With a stick, he started taking pieces of wet, rotten clothes from inside, spreading them out on the floor. Meanwhile, I heard myself repeat, with a lifeless voice, as if it was someone else talking: ‘Yes, this is her blouse’; ‘Yes, this is her knitted brown skirt’; ‘Yes, this is her light brown wool vest… ’. It is to this anonymous street-level bureaucrat from a tiny police station in a poor fishing village that I owe the possibility of closure after learning about my mother’s death. Of course, my fellows from the shantytown would not have had similar stories of gratitude after being helped by the police. In fact, I ignored their stories. I never saw them again. The police assisted us in our search. Of course, it seems impossible not to think of the many thousands of people with missing relatives who, a few years earlier received no help whatsoever, and at times found themselves victimized. The police did help us. Years later, I learned that some anonymous police hand had chosen to file the cause of my mother’s death as ‘illness’ rather than as suicide, probably out of compassion to spare the family the stigma. No doubt the police helped us. At the same time,



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however, they did not let anybody else do so. Among all the individuals helping, after being abandoned by the state, shantytown dwellers were the only ones who had an alternative system of searching and patrolling. Police intervention violently disrupted their participation, while at the same time disarticulating incipient bonds between us, two groups of people who – according to unspoken but established hierarchies – are not expected to come together in friendship. Restoring a cracked social hierarchy through violence, the police reminded shantytown dwellers of their place, communication between us ended, and the state reasserted its monopoly over the care of life. Through its police, the state responded to our request for help. It did so on its own terms, however, at the same time forcefully displacing others who, by helping, could turn into its competitors. How might this story have ended had the police not acted so violently in the shantytown that night? What bonds could have developed out of it? How would it have impacted our identities? By reasserting the state monopoly of the governance of conflict and the administration of care, that night in the shantytown police intervention turned real possibilities into mere hypotheticals. Like them, those ‘who have no part’, as Rancière puts it,148 who do not fit established identities, often find themselves criminalized. The mere fact of their existence calls classifications into question and exposes the contingency of categories and forms of ordering. As they cannot but destabilize hierarchies, they are most often victimized by the police. Yet Rancière also deems them the true subjects of political action. Living securitized lives takes a toll, not only from its victims but also from politics itself. ‘Can a system sustain itself only on fear without exploding or imploding?’ Esposito asks.149 A number of voices agree on the need to look for ‘a political practice distinct from governing through police and security’, as Mladek notes. Indeed, whereas policing generally advances the politics of the statu quo, on a number of grounds police and political action seem antithetical. Living in securitized societies, inhabiting securitized bodies and souls, we surely need to protect ourselves from ‘an excess of protection’, in a vigilant practice that Esposito calls hyper-immunity.150 As a start, countering securitization may involve ‘accepting insecurity as part of the human condition’, as Neocleous suggests.151 At the most basic level, destroying life in the name of its protection responds to a bio-politics rooted in the hierarchical subjection between forms of life. Purging politics of its death-drive, Esposito suggests, requires a different philosophical perspective. One that does not found someone’s

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worth on someone else’s worthlessness.152 It is in the legacy of Spinoza that the philosopher finds a start.

Whatever life ‘For perhaps there is something of the noble even in life taken by itself.’153 Reaching the limits of the thinkable for his time, Aristotle suggested a line of thought that would be furthered only much later. Contemporary theorists revisiting the legacy of Baruch Spinoza take the post. ‘Every natural thing has as much right from Nature as it has power to exist and to act’, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher proposed in his Political Treatise.154 Esposito, among others, highlights the potential of these ideas to build on concepts and practices that help us move beyond exclusionary categorizations. Beings do not need external, or additional validation. ‘Every form of existence’, Esposito notes, carries its own justification. The fact of existence evidences a right to exist; life and law coincide and contain each other in a relation of immanence, the philosopher argues following Spinoza.155 Each individual exists, and counts for what is unique, particular to her. Agamben agrees. What we humans really are, far from any essence, consist of ‘the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality’.156 This fact serves to unfold a form of thinking that does not need to place individuals into hierarchies of the (in)human, but that builds towards individuality. How would the enforcement of a law which is immanent to life look like? What kind of plural communities could it ground? If democracy is to transcend its minimalist thresholds – in Argentina and elsewhere – by eliminating its multiple forms of exclusion, moving towards the ‘democratization of democracy itself’, as Balibar calls for, police governance needs theoretical and empirical exploration.157 In preserving an army of little sovereigns in exercise of the right to life and death on the ground while leaving it unacknowledged, whom are we doing a favour? It is hoped that more will choose to ask themselves such questions, meanwhile the endeavour has just begun to make visible the governing processes that take place every day at countless opaque points throughout society. 

Notes

Preface and Acknowledgements Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972–77 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194; John Pløger, ‘Foucault’s dispositif and the City’, Planning Theory 7(1). Foucault’s concept of dispositif has been generally translated into English as ‘apparatus’. My preference for the original French word echoes Pløger’s concern with not missing the generative connotations of the concept. 2 Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde, ‘Policing the Reechsstaat’ in Markus D. Dubber and Valverde (eds) Police and the Liberal State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 5, 6, 8. 3 Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 16. 4 Klaus Mladek, ‘Exception Rules. Contemporary Political Theory and the Police’, Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution (New York: McMillian, 2007), 224; William Novak, ‘Police Power and the Hidden Transformation of the American State’ in Police and the Liberal State, 55. 5 Barney G. Glaser, and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery Of Grounded Theory: Strategies For Qualitative Research (Edison: Transaction, 1999). Theoretical sampling allows the selection of groups and individuals according to their contributions to discover categories and their relations. Sampling a category should stop at the point where adding more cases brings no new information, known as saturation. 6 See the contributions by Michaelle Browers, Jennifer Holmes, Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka to ‘Symposium: Synergies Between Comparative Politics and Political Theory’, APSA-CP Newlsletter 22(1), Winter 2011. 1

Chapter 1 All the translations from Spanish are mine. Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’ in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 48. Foucault’s expression, now widely cited, first appeared in French as ‘conduire des conduits’ (Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV; Paris; Gallimard, 1994), 237. 3 David Bayley, Patterns of Policing: A Comparative International Analysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 7. Bayley defines police as 1 2

194 Notes ‘people authorized by a group to regulate interpersonal relations within the group through the application of physical force’. For an overview of different uses of the word, from those linked to the eighteenth-century ‘police science’ to police patrols to the police powers of the state, see Mariana Valverde and Markus Dubber’s introduction to The New Police Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 4 Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, The Foucault Effect, 75. 5 Leonard C. Feldman, ‘The Banality of Emergency: On the Time and Space of ‘Political Necessity’ in Austin Sarat (ed.) Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158. 6 Clifford Shearing and Richard Ericson, ‘Culture as Figurative Action, British Journal of Sociology 42(4), 494; Elaine Campbell, ‘Police Narrativity and Discretionary Power’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31. 7 Mercedes Calzado and Nicolás Maggio. ‘Medios de comunicación: ‘A veces pasa como si uno dijera llueve’. La naturalización mediática de la muerte de delincuentes en enfrentamientos con la policía’, in Alcira Daroqui (ed.) Muertes silenciadas: La eliminación de los ‘delincuentes’ (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del CCC, 2009), 67. 8 Kathleen Arnold, ‘Domestic War: Locke’s Concept of Prerogative and Implications for US “Wars” Today’, Polity 39, 28. 9 For the first time, in 2008, respondents to the Latinobarómetro survey, identified crime as the main problem in the region (Informe 2008, Corporación Latinobarómetro, 23) . In Argentina, after reaching the status of a priority at the beginning of the 1990s, after 1999 seguridad consistently ranked as the second most important concern after unemployment (Graciela Romer, qtd. in Sofía Tiscornia, ‘Entre el imperio del “Estado de policía” y los límites del derecho. Seguridad ciudadana y policía en Argentina’, Nueva Sociedad 191, fn2, 79), to gain the first place in 2007. 10 Fernán Saguier, ‘Por que perdieron’, La Nación, 30 June 2009. 11 In a seminal essay, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’ in On Security Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.), Columbia University Press, 1985, 56, Ole Waever defines security as a ‘situation marked by the presence of a security problem and some measure taken in response’ while insecurity denotes the existence of the same situation but with a lack of a response. Security and insecurity are intertwined and involve complementary kinds of demands. 12 Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 107. 13 Scioli: ‘Seguridad y derechos humanos son complementarios’. La Nación, 1 March 2011. 14 Mariano, Confalonieri ‘Cristina crea un Ministerio de Seguridad que comandará Garré’, Perfil, 11 December 2010. 15 Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, 194; Pløger, ‘Foucault’s dispositif.’ 16 Ibid., Foucault, 17 Summary executions have been declared illegal by the Geneva Conventions (Second Protocol, art. 6.2, 1977). 18 William Ker Muir, Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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Ernesto Laclau, ‘Towards a theory of populism’, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: NLB/Atlantic Highlands Humanities Press, 1977), 178, 188. 20 Ronaldo Munck, ‘Neoliberalism, Necessitarianism and Alternatives in Latin America: There is no Alternative (TINA), Third World Quarterly 24(3), 496. 21 Banco de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, ‘Informe Económico Semanal’ 138, 13 May 2011, 7. 22 Mario Brodersohn, ‘Dos Grandes Mitos del Peronismo: Sabe Gobernar y ser el Partido de la Justicia Social’, Econométrica, Septiembre 2009, 6. 23 Ibid., Brodersohn, 7. 24 Facundo Alvaredo, ‘The rich in Argentina over the twentieth century: From the conservative republic to the Peronist experience and beyond 1932–2004’, JEL, 2007, 13. In surveys across Latin America, Alvaredo shows, well-paid professionals, not capital owners, represent the wealthy. 25 UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database, May 2008 ; ECLAC Panorama social de América Latina 2010, Chart I.A-3, 59. 26 Leonardo Gasparini and Guillermo Cruces, ‘Las asignaciones universales por hijo. Impacto, discusión y alternativas’, CEDLAS, Julio 2010, 22. 27 Alfredo Zaiat, ‘50/50’ Pagina12, 8 May 2011. 28 ‘Distribución del ingreso y pobreza: noticias del fracaso’, Banco Ciudad, Informe Económico Semanal 119, 29 December 2010 and 174, 20 January 2012. 29 Eduardo M. Basualdo, ‘La reestructuración de la economía argentina durante las últimas décadas de la sustitución de importaciones a la valorización financiera’, Neoliberalismo y sectores dominantes. Tendencias globales y experiencias nacionales (Basualdo, Eduardo M.; Arceo, Enrique. CLACSO, 2006), 166, 170–71. 30 Sebastian Premici, ‘Bajó el desempleo y se acerca al nivel de los’80’, Pagina12, 21 May 2011. 31 Roxana Kreimer, ‘Para combatir la inseguridad’, La Nación, 8 June 2011. 32 Javier Auyero, Poor People’s Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 66. 33 Pablo Tomino, ‘Multitudinaria marcha contra la inseguridad en la Plaza de Mayo’, La Nación, 8 October 2010. 34 Argentina en Noticias ‘Bicentenario histórico: 6 millones de asistentes, 26 May 2010 . 35 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); Zygmunt Bauman, Comunidad. En busca de seguridad en un mundo hostil (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2003), 9. 36 Records gathered by Human Rights organizations, especially by CORREPI’s 1983–2010 archive expose patterns of arbitrary killings by the police and security forces. For a further analysis of that data, see María del Carmen Verdú, Represión en Democracia. De la ‘primavera alfonsinista’ al ‘gobierno de los derechos humanos’ (Buenos Aires: Herramienta, 2009). 37 Tomino, ‘Multitudinaria marcha’. 38 See, for example, surveys from LAPOP, The Latin American Public Opinion Project, Vanderbilt University, and Latinobarómetro on the relation between fear of crime and victimization. 39 Laura Di Marco, ‘La inseguridad, tema de la gente (¿no del progresismo?)’ 19

