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ENGLISH VERSION
Jackboots on the beat
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VERSIÓN ESPAÑOL
Ronda militarizada
El candidato a la gobernación bonaerense Luis Patti jamás se destacó por su sutileza, ni durante su pasado policial ni en su más reciente carrera como político de derecha, pero el momento elegido para su llamado en favor de una policía militarizada (a apenas dos días de que el ex-capellán de la policía bonaerense Christian von Wernich fuera sentenciado a cadena perpetua por crímenes de lesa humanidad) fue especialmente torpe. A fin de cuentas, todos los crímenes por los que se condenó a von Wernich fueron cometidos en el contexto de una fuerza policial que acababa de ser militarizada luego del golpe militar de 1976, cuando se reemplazó a la jerarquía policial subordinada al gobierno civil por el tristemente célebre General Ramón Camps. Y al recordar a todos a la policía de Camps de la que Patti también formó parte, éste no hace más que revivir los temas que llevaron a que se le impidiera el acceso a la banca de diputado para la que fuera democráticamente electo en 2005 (por más injusta que haya resultado esa prohibición).
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Buenos Aires gubernatorial candidate Luis Patti has never been famous for his subtlety during either his police past or his more recent rightwing political career but the timing of his call for a militarized police (just two days after former Buenos Aires provincial police chaplain Christian von Wernich was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity) was especially crude. After all, the crimes for which Von Wernich was convicted were all committed within the context of a police force which had just been militarized after the 1976 coup with the previous police authorities under civilian control replaced by the notorious General Ramón Camps. And by reminding everybody of the Camps police which Patti also manned, he is only reviving the questions which led to him being barred from the Congress seat to which he was democratically elected in 2005 (however unfair that ban might have been).
The fact that Patti has been elected to both the Escobar mayoralty and a Congress seat shows that he is not alone in his ideas but his firm stance on law and order offers no real answers. The Camps experience was a disastrous advertisement for the idea of a militarized police (so much so that Camps was removed by the military régime itself in late 1977 long before the return of democracy) but even military police forces which are able to fit into democracy (as in Brazil and Chile) often seem to end up taking the crime problem up to new levels rather than crushing it. Thus neither the militarized police of Brazil nor direct use of the military in Colombia have prevented drug-trafficking and other criminal elements in the former country and the narco-terrorists of the latter from escalating their firepower to equivalent levels. Furthermore, many of the causes of crime, such as the truly alarming increase in the consumption of the drug paco in lower-income neighbourhoods, go beyond being a police problem, having deep social and cultural roots.
The limitations of Patti’s approach in no way mean that crime is not a far more serious problem in Buenos Aires province than its current authorities would have us believe nor that there were not various unsatisfactory aspects about the von Wernich trial (if the chaplain was a “genocide” just for hanging around torture centres, for example, where does that leave Adolf Hitler or Julio Argentino Roca for that matter?) But just as war is too important to be left to the generals (according to Clemenceau’s dictum), crime is probably too important to be left to the policemen.
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