Argentina: Heavy Trading in Insecurities

"You are afraid of god and the devil, of the priest and the neighbour, of your employer and boss, of the politician and policeman, of the judge and the jailer, of the law and the government. All your life is a long chain of fears ..."
- Alexander Berkman (from What is Anarchist Communism? 1929)

"Without the use of violence there would be no state" - Max Weber (Essays in Sociology, OUP, 1958)

These are violent times in which we live. And they're getting worse. Is that true, or is it just a perception? Whatever it is, it is not unique to this country or to this continent. On the contrary, the perception is stronger where capital's need to create and sustain it is greater: in the "emerging" countries of the world, where real hunger in the stomach risks undermining the manifold joys of capitalism's new virtual circus.
One such country is Argentina. The new Alianza government of De la Rúa is 'virtually' indistinguishable from the previous one of Menem, humbly obeying the dictates of the IMF and the foreign multinationals as did its predecessor. Following the standard formulas of the SAPs to the letter, they are raising taxes to pay off the debt while cutting jobs, slashing pensions, selling off everything but the very air, causing desperation.
The gap between rich and poor is growing at an alarming rate, and people are afraid; as they were back at the time of the electoral campaign last year, when De la Rúa was depicted in one of his TV ads striding confidently towards the future, surrounded by a mysterious gang of leather-clad machine-gun-toting henchmen. He was gonna clean up this country! Politicians need to be macho in Latin America today, as Chavez in his army fatigues and Fujimori the hostage-taker-killer will testify.
For his part, Menem, when president, launched two major offensives on the 'tough on crime" theme. First he accused immigrants (now what civilized politician here would ever do that?) and then a "wave of violence" of mysterious origin that enabled him to affirm that crime is only eliminated by applying "zero tolerance" and giving more powers to the police. As Giuliani and Straw will testify, there's nothing new in the world of modern policing.
Now De la Rúa is 'safely' installed, the honeymoon period is over, and fear eats the soul once more as before. The fear is of being a victim of crime. Official statistics differ as to the extent of the problem: According to the Ministry of the Interior, in 1998 - the most recent year for which records are available - 960,000 crimes were recorded (1 per minute) in Buenos Aires and its suburbs. The government of Buenos Aires gives the figure as 138,200 (1 every 4 minutes). For the Federal Police - answerable to the Ministry of the Interior - the number of crimes for that year was 199,148 (1 every 2.5 minutes). They can't agree how much crime is being committed, but they don't deny it's a lot.
For Marcelo Ciafardini, director of Crime Policy during Menem's government, however, "the general sensation of insecurity is always higher than the actual crime rate. What happens to others has a rebound effect, and the point is reached where 90% of the population are afraid of being attacked, though this doesn't mean that they actually will be".

Despite their undoubted knowledge of repressive techniques, the police seem to be far less effective at getting their person. As Ciafardini himself says, "there has been an increase in crime against property and the police only find those responsible in 5% of cases". Strangely, opinion polls also show that between 68% and 73% of the population fear those in uniform. What can they have done to deserve that?
The result of all this has been the privatization of security. There are 1,286 surveillance companies in Argentina, almost all run by former soldiers and police chiefs who served the last dictatorship; between them they have an army of 90,100 men, all armed, and last year they had a turnover of US$986 million. Muscles and guns are closely followed by CCTVs; there are 63 companies solely devoted to electronic and satellite surveillance.
Of course, the wealthiest sectors of the population, those with most reason to fear popular discontent, have the luxury of being able to hide away from it in their enclaves: closed-off neighbourhoods with high perimeter fences, CCTVs and armed private security guards. In total, there are 412 of these enclaves in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, with a further 87 under construction, and in the capital itself there are 68.
All this is out of the range of the less wealthy, but they can content themselves with all manner of off-the-shelf serenity-inducing goods on offer from the security industry: alarm systems at a cost of $1,500, tempered or laminated glass windows ($120 per square metre), reinforced doors ($2,500), special locks ($220), iron grills ($50 per square metre), electrocutors ($65) and paralysing gas aerosols ($9).
And of course we all sleep more soundly with a gun under our pillow: according to Gregorio Pomar, head of the National Weapons Register - a body run by the Army - there are 1.4 million authorised weapons registered by civilians. Coincidentally, there have been repeated cases of people taking justice into their own hands. Between 28 April of last year and March 15 of this, 16 killings were recorded in presumed self-defence. And the perpetrators are still out walking the streets. Tony Martin take note.
Yet this doesn't mean the prisons are empty. In the process of being privatized, needless to say, they are full to overflowing, and 77% of the prison population is composed of "first-time offenders", people without a previous record who were forced by desperation into minor acts of theft.
But it couldn't happen here, could it? Don't be so sure. Over the last few days the petrol shortage has led to fist-fights at the petrol pumps and the hoarding of bread and cans by people panicked into preparing for war. The fragility of our "civil" society is demonstrated by crises such as these, and the state well knows this; Jack Straw is already on the case.

(statistics and quotations from Noticias Aliadas, July 24, 2000)

Leslie Ray