196 Notes La Nación, 14 November 2010; in a Gallup poll in November 2010, Argentines ranked 14 among 105 nations on their levels of fear of crime. 40 Informe Latinobarómetro 2008, 22 41 Jason Read, ‘Neoliberal Governmentality. A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity’, Foucault Studies 6, February 2009. 42 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 66–7. 43 Mark Neocleous, ‘Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance; Towards a Critique of Security Politics’, Contemporary Political Theory 6(2), 133. 44 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980). 45 Roberto Esposito, ‘Ontology at Present Tense. Community and Immunity in the Global Times’, IDEA arts+society 25, 2006. 46 ‘Inseguridad, el principal problema’, La Nación, 4 June 2009. 47 CELS. Derechos Humanos en Argentina. Informe 2011 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2011), 66. 48 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein trans (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 7. 49 In this paragraph, the terms from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford, 1998), 7, 114, 7. 50 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Sovereign Police’, in Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 104. 51 Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, ‘Polizei’, Economy and Society 9(2). 52 Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms’ in Jean-Paul Brodeur The Policing Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45. 53 Alan Sklansky, Democracy and the Police (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 109. 54 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence.’ Selected Writings 1 1913–1926, in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1996), 243. 55 Leslie P. Thiele, Thinking Politics (Chattam: Chattam House, 1997), 61. 56 Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research 71(3), 80. 57 Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 7ss. 58 Jacques Ranciere, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory & Event 5(3). 59 Aristotle: Peter L. Phillips Simpson, The Politics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 1255b16. In most editions of the Politics, the passage is generally included in Book I. 60 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 61 Ibid., Arendt, 28. 62 Markus D. Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 213, xii. 63 Ibid., Dubber 3. 64 Plato, Republic, G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, 1984), 246. 65 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36–41.

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Kent Eaton, ‘Paradoxes of Police Reform: Federalism, Parties, and Civil Society in Argentina’s Public Security Crisis’, Latin American Research Review 43(3). 67 Carole Pateman, Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 221. 68 The crossings between studies of policing and democratization have been fertile. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro’s 1996 essay ‘Democracies without Citizenship’ (NACLA Report on the Americas 30) is a classical reference to the impact of abusive and violent policing in the quality of democracy and citizenship. More recently, Daniel Brinks’s book, The Judicial Response to Police Killings In Latin America: Inequality and the Rule Of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) defines a milestone in the inclusion of policing into political science. The same can be said of Mark Ungar’s work, including his books Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), and Policing Democracy: Overcoming Obstacles to Citizen Security in Latin America (Wilson Center, 2011), as well as Mercedes Hinton’s The State on the Streets: Police and Politics in Argentina and Brazil (Boulder; Lynne Rienner, 2006). If Ruth Stanley was among the first political scientists to study the Argentine police (e.g. ‘Controlling the Police in Buenos Aires: A Case Study of Horizontal and Social Accountability’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 24(1); Otwin Marenin’s work, starting with his ‘Review Essay: Police Performance and State Rule: Control and Autonomy in the Exercise of Coercion’, Comparative Politics 18(1) brought policing into the field. Seminal work on the police in Latin America developed outside political science includes Martha Huggins (ed.) Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America. Essays on Extralegal Violence (New York: Praeger, 1991), her Political Policing. The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), Huggins’s co-authored work with M. Haritos-Fatouros and P. Zimbardo. Violence Workers (University of California Press, 2002); Paul Chevigny’s The Edge of the Knife. Police Violence in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995); Peter Waldman (ed.) Justicia en la Calle: Ensayos sobre la policía en América Latina (Colombia: Biblioteca Jurídica Dike, 1996); Laura Kalmanowiecki, ‘Police, People, and Preemption in Argentina’ in Huggins, Vigilantism; ‘Policing the People, Building the State.’ Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation, Diane E. Davis and Anthony W. Pereira (eds) (New York: Cambridge, 2003); Teresa Caldeira’s City of Walls (University of California Press, 2000), and recent work by Diane Davis, such as ‘Age of Insecurity’, Latin American Research Review 41(1). In Argentina, Sofía Tiscornia’s work, as her Burocracias y violencia (Buenos Aires, Antropofagia, 2004); Osvaldo Barreneche’s Crime and the Administration of Justice in Buenos Aires 1785–1853 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press), Marcelo Saín’s El Leviatan azul (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008), Lila Caimari’s Apenas un delincuente. Crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI,2004), and Gregorio Kaminsky (Tiempos Inclementes. Universidad Nacional de Lanús, 2005) are significant in the development of the field. 69 Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levistky, Informal Institutions & Democracy, Helmke and Stephen Levistky (eds) (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 1. The authors define informal institutions as ‘rules and procedures that are created, communicated, and enforced outside the officially sanctioned channels’. 66

198 Notes Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980). See also David C. Perry and Paula A. Sornoff, Politics at the Street Level: The Select Case of Police Administration and the Community’ (Sage, 1973); William Muir, Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); David E. Aaronson, C. Thomas Dienes and Michael C. Musheno, Public Policy and Police Discretion: Processes of Decriminalization (New York: Clark Boardman Co., 1984); Steven MaynardMoody and Michael Musheno, Cops, Teachers, Counselor. Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 71 While recognized scholars and experts in the field of policing treat ‘democratic policing’ as a given, and policing carried out in established democracies as ‘democratic’, definitions are far from univocal or clear. For an analysis of this trend, see Mary Rose Kubal, ‘Bureaucrats with Guns? Possibilities and Problems with a Public Policy Approach to Police Reform in Argentina and Chile, LASA, Toronto, October 2010. 72 Molly Patterson and Kristen Renwick Monroe, ‘Narrative in Political Science’, Annual Review of Political Science 1; Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds). Interpretation and Method (New York, London: M. E. Sharpe, 2006). Interpretive policy analysis builds on two main premises, Dvora Yanow observes, by looking at social reality as constructed by groups, and at researchers themselves as involved in this construction. Citing Lakoff, Johnson and Miller, Yanow notes how the cognitive ‘frames that shape the definition of a problem also entail concepts of appropriate solutions, all according to the internal logic of the frame’ (Dvora Yanow, ‘Practices of Policy Interpretation’, Policy Sciences 28(2), 114). For a different strand of scholarship that, closer to institutionalism, echoes this shift, see Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science 11. 73 Austin Sarat, ‘Introduction: Toward New Conceptions of the Relationship of Law and Sovereignty Under Conditions of Emergency’, Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11. 74 Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges. War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 97. 75 Main references include Michel Foucault’s works and lectures on security and police, such as ‘Prison Talk.’ Power/Knowledge (see note 1); ‘Governmentality’ (in Burchell, Gordon and Miller, see note7); “Spaces of security: The example of the town. Lecture of 11th January 1978, Political Geography 26; Security, Territory, Population (New York: Palgrave, 2007); ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, ‘Truth and Power’, ‘“Omnes et singulatim”. Towards a criticism of ‘Political Reason”’, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (James D. Faubion ed., New York: The New Press, 2000); or The Birth of Biopolitics (see note 47). Key arguments drawing on Foucault’s insights are Giorgio Agamben’s “Sovereign Police” (see note 54) and his Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Mitchell Dean’s Governmentality (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 1999. reprinted 2008), and his recent work on liberalism, governmentality, and biopower. Especially relevant seems Mariana Valverde’s essay, “Police, Sovereignty, and Law: Foucaultian Reflections”, Police and the Liberal State (see note 2), Dubber and Valverde’s The New Police Science 70

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(see note 8), and Dubber’s own The Police Power (see note 66). Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Timothy Campbell ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford University Press, 2009), makes a significant contribution to rethink of security, police, biopower, and politics. A seminal reference for political theorists studying the police is Mark Neocleous’ The Fabrication of Social Order: A critical theory of Police Power (London: Pluto, 2000), as is his aforementioned Critique of Security (see note 16). Similarly, Michael Dillon’s Politics of security (see note 2), and Rancière’s Disagreement (see note 69) and his ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ (see note 63). For recent theoretical discussions of police, see Mladek (see note 4), in particular the chapter ‘Exception Rules. Contemporary Political Theory and the Police’. 1 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972–77 (Colin Gordon ed., Pantheon, 1980); 2 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave, 2007); 3 Mariana Valverde’s essay, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law: Foucaultian Reflections’, Police and the Liberal State (Markus D. Dubber and Valverde eds, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); 4 Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: towards a political philosophy of continental thought (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 5 Klaus Mladek, Police forces: a cultural history of an institution (New York: McMillian, 2007), in particular the chapter ‘Exception Rules. Contemporary Political Theory and the Police’. 76 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Theory as a Vocation’, The American Political Science Review 63(4), 1082. 77 Legal theorist Markus Dubber first identified the relevance of Aristotle’s distinction, in the Politics, for our understanding of police power, while Giorgio Agamben has delved into the biopolitical implications of Aristotle’s understanding of politics. 78 Mark Neocleous; George Rigakos, Anti-Security (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2001). 79 Arendt, The Human Condition, 37.

