Duhalde seems to have had his ear closer to the ground. A survey conducted in early December by the consulting firm OPSM shows 87.4% of respondents opposed to the piquetero practice of obstructing the highways, up from 61.2% only four weeks earlier. As many as 62.1% believe that this kind of protest endangers the democratic system. More politically significant, perhaps, is the fact that the proportion declaring support for the motives of the piqueteros has fallen from 73.9% at the beginning of the year to 56.2% now — and there is growing scepticism about those motives, with only 23.7% accepting their stated motive of unemployment and 14.1% citing poverty. On the other hand, 20.7% see political aims behind the protests, 15.4% see them as provoked by groups of activists, and 10.1% cite corruption. The scepticism has been growing rapidly: four weeks earlier, fewer than 1% cited either activist groups or corruption.
PARAGUAY | Threats follow police shake-up. Threats have been issued against the commandant of Paraguay's national police, Humberto Núñez, after the inauguration of the force's new department of internal affairs, considered a key piece of the anticorruption drive launched by interior minister Orlando Fiorotto. Núñez says he has no doubts that the threats have come from within police ranks.
Fiorotto's campaign began in November when one group of policemen were charged with abuse of authority and robbery after preying on exchange operators, and an entire brigade was dismantled after evidence emerged linking it with gangs of car thieves. The minister plans to transform the auto theft section into an independent unit staffed with `the best values' of the force. He also intends to beef up and modernise the antikidnap department.
PARAGUAY | `Farc advising kidnappers.' Colombia's Farc guerrillas are providing advice to Paraguayan kidnappers who specialise in targeting businessmen, according to state prosecutor Oscar Germán La Torre, who travelled to Bogotá in December to follow a trail of evidence. He is also seeking advice from Colombian chief prosecutor Luis Camilo Osorio on how to deal with the problem, which he describes as the beginnings of `a Mercosur of kidnapping', in an allusion to the international reach of the abduction business.
CHILE | Major crimes rate still rising. The debate in Chile is over: high crime-rate figures earlier in the year [SSR-03-03] were not a fluke. The number of reported major crimes in the third quarter of the year was 19.5% higher than a year earlier; reported armed robbery was up 26.2%. The only comfort interior ministry officials have been able to find is that the rates of increase have slowed down.
This casts doubt on the effectiveness of several anticrime initiatives launched last year. Also discouraging is the finding of a survey by the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo that only some 50% of the respondents who had been victims of a crime had reported them to the police. Confidence ratings of the public security agencies were all below 5%; that of the judiciary barely reached 3.2%.
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