Chapter 2 Informe Latinobarómetro 2010, 16 . 2 ‘Percepción sobre la seguridad’; El Litoral, 20 December 2010. 3 Bryn Hughes, ‘The Security Story… But Which One?’ Dialogue 2(2), 1. 4 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2002), 30. 5 ‘Informe total país’; Sistema Nacional de Información Criminal año 2007, Dirección Nacional de Política Criminal, Ministerio de Justicia, Seguridad y DD. HH., Argentina. 6 Ezequiel Lorusso, ‘El mapa revela la cifra negra de la inseguridad’, 24 CN conurbano online, 15 December 2008, posted on Eugenio Burzaco. Diputado de la Nación 1

200 Notes Calzado and Maggio, ‘Medios de comunicación’ Muertes silenciadas (see note 7), 77. 8 Stella Martini, ‘Argentina, prensa gráfica, delito y seguridad’ in Germán Rey (ed.) Los relatos periodísticos del crimen (Bogotá, Centro de Competencia en Comunicación para América Latina, 2007), 80. 9 Germán Rey, El cuerpo del delito: representación y narrativas mediáticas de la (in) seguridad ciudadana (Bogotá: Centro de Competencia en Comunicación para América Latina; Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2005), 55, 25. 10 Angeles Castro, ‘Tres homicidios por día en la provincia’, La Nación, 15 December 2008. 11 ‘Los enemigos-según Grondona-son los delincuentes’, Hora Clave, 4 April 2004). 12 ‘¡No se puede vivir asi... nos estan matando a todos!’ Crónica, 6 November 2009; ‘Susana Giménez: ‘El que mata, tiene que morir’, El Cronista Comercial, 27 February 2009. 13 CELS, Derechos Humanos en Argentina. Informe 2010 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2010), 124. 14 Daniel Hadad bought the radio station in 1995, launching AM 710 in 1998 and FM Mega 98.3 soon afterwards. In 2002, he gained control of Channel 9. He also owned Channel 5, a newspaper, and Infobae, an Internet newspaper. 15 Ana Wortman, Construcción imaginaria de la desigualdad social argentina, el nuevo lugar de las clases medias y los intermediarios culturales mediáticos (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2007). 16 CELS, Informe 2011, (see note 47), 81. 17 Ministerio de Seguridad, Press release 116, 2 June 2011 18 ‘Los argentinos y los medios de comunicación.’ Revista Mercado, 13 October 2009. 19 Rey, Cuerpo del delito, 25. 20 Wortman, Construcción imaginaria. 21 Rey, Cuerpo del delito, 25–6. 22 Susana Murillo, Colonizar el dolor. La interpelación ideológica del Banco Mundial en América Latina. El caso argentino desde Blumberg a Cromañón (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2008), 197. 23 Mauro Cerbino, ‘El (en)cubrimiento de la inseguridad o el “estado de hecho” mediático’, Nueva Sociedad 208, 92. Drawing on a comparative study of major Latin American newspapers, Rey (Cuerpo del delito, 58) shows that almost 25 per cent of the news portray the police as main agents of public security policies, vis-à-vis the national government (1.6 per cent), regional governments (1.6), state security organism (2.1 per cent), or civil society (3 per cent). 24 Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, ‘Crime Distribution and Victim Behavior during a Crime Wave’, Documento de Trabajo 44, CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, December 2006, 9. 25 Gabriel Kessler, ‘Miedo al crimen’ in Alejandro Isla (ed.) En los márgenes de la ley (Paidós, 2007), 75. 26 Di Tella, Galiani and Schargrodsky, ‘Crime distribution’, 1. 27 LICIP, Research Laboratory on Crime, Institutions and Policies, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, July 2009 . The centre administers its own phone survey on perceptions of crime. 7

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LICIP, May 2010. Di Tella, Galiani and Schargrodsky, ‘Crime distribution’, 13. 30 María Graciela Rodríguez’, Medios, protesta y experiencia en Argentina’, Nomadas 20, 134. 31 ‘Disputa por un muro entre San Isidro y San Fernando’, La Nación, 8 April 2009. 32 Javier Auyero, Poor People’s Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 62. 33 Maristella Svampa, Los que ganaron: la vida en los countries y barrios privados (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2001). 34 Sonia Vidal-Koppman, ‘La articulación global-local o cuando los actores privados construyen una nueva ciudad’, Scripta Nova 10, 39. 35 ‘El negocio de la inseguridad. $10,000 millones en seguridad privada’, Crítica, 13 December 2009. 36 Corinna Hölzl, ‘Torres countries en Buenos Aires – la prolongación de una nueva forma de vivir como desencadenante y multiplicador de la fragmentación social. Los casos de Palermo Nuevo y El Abasto’, Congreso Latinoamericano de Antropología, Rosario, Argentina, 2005. 37 Clifford D. Shearing and Philip Stenning, ‘From Panopticon to Disneyworld: The Development of Discipline’ in Perspectives in Criminal Law in A. Doob and E. L. Greenspan (eds) (Toronto: Canada Law Books, 1985). 38 Diane Davis, ‘Irregular Armed Forces, Shifting Patterns of Commitment, and Fragmented Sovereignty in the Developing World’, Theory and Society 39(3–4), 405. 39 Hen Harel, ‘La inseguridad en los countries no es sólo problema de la Policía’, Online 911, 15 March 2010. 40 Vidal-Koppman, ‘La articulación’. The district of Pilar, in the northern Conurbano, epitomizes these trends. 41 Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls (University of California Press, 2000), 292. 42 Héctor Tobar, ‘A New Twist in Case Cloaked in Mystery and Money’, Los Angeles Times, 29 February 2004; Patrick J. McDonnel, ‘Startling turn in sensational murder case’, Los Angeles Times, 17 June 2006. 43 ‘Mitos y realidades de los barrios cerrados’, Los Andes, Mendoza, 17 December 2006. 44 Javier Auyero, ‘The Hyper-Shantytown. Neo-Liberal Violence(s) in the Argentine Slum’, Ethnography 1(1), 98. 45 María Cristina Cravino, Juan Pablo del Río, Juan Ignacio Duarte, ‘Magnitud y crecimiento de las villas y asentamientos en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires en los últimos 25 años’, School of Architecture, University of Buenos Aires

46 Banco Ciudad, ‘Diagnósticos Sectoriales’, April 2011, 6. 47 Fernando Massa and Laura Rocha, ‘Llegan a las villas 15 personas por día’, La Nación, 14 August 2011. 48 World Health Organization, . For 2007, Argentina and Chile had the same homicide rate, 4.5 per hundred thousand, reaching 5.9 in the United States, 3 in Peru, 8.1 in Mexico, and 29.3 and 34.7 in Brazil and Venezuela respectively. 49 León Carlos Arslanián, Un cambio posible (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2008), 305–6. 50 OAS, La Seguridad Pública en las Américas: retos y oportunidades (OEA documentos oficiales), 28. 28 29

202 Notes Federico Arenoso, Julieta Arias, María Batch, Manuel Calvagno, Josefina Palma and Varina Suleiman. ‘Argentina’, Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 214–6. 52 Gustavo Carabajal, ‘Los vecinos ahora arman su propio mapa del delito’, La Nación, 8 December 2008. 53 CELS, Informe 2010, 124. 54 Mariana Galvani, Fuerzas de Seguridad en la Argentina: un análisis sociológico y comunicacional de la construcción de identidad de/en la Policía Federal Argentina. Doctoral Thesis (Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2009). 55 Gregorio Kaminsky and Diego Galeano, ‘Hacer saber: la entrada de la seguridad ciudadana en la formación universitaria argentina’ en Estado, democracia y seguridad ciudadana. Aportes para el debate’, Alejandro Alvarez, Julián Bertranou and Damián Fernández (eds) (Buenos Aires: PNUD, 2008), 251. 56 CELS has monitored state violence and public security policies for many years. Those at the Federal Dirección de Politica Criminal, with exceptional continuity, count with critical expertise in the area. Among the NGOs and foundations gaining temporary visibility, the Sophia Group, created in 1995 and sponsored by private companies, offered policy proposals in public security until several of its members became Mauricio Macri’s officials in the city of Buenos Aires. Often, provincial and federal governments, political parties, and NGOs invite international experts and consultants to Argentina to offer diagnoses and possible solutions. 57 Marcelo Saín, ‘Situación de la seguridad pública en la Argentina’ in Bertranou, Alvarez and Fernández (eds) Estado, democracia y seguridad, 73. 58 CELS, Informe 2011, 64. 59 ‘Un asunto interno detrás del robo’, Pagina12, 11 January 2010. 60 Kent Eaton, ‘Paradoxes of Police Reform: Federalism, Parties, and Civil Society in Argentina’s Public Security Crisis’, Latin American Research Review 43(3). 61 ‘Córdoba: denuncian que entra un avión con drogas por día’, Clarín, 14 January, 2010. 62 Marcelo Saín, ‘Police, Politics, and Society in the Province of Buenos Aires’ in Edward Epstein and David Pion-Berlin (eds) Broken Promises (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 65. 63 Loïc Wacquant, Las Cárceles de la Miseria (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2000). 64 Eduardo Estévez, ‘Citizen Security, Police Culture, and the Study of Policing: Thoughts and Experiences from Argentina’, Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 11–14 June 2009. 65 Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, (see note 70), 19. 66 Except for the interview with former Sub-Commissioner Luis Patti, by then Mayor of Escobar, held during the summer 2003. 67 Murillo, Colonizar el dolor, (see note 100), 197. 68 Laura Glanc, ‘Authoritarian security under democracy: the persistence of militarised practices of the Argentine Federal Police in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1983–1998)’, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Government, University of Essex, March 2011, 21 69 ‘Con el apoyo de Kirchner, Solá designó a Arslanián en Seguridad’, Clarín, 8 April 2004. 51

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‘Lanzamiento del Operativo Centinela’, Argentina en Noticias, 20 December 2010 Ricardo Ragendorfer, and Sebastián Hacher. ‘Cómo va a ser la nueva policía’, Miradas al Sur, Sunday 6 March 2011. 72 Federico Lorenc Valcarce, ‘A Market Approach to the Production of Safety: State Officers, Security Firms and Private Policing in Contemporary Argentina’, ISA, New York City, 15 February 2009, 14, 3. 73 Lucía Dammert, Seguridad Privada: ¿Respuesta a las necesidades de seguridad pública en conglomerados urbanos?, Department of Public Safety, OAS, 2008, 5–6. 74 Ian Loader and Neil Walker, Civilizing Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23. 75 Paul Chevigny, ‘The Populism of Fear: Politics of Crime in the Americas’, Punishment & Society, 5(1). 70 71

Chapter 3 ‘Con el enemigo dentro de sus filas’, Pagina12, 15 December 2009. ‘Hay muchos mayores que están detrás de los menores’, Pagina12, 17 December, 2009. 3 ‘Hay estructuras delictivas detrás de los menores’, Perfil, 7 November 2009. 4 ‘La policía de Buenos Aires recluta menores para robar’, Diario Uno, Santa Fe, 23 October 2009. 5 CELS, Informe 2010, 157. 6 ‘Inseguridad: “Nos están matando a todos, le puede pasar a cualquiera” ’, Infobae, 18 November 2009. 7 Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 8 Michel Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972–77 (Colin Gordon ed., Pantheon, 1980), 47. 9 Dean, Governmentality (see note 75), 120. 10 Ibid., 121. 11 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Security and Terror’, Theory & Event 5(4). 12 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15(1). 13 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’(see note ??): Gilles Deleuze and David Lapoujade, ‘What is a dispositif?’ Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006); Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is an Apparatus?’ in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); The dispositif, Agamben observes (14), is ‘literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings’. Ultimately, Agamben deems dispositifs responsible for the process of hominization undergone by our species. 14 Foucault, ‘The Confession’, 197. 15 Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’ 345. 16 Foucault, ‘The Confession’, 195. 17 Murillo, Colonizar el dolor, (see note 100), 179. 1 2

204 Notes Eduardo Silva, ‘Argentina’, Challenging Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2009). 19 James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 78. 20 Foucault, ‘The Confession’, (see note ??.), 195. 21 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 312. 22 Foucault, ‘The Confession’, 197. Foucault characterizes the episteme as a ‘specifically discursive apparatus’ or dispositif, vis-à-vis dispositifs integrating heterogeneous elements. 23 James Der Derian, ‘The Value of Security’, On Security in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.) (New York, Columbia University Press, 1995), 27. 24 Gabriel Kessler, ‘Inseguridad subjetiva: Nuevo campo de investigación y de políticas públicas‘, in Bertranou, Alvarez and Fernández (see note 133), 132ss. 25 Gabriel Kessler, ‘Miedo al crimen’, 70. 26 CELS. Políticas de seguridad ciudadana y justicia penal (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI/ CELS 2004), 9. 27 CELS, Informe 2010, 126. 28 ‘Alain Touraine, ‘La Argentina es un país que no existe’, Clarín, 4 April 2002. 29 Ronaldo Munck, ‘Neoliberalism’, (see note 20), 503. 30 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2ss; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 31 John Williamson, ‘What Washington Means by Policy Reform’, Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? John Williamson (ed.) (Institute for International Economics, 1990), updated November 2002. 32 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 131. 33 Maristella Svampa, La sociedad excluyente (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2005), 27. 34 Silva, ‘Argentina’, 59. 35 Sylvina Walger, Pizza con champán (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1994). 36 Ariel Armony, The Dubious Link. Civic Engagement and Democratization (Stanford: Stanford, 2004), 17. 37 Patrice McSherry, Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (Hampshire: MacMillan, 1997), 232. 38 Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling in (And Out) (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 29. 39 Laura Tedesco and Jonathan R. Barton. The State of Democracy in Latin America (New York: Routledge 2005), 27, 65. 40 Silva, ‘Argentina’, (see note 171), 61–2, 66, 75, 78. 41 Fernando De la Rúa took office in December 1999 heading a centre-left coalition, the Alianza, formed by the traditional Union Cívica Radical and the progressive, newer, and smaller FrePaSo. Several months later, a corruption scandal led Vice-president Alvarez to resign. Since then, the situation, worsened. With an external debt that did not cease to expand, amid a deep and prolonged recession, Argentina sunk into a deeper crisis. 42 Marina Aizen, ‘Riesgo país o timba en Wall Street’, Clarín, 22 July 2001. 43 ‘Scant hope for Argentina’s IMF talks’, BBC News, 16 December 2002 18

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Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 45 Brodersohn, ‘Dos Grandes Mitos’, (see note 22), 5. 46 Juan Domingo Perón, La comunidad organizada: esbozo filosófico (Buenos Aires: Club de Lectores, 1949). 47 Alfredo Zaiat, ‘50/50’ Pagina12, 8 May 2011. 48 Jorge Halperín, ‘Sesenta años en el tobogán’, Pagina12, 28 December 2008. In 1948, under Perón, salaries reached 53 per cent of national income. In 1974, again under Perón, waged labour’s income got 48.46 per centof national income and the GINI index was 34.3. In turn, inequality grew 5 per cent nationally – 10 per cent in rural areas – between 1953 and 1961, and continued rising in the 1960s. 49 Between 1963 and 1974, Argentina’s GDP grew 54 per cent, and by the mid-1970s, expanding industrialization and industrial exports seemed to start transforming the economic structure of the country (Basualdo, op. cit., 124, 140). 50 Daniel Aspiazu, Miguel Khavisse and Eduardo Basualdo, El nuevo poder económico (Buenos Aires: Hyspamerica, 1988). 51 Jorge Rafael Videla, 1975 Interamerican Army Conference, Montevideo. La Nación, 26 October 1975, quoted in Lorenzo, Celso Ramón. Manual de Historia Constitucional Argentina 3 (Rosario: Ed. Juris, 2000), 345. 52 Brodersohn, ‘Dos grandes mitos’, (see note 22), 7. 53 Silva, ‘Argentina’, (see note 171), 60, 62. 54 Basualdo, ‘La reestructuración’, (see note 29), 166. 55 Gabriel Kessler and María Mercedes Di Virgilio, ‘La nueva pobreza urbana: dinámica global, regional y argentina en las últimas dos décadas’, Revista de la CEPAL 95. 56 Gabriel Kessler, ‘Las transformaciones en el delito juvenil en argentina y su interpelación a las políticas públicas’, in Barbara Potthast, Juliana Ströbele-Gregor, and Dörte Wollrad (eds) Ciudadanía vivida, (in)seguridades e interculturalidad (Buenos Aires: FES/Adlaf/Nueva Sociedad, 2008), 238. 57 Florencia Saguier, ‘Infancia en venta’, La Nación, 17 February 2007. 58 Arslanián, Un cambio posible, (see note 127), 19. 59 Javier Auyero, ‘The Hyper-Shantytown’, (see note 122), 103, 100. 60 Juan Pegoraro, ‘Violencia delictiva, inseguridad urbana. La construcción social de la inseguridad ciudadana’, Nueva Sociedad 167. 61 Ibid., Auyero, 100, 109. 62 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007). 63 Valeria Perasso, ‘El “boom” de las villas miseria’, BBC Mundo, 18 June 2009; Cravino, Maria Cristina, Juan Pablo del Río, and Juan Ignacio Duarte Cravino, ‘Magnitud y crecimiento de las villas y asentamientos en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires en los últimos 25 años’, . The estimate for the city of Buenos Aires corresponds to Perasso; the estimate for the Greater Buenos Aires corresponds to Cravino, del Río and Duarte. 64 Ernesto Pastrana and Verónica Di Francesco, ‘Acciones poco eficientes’, IADE, 29 January 2009. 44

206 Notes Natalia Aruguete and Bárbara Schijman, ‘Hablar de las villas como otro mundo es no entender cómo funciona la ciudad’, Pagina12, 29 November 2010. 66 Basualdo, ‘La reestructuración’, (see note 29), 166. 67 ‘La CTA oficialista advirtió por el alza de la pobreza’, La Nación, 31 May 2011. 68 In 2006, the wages of informal workers represented 37 per cent of the wages of those working under a contract (Maximiliano Montenegro, ‘Blanco y Negro’, Pagina12, 6 August 2006). 69 Banco Ciudad, ‘Informe Económico Semanal 138, 13 May 2011, 4, 5, 7. Only 230,000 minors came out of poverty as a result of the programme, a modest number in light of the millions covered. 70 CELS, Políticas de seguridad ciudadana, 7. 71 Murillo, Colonizar el dolor, (see note 100), 175. 72 Pablo Fanzylber, Daniel Lederman and Norman Loayza, ‘Determinants of crime rates in Latin America and the world’ (Washington: The World Bank, 1998), and ‘What causes violent crime?’ European Economic Review 46. 73 Esposito. 74 Plato, Republic, (see note 64), 223. 75 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 2. 76 Rancière, ‘Ten Theses’, (see note 58), Thesis 7. 77 Agamben, Homo Sacer, (see note 75), 6. 78 Agamben, ‘What is a people’, Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 34. 79 Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, (see note 75), 409, 416. 80 Warren Montag, ‘Necro-economía: Adam Smith y la muerte en la vida del universal’, Youkali 1, 17. 81 Michel Foucault, ‘17 March 1976’, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. 82 Warren Montag, ‘El peligroso derecho a la existencia: la necroeconomía de Von Mises y Hayek’, Youkali 2. 83 Warren Montag, ‘Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal’, Radical Philosophy November/December 2005, 10, 13. 84 Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action. A Treatise on Economics, 839, 282, quoted in Montag, ‘El peligroso derecho a la existencia’, 26. 85 Montag, ‘Necro-Economía’, 15. 86 Ibid., Montag, 16. 87 ‘Es más peligroso un pibe que piensa que un pibe que roba’, Pagina12, 18 October 2010. 88 Cristián Alarcón, Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2003). 89 Osvaldo Quintana, ‘Lobo suelto, cordero atado’, El Colectivo 3(14), Paraná, p. 5. 90 Etienne Balibar, ‘Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence’, Constellations 8(1). 91 Aida Hozic, ‘Zoning, or How to Govern (Cultural) Violence?’ Cultural Values, 6(1). 65

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Agamben, ‘What is a people’, 33. Agamben, Homo Sacer, (see note 75), 58–59. 94 Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 15–16. 95 Silvia Grinberg, ‘Pedagogical Risk and Governmentality: Shantytowns in Argentina in the 21st Century’. 96 CELS, Informe 2010, 165. 97 CELS, Informe 2011, 66. 98 Ibid., CELS, 140–2. 99 Mark Neocleous, ‘Theoretical Foundations of the ‘New Police Science’, The New Police Science, (see note 3), 21ss. 100 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, (see note 75), 334–34. 101 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), xvii–xviii. 102 CELS, Informe 2011, 27. 103 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Perplexities of the Rights of Man’ in Peter R. Baehr (ed.) The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003). 104 Michelle Bonner, ‘Applying the Concept of ‘Human Security’ in Latin America: An Argentine Case Study’, Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies 33(65), 23. 105 Svampa, La sociedad excluyente (see note 186). 106 Ibid., Bonner, 12, 17. 107 ‘Estamos lejos de que este Gobierno exprese un modelo nacional y popular’, La Capital, Mar del Plata, 9 January 2008. 108 Hugo Frühling, J. S. Tulchin and H. A. Golding (eds) Crime and Violence in Latin America: Citizen Security, Democracy, and the State (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003). 109 Lila Caimari, La ciudad y el crimen (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009), 190. 110 Alexei Barrionuevo, ‘Cheap Cocaine Floods Argentina, Devouring Lives’, New York Times, 23 February 2008. 111 Cerbino, ‘El (en)cubrimiento de la inseguridad’ (see note 101), 92. 112 Encuesta Nacional de Victimización, Dirección Nacional de Política Criminal, Ministerio de Justicia, Seguridad, y Derechos Humanos; Kessler, ‘Miedo al crimen’, (see note 103), 76–9, 124,128. 113 María Eugenia Boito, ‘Imágenes crudas y mirada cruel sobre el “otro de clase” en Policías en Acción’, Cuerpo(s), Subjetividad(es) y Conflicto(s), Adrián Scribano and Carlos Figari (eds), Buenos Aires, CLACSO/CICCUS, 2009, 56, 61. 114 Daniel Feierstein, quoted. in Ricardo Rivas ‘Patoruzú’, Tinieblas del crisol de razas: ensayos sobre las representaciones simbólicas y espaciales de la noción del’ otro’ en Argentina, H F Noufouri (ed.) (Buenos Aires: Cálamo de Sumer, 1999). 115 Ibid., 105. 116 Sofía Tiscornia, ‘Seguridad ciudadana y cultura de la violencia’, Encrucijadas 3(5), 6–7. 118 ‘El mapa de los conflictos que padecen los pueblos originarios’, Tiempo Argentino, 13 March 2011. 119 Darío Aranda, ‘La fiebre del Litio’, Pagina12, 6 June 2011. 92 93

208 Notes Chevigny, Edge of The Knife (see note 68); Laura Kalmanowiecki, ‘Origins and Applications of Political Policing in Argentina,’ Latin American Perspectives 27. 121 CELS, Derechos humanos en Argentina: informe 2009 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2009), 111, 133. 122 CELS, Informe 2010, 154. 123 CELS, Informe 2009, 112. 124 CELS, Informe 2011, 181, 179. 125 Verbitsky, Horacio. ‘Los treinta mil’, Pagina12, 27 June 2010. 126 United Nations Committee against Torture, ‘Issues Concluding Observations on Reports of Argentina, the United Kingdom and Greece.’ ; and ‘Comments submitted by the Government of Argentina on the conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture’, 2 February 2006 and 22 October 2007. 127 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 16, 22. 128 CELS, Report 2010, 166. Verdú, Represión en democracia (see note 36), 133. 129 Ibid., Verdú, 129. 130 Carlos Ernesto Motto, ‘Enfoque metodológico’, Muertes silenciadas (see note 7), 25. 131 Calzado and Maggio, ‘Medios de comunicación’, Muertes silenciadas, 95. 132 Daroqui, Muertes silenciadas (see note 7), 9ss. 133 Daiana Bruzzone, ‘Rock and rolls y muertes’, Pagina12, 6 February 2010.  134 CORREPI, ‘Archivo 2011’, Buenos Aires, 30 November 2011 135 Silvina Friera, ‘Las claves de la cuestión criminal’, Pagina12, 22 May 2011. 136 Chevigny, Edge of the Knife, 191. 137 Gabriel Sarfatti, Un discurso para el gatillo fácil (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del CCC, 2008), 42. 138 Motto, Muertes silenciadas, 29. 139 CELS, Informe 2010, 155, 160. 140 CORREPI, ‘Persecuciones y allanamientos que terminan en fusilamientos’, Boletín informativo 525, 25 June 2009. 141 Ibid., CELS, Informe 2010, 127. 142 CORREPI, Boletín informativo 454, 18 November 2007. 143 ‘Kirchner repudió la violencia y afirmó que Fuentealba ‘fue fusilado’,

144 CORREPI, Boletín informativo 610, 31 May 2011. 145 Motto, Muertes silenciadas, 31. 146 Ibid., 30. 147 Verdú, Represión en democracia (see note 36), 162. 148 ‘Menem: no queda otra salida que la mano dura frente a la inseguridad’, Clarín, 13 September 1998. 149 Juan Carlos Onganía, La Razón, 22 September 1965, quoted in Nunca Más 150 María Marta García Negroni; Mónica Graciela Zoppi Fontana, Análisis lingüístico 120

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y discurso político: el poder de enunciar (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992). 151 Ibid., ‘Menem: no queda otra salida’. 152 Kalmanowiecki, ‘Origins and Applications’, (see note 273), 36. 153 Foucault, ‘Spaces of security’, (see note 75), 54. 154 Agamben, ‘Security & Terror’, (see note 164). 155 Confalonieri, ‘Cristina crea un Ministerio’, (see note 14). 156 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 6.

Chapter 4 Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim’, (see note 75), Marenin, ‘Police Performance’, (see note 68), 102. 3 Shearing and Ericson, ‘Culture as Figurative Action’, (see note 6), 489. 4 Waldman, Justicia en la calle (see note 68). 5 Rancière, ‘Ten Theses’, (see note 58), Thesis 7. 6 Christopher P Wilson, Cop Knowledge: Police Power And Cultural Narrative In Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5. 7 Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Political Language and Metaphor. Interpreting and Changing the World, Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo (eds) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 4. 8 Wilson, Cop Knowledge, 12. 9 William Terrill, Eugene A. Paoline III and Peter K. Manning, ‘Police Culture and Coercion’, Criminology 41(4). 10 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 122. 11 Ideas and Contributions. Democracy in Latin America (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2004), 26. 12 P. A. J. Waddington, ‘Police (canteen) Sub-culture. An Appreciation’, British Journal of Criminology 39(2). 13 CELS, Informe 2009, (see note 274), 173. 14 CELS, Informe 2010, 170. 15 Armony, The Dubious Link, (see note 189), 12. 16 Dubber, The Police Power, (see note 62), 115. 17 Diego Galeano, ‘“Caídos en cumplimiento del deber”. Notas sobre la construcción del heroísmo policial’, Mirada (de) uniforme. Historia y crítica de la razón policial in Gregorio Kaminsky and Diego Galeano (eds) (Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2011). 18 Dahl, Robert. After the Revolution?: Authority in a Good Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 45. 19 Ranciere, ‘Ten Theses’, (see note 58), Thesis 5. 20 Agamben, Homo Sacer, (see note 75), 132–3. 21 Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 75. 22 Esposito, Bios (see note 75), 32. 1 2

210 Notes Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations in Kathryn Shuterland (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1995). 24 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 231. 25 Lucía Eilbaum, ‘La policía ‘al servicio de la comunidad’: tradición policial y vientos de cambio’. Estudios en antropología jurídica. Burocracias y violencia in Sofia Tiscornia (ed.); (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2004). 26 Leslie E. Anderson ‘Of Wild and Cultivated Politics’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16(1). 27 Ruth Stanley, ‘Controlling the police in Buenos Aires’, (see note 68). 28 Saín, ‘Police, Politics, and Society, (see note 140), 55. 29 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘‘And why should I give a shit?” Notes on Sociability and Politics in Argentina and Brazil’, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). 30 Neocleous, The Fabrication, (see note 75), xi. 31 Question A80210D: ‘Hacen valer sus derechos: Un pobre’, Latinobarómetro

32 Question A505203: ‘Razones por las cuales no se trata a todos por igual’, Latinobarómetro. 33 Enrique Fentanes, Compendio de ciencia de la policía (Buenos Aires: Editorial Policial, 1979), 123. 34 Markus Dubber, ‘Miscarriage of Justice as Misnomer’ in Charles Ogletree and Sarat Austin Sarat (eds) When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 296. 35 Giubilei, Eliana, 5. ‘Rutinas Policiales. Entre la represión del delito y la administración de ilegalismos.’ Thesis. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, November 2009. 36 Pløger, (see note ??.), 52. 37 Valverde and Dubber, Police and the Liberal State (see note ??.), 4. 38 Neocleous, The Fabrication, 113. 39 Jacqueline Ross, ‘The Elusive Line Between Prevention and Detection of Crime in German Undercover Policing’, in Valverde and Dubber, Police and the Liberal State. 40 Marenin, ‘Police Performance’, (see note 68), 107. 41 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, ‘Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety’, Atlantic Monthly 249(3), March. Their argument, which Loïc Wacquant recently reassessed as the ‘so-called theory of Wilson and Kelling’ (265, see note 254) promotes and legitimizes heavy forms of police harassment and repression of the undesirable and the poor. 42 Carver and Pikalo, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, (see note 316), 2. 43 Otwin Marenin, ‘Police Training for Democracy’, Police Practice and Research 5(2), 107. 44 Neocleous, The Fabrication, 112. 45 Blackstone, quoted in Dubber, The Police Power (see note 75), 49. 46 Gastón Chiller, Fernando Rosúa, and Marcelo Saín. Las Reformas Policiales en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: CELS, 1998), 4. 23

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CELS, Informe 2010, 126. Mariana Sirimarco, ‘Acerca de lo que significa ser policía. El proceso de incorporación a la institución policial’, in Burocracias y violencia (see note 68), 245. 49 Ungar, Elusive Reform, (see note 68), 87, 89. 50 Kessler, ‘Miedo al crimen’, (see note 103), 96. 51 AOJ8, LAPOP, Argentina, 2008. 52 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, (see note 280), 141. 53 Ibid., 131. 54 Julie Taylor, ‘A Juridical Frankenstein, or Death in the Hands of the State’ in Austin Sarat (ed.) The Killing State (New York: Oxford, 2001). 55 CONADEP, Nunca Más (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1997). 56 Neocleous, The Fabrication, 78. 57 Taylor, ‘A Juridical Frankenstein’, 75. 58 J. Patrice McSherry, ‘Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System’, Social Justice, 26(4), 144. 59 Kate Millet, The Politics of Cruelty (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994), 244. 60 See the 2009, 2010, 2011 CELS Reports, CORREPI database and bulletins, Daroqui (note 7), and Verdú (note 36). 61 Martha Huggins, M. Haritos-Fatouros, and P. Zimbardo. Violence Workers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 62 Valverde, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law’, (see note 75), 18. 63 ‘La vida de policía se aprende en el cuerpo’, Pagina12, 11 February 2007. 64 Dubber, ‘Miscarriage of Justice as Misnomer’, (see note 343), 285. 65 Yahon Ezrahi, ‘The Theatrics and Mechanics of Action: The Theater and the Machine as Political Methapor’, Social Research 6(2). 47 48

Chapter 5 Gerardo L. Munck, Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 43, 47, 52. 2 Marenin, ‘Police Performance and State Rule’, (see note 68), 101. 3 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 22. 4 Dubber and Valverde, Police and the Liberal State, 5. 5 Neocleous, The Fabrication, 116. 6 Jason Seawrigth, ‘Democracy and Growth: A Case Study in Failed Causal Inference’, Regimes and Democracy in Latin America. Theories and Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 195. 7 Valverde, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law’, (see note 75), 17. 8 Tedesco and Barton, The State of Democracy, (see note 192), 33. 9 Gerardo L. Munck, ‘The Study of Politics and Democracy: Touchstones of a Research Agenda’ in Munck (ed.) Regimes and Democracy in Latin America, 35. 10 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Pobreza y desigualdad en América Latina. Algunas reflexiones políticas’ in V. E. Tokman and O’Donnell, G. Pobreza y Desigualdad en América Latina. Temas y Nuevos Desafíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1999), 85. 1

212 Notes Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Gerardo L. Munck, ‘The Regime Question: Theory Building in Democracy Studies’, World Politics 54; ‘The Study of Politics and Democracy’; see also the papers of the Committee on Concepts and methods at the International Political Science Association, . 12 Dahl, After the Revolution? Dahl identifies five forms of democratic rule, ranging from primary, direct democracy to polyarchy or the type of representative democracy that we have these days. 13 Tilly (see note 330), 7. Tilly classifies definitions of democracy into ‘constitutional, substantive, procedural, and process-oriented’. 14 Gerardo Munck, Measuring Democracy, xvi. 15 Sebastián Mazzuca, ‘Reconceptualizing Democratization: Access to Power Versus Exercise of Power’, in Munck, Regimes and Democracy in Latin America. 16 Political theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, or Jacques Rancière coincide in characterizing the democratic logic as one of progressive dissolution of inequality and subordination. 17 O’Donnell, ‘Pobreza y desigualdad’. 18 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), La democracia en América Latina. El debate conceptual sobre la democracia (New York: UNDP, 2004), 49. For perceptions of legal equality, see Tables 147 and 148 in UNDP, Democracy in Latin America. Statistical Compendium (New York: UNDP, 2004), 258ss. 19 UNDP, La democracia en América Latina, Table 26, 110. Argentine survey respondents ranked women, immigrants, members of indigenous communities and the poor for their chances to have their rights respected. 20 Gerardo Munck, Measuring Democracy, 52. 21 Susan Stokes, ‘Do Informal Rules Make Democracy Work? Accounting for Accountability in Argentina’, in Informal Institutions and Democracy (see note 69), 139. 22 Daniel M. Brinks, ‘The Rule of (Non)Law: Prosecuting Police Killings in Brazil and Argentina’, in Informal Institutions & Democracy (see note 69). 23 Aristotle, Politics, 1278a21. 24 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, (see note 75), 75. 25 Plato, Republic, (see note 64), 214–5. 26 Dubber, The Police Power, xiii. 27 Dahl, On Democracy, 7. 28 Blackstone, in Dubber, The Police Power, xii. 29 Carl Schmitt, La Notion de Politique Preface de Julien Freund (Paris: Calmann-Lévy), 45. 30 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991). 31 On this, see both Dahl’s and Ranciere’s converging analyses. 32 Aristotle, Politics, 1278a21. 33 Monique Marks, ‘Researching Police Transformation: The Ethnographic Imperative’, The British Journal of Criminology 44(6). 34 Osvaldo Barreneche, ‘La reforma policial del peronismo en la provincia de Buenos Aires, 1946–1951’, Desarrollo económico 47(186). 35 Larry Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, Journal of Democracy 13(2). 11

Notes

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Marenin, ‘Police Training’, (see note 352), 108. David H. Bayley, Changing the Guard. Developing Democratic Police Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 38 Mary Rose Kubal, ‘Democratic Policing’ Paradigms in Practice: Less-ThanDemocratic Outcomes in Argentina and Chile’, Paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association Conference, Montreal, 1 June 2010. 39 Loader and Walker, Civilizing Security, (see note 152), 10–6. 40 Paulo de Mesquita Neto, ‘Paths Toward Democratic Policing in Latin America’, Human Rights and the Police in Transitional Countries in L. Lindholt (ed.) (PLACE, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003). 41 Sklansky, Police and the Liberal State, (see note 75), 109. 42 O’Donnell, ‘Estado, Democratizacion y ciudadanía’, Nueva Sociedad 128, 70. 43 Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, 19. 44 Richard Synder, ‘Scaling Down: The Subnational Comparative Method’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 36(1), 93–110. Advantages of the ‘subnational comparative method’ include allowing an increase in the number of units in a study, helping to overcome small N limitations in research designs. Units of analysis defined at the subnational level also allow researchers to categorize and code cases more accurately, accounting for heterogeneities that tend to be lost when the unit is the entire country. Finally, the choice of subnational units facilitates dealing with ‘spatially uneven nature of major processes of political and economic transformation’, as is the case of democratization. 45 Stokes, ‘Do Informal Rules Make Democracy Work?’ 128–29. Regional differences, Stokes shows, predict expectations of accountability. The rest of the citations of Stokes in this paragraph correspond to pages 134, 139, 129 and 138. 46 ‘Disputa por un muro entre San Isidro y San Fernando’ La Nación, 9 April 2009. 47 Jason Seawrigth, ‘Democracy and Growth: A Case Study in Failed Causal Inference’, in Munck (ed.) Regimes and Democracy, (see note 380), 195. 48 Daniel Brinks, ‘The Rule of (Non)Law: Prosecuting Police Killings in Brazil and Argentina’, Informal Institutions & Democracy (see note 69). 49 Daroqui, Muertes silenciadas, (see note 7), 124. 50 Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks and Aníbal Perez-Liñán, ‘Classifying Political Regimes in Latin America’, Regimes and Democracy, 123. 51 Munck, Measuring Democracy, (see note 388), 52. 52 Bureau of Justice, ‘Deaths In Custody Reporting Program’, 53 The Freedom House, 54 Mainwaring, Brinks and Perez-Liñán, 151. 55 Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi, Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996–2008 (29 June 2009). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4978, , 77–8. 56 Indice de democracia electoral (IDE). See ‘La metodología para la elaboración de indicadores’, Indicadores de desarrollo de la democracia, Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo (PNUD) La democracia en América Latina. Compendio estadístico (see note 392), 13. 57 David Beetham, Edzia Carvalho, Todd Landman and Stuart Weir, Assessing the Quality of Democracy: A Practical Guide (Stockholm, Sweden: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 2008), Table 2.5, 190. 36 37

214 Notes Ibid., 192, 300–301. José Miguel Cruz, “Police Abuse in Latin America,” AmericasBarometer Insights 11, 2009. 60 Carver and Pikalo, (see note 316), 1; Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. ‘The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system’, Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal 4(2), 195–208; Kathleen Carley, ‘Extracting Culture Through Textual Analysis.’ Poetics 22. 61 Tilly, Democracy, (see note 330), 71–2. 62 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 18. 63 Tedesco and Barton, The State of Democracy, (see note 192), 33. 58 59

Chapter 6 Neocleous, The Fabrication, xi. Franken Paul, ‘On Three “Inherent” Powers’, The Monist 66(4), 537–8. 3 Schmitt, The Leviathan, (see note 48), 31. 4 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 29. 5 Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, Bringing the State Back In, (see note 160), 6 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Eveline Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens. Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 159. 7 Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty. Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth. Abridged and translated by Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8 Preston King T, The Ideology of Order. A Comparative Analysis of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes (London: Frank Cass, 1999). 9 Hobbes, Leviathan, (see note 49), 138. 10 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, (see note 234), 240. 11 Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In: Current Research’, Bringing the State Back In, 22. 12 Mladek, ‘Exception Rules’, (see note ??), 222. 13 Esposito, Bios, (see note 75), 40. 14 Leviathan, 7. 15 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (also previously published as ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge), 34. The citations that follow in this paragraph are from pages 27, 28, 30 and 27. 16 Tedesco and Barton, The State of Democracy (see note 192), 32. 17 Oscar Oszlak, ‘El Estado Democrático en América Latina y el Caribe’, Nueva Sociedad 42. 18 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Why the Rule of Law Matters’, Journal of Democracy 15(4), 34–5, 32. 19 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’, Cardozo Law Review 11, 925. 20 Dubber, The Police Power (see note 75), 24, xv. 1 2

Notes

215

Dubber, ‘Criminal Police and Criminal Law’, Police and the Liberal State (see note 75), 93. 22 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, (see note 75), 339. 23 Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002), 79. 24 Valverde, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law’ (see note 75), 3. 25 Knemeyer, ‘Polizei’, (see note 51). 26 Neocleous, The Fabrication, 1–5. 27 Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’ (see note 75), 410, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, (see note 75), 315; Dean, Governmentality, (see note 75), 201. 28 Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, 317. 29 Dubber, The Police Power, 113. 30 Ibid., 72. 31 Lipsky (see note 70), 13–26. 32 James Q. Wilson, ‘Dilemmas of Police Administration’, Public Administration Review (September October 1968), 413. 33 Novak, ‘Police Power’ (see note 75), 55. 34 John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino, ‘The law of the Exception: A Typology of Emergency Powers’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 2(2), 216. 35 Dubber, The Police Power, p. 75, and Dubber, ‘Miscarriage of Justice as Misnomer’, in When Law Fails p. 281. 36 Wendy Brown, States of Injury. Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 176. 37 Manuel Medina Ortega, ‘The United States and Europe: Political Cleavages and the Use of Law’, Dean Rusk Center, Occasional Papers Series 2, University of Georgia School of Law, 2003. 38 Neocleous, ‘Security, Liberty, and the Myth of “Balance’ ”, (see note 43), 135. 39 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government in Peter Laslett (ed.) (PLACE: Cambridge University Press, 1988),§199, 202. 40 John T. Scott, ‘The Sovereignless State and Locke’s Language of Obligation’, American Political Science Review 94(3), 547. 41 Dubber, The Police Power, 47. 42 Locke, Two Treatises, §160, §166, §160. 43 Clement Fatovic, ‘Constitutionalism and Contingency: Locke’s Theory of Prerogative’, History of Political Thought, 25(2), 278. 44 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 150–1. 45 Fatovic, ‘Constitutionalism’, 287. 46 Pasquino and Ferejohn, ‘The law of the exception’, 22. 47 Locke, Two Treatises, §146. The citations in the rest of the paragraph come from §147 and §148. 48 Fatovic, ‘Constitutionalism and Presidential Prerogative’, 431. 49 Austin Sarat, Mercy on Trial: What it Means to Stop an Execution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 154. 50 Pasquino, ‘Locke on King’s Prerogative’, 201. 51 Vivienne Brown, ‘The ‘Figure’ of God and the Limits to Liberalism: A Rereading of Locke’s Essay and Two Treatises’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60(1), 94. 21

216 Notes Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, 417. Sheldon Wolin, ‘Democracy and the Welfare State: The Political and Theoretical Connections Between Staatsrason and Wohlfahrtsstaatsrason’, Political Theory 15(4). 54 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 6. 55 Locke, §168. 56 Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, 152. 57 Locke, §152. 58 Clement Fatovic, ‘Constitutionalism and Contingency: Locke’s Theory Of Prerogative’. History of Political Thought 25(2), 296. 59 Arnold, ‘Domestic War’, (see note 8), 17. 60 Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain, ‘On Lawful Lawlessness: George Ryan, Executive Clemency, and the Rhetoric of Sparing Life’, Stanford Law Review 56. 61 Arnold, 3. 62 Franken Paul, ‘Three ‘Inherent’ Powers’ (see note 438), 536. 63 Neocleous, ‘The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency” ’, Global, Local, Political 31(2). 64 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality (London: Sage, 1999, reprinted 2008), 121. 65 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, (see note 75), 339. 66 Ibid., 339–40. 67 Foucault. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 138. 68 Dubber, The Police Power (see note 75), 43; Raymond Westbrook, ‘Vitae Necisque Potestas’, Historia 48(2). 69 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 240. 70 Westbrook, ‘Vitae Nescique Potestas’, 211. 71 Aristotle’s definition of humans as reaching full development only as members of a political community, which excludes stateless beings from humanity without considering the contingency of their condition, can be apprehended only from a bio-political rationale, Agamben observes. 72 Agamben, ‘Sovereign Police’, (see note 50), 103. 73 Ibid., 104 74 Agamben, Homo Sacer, (see note 75), 174. 75 Feldman, ‘The Banality of Emergency’, (see note 5), 154. 76 Ibid., Feldman, 156. 77 Ibid., 155. 78 Dubber, ‘Criminal Police and Criminal Law in the Reechtsstaat’, Police and the Liberal State (see note 75), 99; The Police Power, 157. 79 ‘Charla con Isabel Basualdo, a 13 años de la desaparición de su hijo Martín y Héctor Gómez’, El Colectivo 2(14), Paraná, May/June 2007. 80 Agamben, ‘Sovereign Police’, 105. 81 Esposito, Bios (see note 75), 41, 35. 82 Dubber, The Police Power, 75; Valverde, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law’ (see note 75), 26. Pastoral power, after the image of the herdsman and his flock, combines care with surveillance, as the herdsman/leader must take care simultaneously of both his herd and of each individual within it. Central in the Christian 52 53

Notes

217

Church, pastoral power was adapted by modern states as they assembled police mechanisms. 83 Benjamin (see note 54), 243. 84 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, (see note 455), 1011, 1013. 85 Dubber, The Police Power, 75. 86 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1011, 1013. 87 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91. 88 Foucault, Power (see note 75), 124. 89 Westbrook, ‘Vitae Nescique Potestas’, (see note 503), 209. 90 Dubber, The Police Power, 85 . 91 Ibid. 92 Mark E. Kann, ‘Limited Liberty, Durable Patriarchy’, Police and the Liberal State (see note 75), 74. 93 Dubber, The Police Power, 66. 94 Andrew Neal, ‘‘Cutting off the King’s head’: Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of Sovereignty’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, 397. 95 Ibid., 256. 96 Valverde, ‘Police, Sovereignty, and Law’, 25 97 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 259. 98 Ibid., 260. The following three citations in this paragraph are from the same page. 99 Kalmanowiecki, ‘Origins and Applications’, (see note 273), 49. 100 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 64. 101 Ibid., 74. 102 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 175. 103 Carver and Pikalo, (see note 316), 3. 104 Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003), 4. 105 Schmitt, The Leviathan (see note 48), 5. See the introductory chapter and Chapter 1. 106 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘From the King’s House to the Reason of State’, Constellations 11 (1), 30. 107 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 34. 108 Neal, ‘Cutting off the King’s Head’, 381. 109 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 20. 110 Ibid. 111 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 283. 112 Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, Capitalist Development (see note 442), 274–5. 113 Miguel Angel Centeno, ‘Limited War and Limited States’, in Davis and Pereira (see note 68), 82. 114 Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, (see note 160), 170. 115 Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, 276. 116 Foucault, Power/Knowledge (see note 75), 40. 117 Tedesco and Barton, The State of Democracy, (see note 192), 26. The state comprises ‘the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the public administration,

218 Notes and security forces (military and police). The final element – social relations – is shaped by social structures.’ 27. 118 Anthony Pereira, ‘State Formation and Violence’, in Davis and Pereira (see note 68), 388–9. 119 Friedrich Nietzsche/Walter Kauffmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: London: Penguin, 1976), 160. 120 Antonio Gramsci, ‘State and Civil Society’, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers), 238. 121 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 21. 122 Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia (Glenn W. Most: Harvard University Press, 2006), 29. 123 M. L.West, ‘Three Presocratic Cosmologies’, The Classical Quarterly 13(2), 163. 124 Davis, ‘Irregular Armed Forces’, Theory & Society (see note 116), 409. 125 Ibid., 407, 404. 126 Davis and Pereira, ‘Introduction’, (see note 68), 7. 127 Davis, ‘Irregular Armed Forces’, 405. Based on newspapers, Davis reports 3,553 killings in roughly six months in 2009.

Conclusion Ernesto Tenembaum, ‘La vida, la muerte y todo lo demás’, Veintitrés, 24 June, 2010. 2 Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’ (see note 166), 345. 3 Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form’ in Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds) London: Verso, 1991), 102. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London; Verso, 1983), 26, 163ss. 5 Esposito, Communitas, (see note 75), 16. 6 Balibar, ‘The Nation Form’, 93–94. 7 Pablo Dalle, ‘La nación imposible, la que somos y la anhelada. Reflexiones sobre la identidad nacional argentina’, Intersticios: Revista Sociológica de Pensamiento Crítico 2(1). 8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 9 Michael Goebel, ‘Nationalism and Political Violence in Argentina’, Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America in Will Fowler and Peter Lambert (eds) (Palgrave Macmillian, 2006), 210. 10 Dalle, ‘La nación imposible’, 203. 11 Sklansky, Police and the Liberal State (see note 75), 109. 12 Esposito, Communitas, 96 13 Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2011). 14 Esposito, Communitas, 8. 15 Robinson, Cyril D. and Richard Scaglion, ‘The Origin and Evolution of the Police Function in Society: Notes Toward a Theory’, Law and Society Review 21(1), 118, 131, 112–13. 16 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, Power (see note 75), 42–43, 46. 17 Esposito, Communitas, 28. 18 Davis, ‘Irregular Armed Forces’, (see note 116), 401. 1

Notes

219

Guido Galafassi, ‘Social Movements, Conflicts and a Perspective of Inclusive Democracy in Argentina’, Democracy & Nature 9(3). 20 Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Edinburgh, Oakland: AK Press, 2006). 21 Deborah Reed-Danahay, Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1997); Heewon Chang, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2008). 22 Ranciere, ‘Ten Theses’, (see note 58), Thesis 5. 23 Esposito, Communitas, (see note 75), 29. 24 Esposito, Bios (see note 75), 97. 25 Neocleous, ‘Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance’, 146. 26 Esposito, Bios, 157. 27 Aristotle, Politics, 87–88 (1278b17). 28 Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise, Samuel Shirley trans.; introduction and notes by Steven Barbone and Lee Rice: (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 38. For a different version, see A Treatise on Politics (London: Holyoake, 1854), 18. 29 Esposito, Bios, 186. 30 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community 7th edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 43. 31 Etienne Balibar, ‘Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance for Citizenship’, Rethinking Marxism 20(4), 526. 19

Index

accountability informal rules 140 a posteriori 165 Acuerdo para la Seguridad Democrática 147 Agamben, Giorgio biopower 69 dispositif 4 the people 99 police sovereign exercises 12, 167, 169 the poor 70, 74 security 57 singularity 192 on sovereign power 168 sovereignty and biopolitics 166 agenda, ‘law and order’ 273 Arendt, Hannah political experience 12 politics and life 19 right to have rights 76, 101 Argentine police bonaerense 1, 36, 38, 40, 45, 134 Federal Police 36–7, 47, 113, 122 number of police personnel 36 Policía de Buenos Aires (PoL2) 46, 116 provincial police forces 36 role during El Proceso 118 Aristotle biopower 69, 167, 192 on citizenship 130, 132 forms of government 13 household management (oikonomie) 13 police governance 12 political/non-political 148 specific human traits 69 armed non-state actors 180

Arslanián, León reform 44–5 second term 47–116 Asignación Universal por Hijo 7 Balibar, Etienne democratization of democracy 192 life zones and death zones 74 the people 183 Barreneche, Osvaldo 44 Benjamin, Walter police 169, 172 biopower 69, 70, 71, 133, 148 in Agamben 69 in Esposito 100 in Foucault 69–70 and life hierarchies 191 and sovereign power 166–7, 169 in Valverde 172 Blajaquis, Camilo 72 Blumberg, Axel see also Blumberg, Juan Carlos Blumberg, Juan Carlos 8, 45–6, 86 ‘Blumberg Laws’ 46 bonaerense see Argentine Police Brinks, Daniel arbitrary killings by the police 104 informal police rules 130 patterns of police killings 141 Butler, Judith state production of the excluded 75 Cabezas, José Luis 40 CAESI 48, 50 carapintada 49 care 187 cartoneros 67 Cavallo, Domingo 63

222 Index CCTV 74 CEAMSE (Coordinación Ecológica Area Metropolitana) 66 Sociedad del Estado 66 CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales) 6 cifra negra 27 see also unreported crime Citizen Security Doctrine 76 Código de Convivencia 46 Cohen, Stanley 23 common good as end of the government 162 invoked by the police 167–8 comparativists x, 10, 1 Conurbano 25, 30, 144 asentamientos 31 drug trafficking 39 irregular private security workers 50 lawless areas 107 Plan Centinela 47 villas 30 wealthier areas 28, 30, 141, 201n. 40 corralito 63 CORREPI (Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression) 6 estimate of killings by the police 82 inseguridad 57 police violence against activists 83 corruption in Argentina 39 la bonaerense 44 local networks 45 police corruption, involvement in crime 38–9, 44, 57 in surveys 143–4 country risk 63 crime crime prevention 27, 47, 73, 102, 177 crime waves 22–4 see also olas perception 9, 26 stigmatized zones 28–9 unreported 24 see also cifra negra victimization of the poor 28 criminal suspects as security threat 43, 85, 103 Dahl, Robert 13, 98–9, 128

Davis, Diane 29, 179, 188 Davis, Mike 67 De la Rúa, Fernando democratic policing 139 ‘democratic’ state repression 48 state of emergency 63 De Narváez, Francisco 34, 51 December crisis 8, 61 democracy expanding horizon 129 minimalist definitions 128 quality of democracy 129, 132 Rancière’s definition 13 Sklanky’s definition 139 democratic citizenship 99 democratization 1, 15 comparative studies of democratization 10, 16, 127 Latin America 127 obstacles 15 policing 127 scaling-down in the study of democratization 126 thresholds 125 despotism 13–4, 132 John Stuart Mill 132 Diamond, Larry 140 dispositif vii–viii, 3–6, 17, 58–9, 92, 149, 182 Dubber, Markus police as a basic mode of governance viii, 13, 107, 122, 160 police elimination of threats 95, 103, 105 police as governmentality 131 police power 151, 156, 159 police preventive character 156–7 police rules 156 Duhalde, Eduardo 44, 186 edicts 40 El Proceso 5, 10, 44, 59, 85, 87, 98, 117–9 legal legacies 134 and neoliberalism 5 emergency and crime 23

Index and police power 152, 156, 158, 166 politics of emergency (Leonard Feldman) 2 state of emergency 63, 152 Esposito, Roberto biopolitical distinctions 69 biopower and sovereign power 169 biopower, subjectivity, and death 100 care and communities 187 fear 191 hyper-immunity 191 juridicization of sovereign power 152 life’s immanence 192 politics’ death drive 191 risk creation 10 estado policial 158 fear of crime vii 3–6, 9, 21, 42, 52, 54, 60, 182 Federal Police 36–7, 47, 113, 122 of the poor 171 Feldman, Leonard on Agamben 167–8 on emergency 2 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina 7 human rights 113 seguridad 3, 43, 47 Ferreyra, ‘Malevo’ 41–2 firearms in Argentina 51 fora 45 Foucault, Michel ancient roots of sovereignty 166 antinomies of political reason 181 biopower 69–71, 166, 172 crime 57 critique of the state 152–3, 169, 175 dispositif definition, 58–9 security dispositifs 87 as universal 4 episteme 59 expropriating the administration of conflict 187 governing practices 1 governmental regime 62, 127 law 170

223

liberal representations of life 10 the monstrous 177 the Nazi state 172 police 75, 89, 131, 157, 165, 167, 170 police vs. justice 156 prisons 177 race 171 regime 130 sovereign power 152, 166–7, 171–2, 176 sovereignty in political theory 170 surface discourses 93 Freedom House 143–4 garantismo 41 Garré, Nilda 25, 38, 47 gente vs. delincuentes 4, 9, 25, 42, 94, 103, 182 governmental agenda vii, 6, 10, 16, 58, 182 governmentality 15, 131 Dean, Mitchell 185 governmentalities of the lesser 133 multiple regimes 131 and policing 15 Gramsci, Antonio 178 hierarchy interrelated hierarchies (Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White) 70 unjustifiable hierarchy (Sklansky, Alan) 12 of worth 13, 69–70 Hobbes, Thomas fear 60 Leviathan 11, 153 magistrates 11, 153 police power 11 sovereign power 11, 159 sovereign prerogativen 151 state 17 hyper-inflation 62, 65, 69 IDE (Index of Electoral Democracy) 144 INDEC (Instituto nacional de estadísticas y censos) 7

224 Index indigenous peoples 79, 81, 129, 184 inflation 7 informal economy 50, 65 informal institutions 197n. 69 informal policies viii, 15, 94, 141, 157 inseguridad 3, 21, 22, 35 waves 22–3 sources 69 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 62–3 invisibility 75, 94 judiciary alleged permissiveness toward criminals 43 prerogative power 164 protecting the police 81, 140 trust in the judiciary 52–3 Kalmanowiecki, Laura Buenos Aires hegemony 37 the dangerous classes 173 unaccountable Argentine police 37 Kirchner, Néstor 46, 51, 84 LAPOP (Latin American Public Opinion Project) 21, 40, 144–5 Latinobarómetro 3, 21 law enforcement 14, 154 Law of Internal Security 35, 43 Leviathan,11, 174–5, 178 Foucault 152–3, 175 neoliberal Leviathan (Loïc Wacquant) 75 police voices 94 promise 174 Schmitt, Carl 175 a security dispositif 149 liberalism and democracy 5–6 LICIP (Laboratorio de Investigaciones sobre Crimen, Instituciones y Políticas) 28 little sovereigns 175, 192 Locke, John agents of prerogative 160–1, 163–5 ‘appeal to Heaven’ 163 federative power 161

legal vs. prudential 162 low-ranking state officials 163 prerogative 17, 160–2, 175 representation of the state 164 rule of law 160, 162 mano dura 41–2 McSherry, Patrice 62, 211n. 58 media crime coverage 24, 26, 42, 81 fear 27, 77 influence on public opinion 25 ‘the people’ 52 and the police 27, 82 scandals 39, 56 seguridad 3, 9 stigmatizing the poor 31 metaphor 93, 102–3, 109, 149, in political theory 11, 153, 175 method in political theory 16–7 military, the in domestic security 35, 85, 118 militarization 125, 118–9 Ministerio de Seguridad 3, 48, 186 Mitchell, Timothy 174 moral panics 23 Munck, Gerardo 128, 144 Munck, Ronaldo 6, 61 National security doctrine 43 necroeconomics (Montag, Warren) 71 necropolitics (Mbembe, Achille) 58 Neocleous, Mark body of the state 176, 178 insecurity and the human condition 191 liberty and security 10 national identity and security 3 police fabrication of social order 150, 165 police rules 111 police shaping of civil society 105, 118 similarities between police powers across societies 126 state and police 150

Index neoliberalism 61–2 and authoritarian rule 5 non-state actors 165, 177, 180 O’Donnell, Guillermo elite perception of order 104 quality of democracy 128–9 rule of law 154 state legality 140 Oikos 13, 71 olas de inseguridad 22, 26 ontology 13, 57, 70 paco 56, 77 Palacios, ‘Fino’ 41–2 Parque Indoamericano 47 patriarchal household 131 household management 13 as a model for monarchical rule 132, 166 Patti, Luis 41–2, 51 picana eléctrica 81, 117 piqueteros 63, 67 Plan Nacional de Participación Comunitaria 47 Plan of Crime Prevention 43 Plato the city and the soul 131 function 100 stigmatizing the poor 70 police administering access 15, 76, 91, 94, 126, 133, 151 agents 36 ‘art of government’ (Foucault) 89 autonomy 44, 47, 134–5 as auxiliary of the military 127 categorizing 79, 94, 99, 131 and the common good 167 condensing the state 12, 150–1, 182 corruption 120 culture (regional) 141 discretion 41, 110, 157 discursive practices 91 and the division of powers 159 emergency rule 159–9 episteme 90, 92–3, 100

225 as experts on crime 27, 92 as a family 122 as a friend 121 function (Dubber, Markus) 95 general welfare viii, 165 as governing agents viii as a governing organ 12 grassroots governance vii–viii, x, 5, 35, 70, 134, 152 hierarchies 70 informal policymaking 90 informers 114 intelligence 108, 117 killings by the police 59, 81–2, 84, 142 law enforcement 153, 155 laws 169, 87 likened to the military 40 mercy 112 offenses 111 olfato policial 109 ontological productivity 91, 105 order maintenance 155, 156 oversight 112, 115 the nation 19, 183 ‘partitioning the sensible’ (Ranciere) 70 police brutality 75, police dictatorship (Taylor, Julie) 117 the police as a gang 65 ‘police method’ 118, 125 police regime 9, 17, 142 the police as a soldier (Fentanes, Enrique) 105 ‘police wars’ 86, 173 policing 15 policing of poverty viii, 60 political conduction of the police 43–4 in political theory 16, 165 politicians 137, 151 prerogative viii, 1, 93, 152, 158–9, 165, 170 prevention 102–3, 155 purges 44 quality of policing and ruling (Marenin, Otwin) 125 reforms 40 repression 83, 117

226 Index repressive dimension 107 as reproducing hegemonic views 140 revolution 137 rise of police 156–7 rules 156 Schmitt’s definition 132 sovereign 70, 167 symbolic power 2, 27 traits 96, 114, 125, 169 treatment of indigenous peoples 79, 185 treatment of the poor 31, 72, 74–5, 191 trust 97–8 unwritten rules (Brinks, Daniel) 104 violence 81 police of the Buenos Aires province see bonaerense police state 125 political governance of seguridad 44 political 12–3, 134 political vs. non-political 14, 130, 132 Polizei 156 Polizeistaat 156 populism of fear (Chevigny, Paul) 51 poverty alternative estimates 6–7, 68 criminalization 60, 76 policing of the poor 74–5 as ‘shadow’ (Agamben, Giorgio) 70 as stigma 77 prerogative agents 2, 165 and the common good 162 definition in John Locke 160–1 dimension of the state (Brown, Wendy) 159 grassroots exercises 91, 94, 159 in liberal democracies 165 in modern repubics 164 and the police 1, 152 sovereign prerogative 151, 158–9 private security (in Argentina) 48–9 quality of democracy O’Donnell, Guillermo 128–9 Stokes, Susan 140

regime 1, 15, 18, 58, 125 conceptual and methodological aspects 128–9 police regime 9, 17, 126, 133 political regime 130 Rejali, Darius first victims of picana in Argentina 117 torture 81 torture and regime type 125 Saín, Marcelo on police autonomy 44 police criminal involvement 39 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 78, 184 scaling down 126, 139–40 Schmitt, Carl Leviathan 175 police 132 the sovereign 162 state and police 150 Scioli, Daniel 3, 47 Scott, James legibility by the state 58 security cameras 74 security forces 31 seguridad a dispositif 17, 79, 84, 87, 91, 102, 106, 133, 181 experts 35, 43–4 a governmental agenda 58, 182 ontological productivity 57, 72 a principle of formation (Michael Dillon) viii as a script 25 seguridad ciudadana 76 university programs, research, and degrees 34 shock therapy 64 Skocpol, Theda state 150 Smith, Adam police 12 the poor 71, 100 sovereign prerogative see prerogative Spinoza, Baruch 192

Index Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White hierarchies 70 state apparatuses 132 chain of governance 142 definition of threats 76, 177 fabrication of social order (Neocleous, Mark) 165 fragmented sovereignty (Davis, Diane) 188 governance 15 grassroots agents 11 institutional traits 120 internal enemies in Argentina 86 in Latin America 153, 176–7 monopoly of legitimate force 177 as a monster 11, 153, 176, 178 order 95 police backbone 151 power to kill 172 security dispositifs 88 state formation 176, 187 state terror 5, 85–6, 98, 104 the state’s perspective 70 street children 81 suboficiales 38 subversión 84 surveys the Americas Barometer 40 Gallup 21, 25 LAPOP 21, 40, 144–5 Latinobarómetro 3, 21 Svampa, Maristella Citizen security doctrine 76 Patrimonial citizenship 76 Tilly, Charles analytical narratives 148 categorical inequalities 100 irregular violence and the emergence of the state 180 modern states as protection rackets 177 war-making and state-making 176 torture ‘clean torture’ (Rejali) 149

227

definition (Rejali) 81 euphemisms 104, 116 picana eléctrica 81, 117 in present Argentina 9, 59, 67, 75, 80 and regime type 125 under the dictatorship of El Proceso 98 Transparency International corruption in Argentina 39 Typhon 178–9 UCEP (Unidad de Control del Espacio Público) 75 Valverde, Mariana institutions 93, 120 police power as boundless 156 police power as a mode of governance police, sovereignty, biopolitics 172 on the political valence of police power 125 vecinos as subjects of police protection 51, 102 victimization 9, 27–8, 34, 54, 77 villas miseria or villas de emergencia in the 1950s 67 in the 2000s 65, 67 in the Conurbano 30–1 cumbia villera 73 expansion 29 as hideouts for criminals 31 police harassment 74–5 as stateless 179 as stigma 31, 67 vitae necisque potestas 166, 168 Waldman, Peter 91–2 Washington Consensus 62 World Bank 62–3 Governance Indicators 143 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Survey (GCS) 143 Young, Iris Marion political philosophers and the police 16

228 Index zero tolerance 40, 85 zoning as a biopolitical practice 69 distinctions 140

as a police practice 114 and regime assessment 18, 94 and security 28