ARGENTINA: Second round of get-tough policies
The late-March kidnapping and murder of young Axel Blumberg, 23, in an affluent suburb of Buenos Aires, touched a raw nerve among the public. Led by the victim's father, Juan Carlos Blumberg, 130,000 people took to the streets of Argentina's capital on 1 April to demand immediate action against a crime rate that has become intolerable - starting with legislation to introduce much harsher prison terms. Only the scale of the protest distinguished it from several others over the past two years. The response from officialdom was swift, but also replicated recent recipes, which have not proven particularly efficacious.
Instant response I: Buenos Aires
The governor of Buenos Aires province, Felipe Solá, proclaimed a `security emergency' and promptly replaced his security minister, Raúl Rivara, with former federal justice León Arslanián, remembered by many as the judge who in 1985 presided over the court that convicted military junta leaders for gross violations of human rights, and by a few as the man who briefly served as provincial security minister in 1999.
The governor also put in an urgent request for an extra Arg$1bn (US$344,000) from the federal government to boost the strength of his 45,000-strong provincial police force with the recruitment of 3,000 new officers - and ordered the immediate redeployment onto the streets of 1,300 members of the provincial force who had been holding desk jobs or serving in the anti-riot divisions.
The Arslanián plan
Within less than a week from when his appointment was announced, Arslanián produced a three-year plan to reorganise the provincial police (which draws heavily on initiatives he had floated when he briefly held the same post five years ago). Its main components are:
- Creation of a special, 2,000-strong force for the 31 municipalities of the Greater Buenos Aires area, with independent command structure and recruitment procedures, mandated to act in close coordination with the federal police, the Gendarmería (border police) and Prefectura Naval (coastguard and river police).
- Creation of a specialised antikidnap division, to be equipped with state-of-the-art technology.
- Tighter internal control of the force, via strengthening the internal affairs department, which has already been removed from the police force proper and placed directly under the security ministry.
- Decentralisation, strengthening the regional commands [this revives an earlier Arslanián initiative aborted by governor Carlos Ruckauf].
- Abolition of the military-style distinction between commissioned and non-commissioned officers, establishing a single system with nine grades, in which access to the top three will require a university degree.
- Replacement of the exclusively seniority-based pay system with one based on incentives for merit, efficacy and honesty.
- Incorporation of civilians (chiefly lawyers and technicians) who could aspire to command positions.
- Cooperation with the armed forces; an agreement has been signed with the federal government whereby the military will provide logistical support [the only kind allowed by the constitution], which may include ceding army premises to be used as prisons.
- Citizen participation: Community forums will be created to monitor local police activity; municipalities will appoint `security ombudsmen'; and the police will create a `multiple response group' with a brief including social problems.
- Criminal intelligence, aimed at crime prevention as well as investigation. Means will be sought to facilitate legal access to information.
President Néstor Kirchner, convalescing from a severe gastric disorder, ordered his political operators to spur congress into action on anticrime legislation demanded by Juan Carlos Blumberg, and to accelerate the passage of other anticrime bills in the pipeline, and got justice minister Gustavo Béliz to announce the imminent unveiling of a `national plan' against crime.
The scheme was described as `a drastic and profound multi-year, short- medium- and long-term plan which embraces multiple changes', including the restructuring of the federal police, the elimination of judicial obstacles that hinder the investigation of kidnappings, the reform of the prosecutorial service and an agreement with the provincial governments to `redefine' their provincial police forces.
Further details of the plan had not emerged by the time of writing, but congress certainly did deliver. First, on 7 April, it passed a law increasing the penalties for offences committed with the use of weapons. Maximum terms were introduced of 20 years for the use of firearms and 15 for the use of knives, in both cases without benefit of parole.
A week later it passed another law stiffening the penalties for possessing, bearing, manufacturing or selling illegal firearms, establishing tariffs ranging from six months to 10 years, with fines of up to the equivalent of US$3,500. Also pushed through was a law creating three new criminal courts in Buenos Aires city. Expected to be extruded in the next few days are laws withdrawing the benefit of parole from those convicted of robbery, rape or kidnapping followed by the death of the victims.
One cabinet member, interior minister Aníbal Fernández - whose purview includes public security - felt compelled to warn that the stiffening of penalties would not translate into an instantaneous solution to the current situation of insecurity. `Tightening the penalties so quickly leads society to believe that solutions will begin tomorrow,' he said. `One must be very prudent and not lie to the people [...] To all those now under arrest, including the material or intellectual authors of Axel Blumberg's death, none of the penalties [just approved by congress] will be applicable.'
Well worth noting is the fact that by 9 April the police had arrested six people suspected of involvement in the Blumberg case. One of them is a police subcomisario (deputy commissioner, a rank associated with a number-two position in a police station). He has been charged with aggravated obstruction of justice; his alleged participation brings once again to the fore an important feature of criminality in present-day Argentina: the involvement of the police.
Efficacy of tougher sentences
The interior minister could well have pointed out that recent experience casts serious doubt on the efficacy of tougher penalties as a deterrent. When President Kirchner took office on 25 May last year he found the country in the grip of a similar upheaval about a high-profile kidnapping, and one of his first acts was to send justice minister Béliz to congress to urge immediate passage of an antikidnapping bill that had become bogged down. Within little more than a week the bill had become law.
It more than doubled the maximum prison term for kidnapping, from 10 to 25 years - and in the case of kidnapping followed by murder, mandated life imprisonment. The latter was added purely for effect: the existing penal code already prescribed life imprisonment for any murder committed `with perfidy', with the aid of two or more accomplices, or because the criminal's aim was thwarted (as in the case of ransom not being paid).
The prospect of sentences more than twice as long as before, though, made no impact on the kidnapping trend: in the Greater Buenos Aires area reported abductions increased in 2003 by an estimated 57% (without counting the so-called `express' kidnappings). Nor did the prospect of life imprisonment deter the murder of kidnap victim Blumberg (the third such case in the Greater Buenos Aires since 2002).
Compared with the antikidnapping law of 2003, the latest increases in penalties meant to deter the use of firearms are almost timid: for armed robbery and the bearing of illegal handguns, the maximum term of imprisonment is lengthened by a third. Already in the penal code, armed crime carried the strongest punishment - and last year, 2,052 homicides (65% of the total) were committed with firearms.
The May legislation was not the only antikidnapping initiative by the Kirchner administration last year. In November -- just after an increase in kidnappings provoked a mass street protest in Buenos Aires -- the government announced the creation of a special, 100-strong `anti-kidnap brigade', under the command of federal police commissioner Juan José Schetino, a man with a reputation as a first-class investigator who only days before his appointment had led a team that located and rescued a kidnapped businessman.
The brigade was intended to work in coordination with provincial police forces and was to enjoy `total autonomy' to deploy anywhere in the country if the judge in charge of a kidnap case should deem it necessary. As noted at the time, this posed legal problems: federal police and security forces can only be deployed outside the federal capital to deal with cases that are clearly within federal jurisdiction (border matters, interprovincial traffic) or when a provincial government requests their assistance. Unlike the US, there is no legal provision for treating kidnappings as a specifically federal offence; they would only fall within federal jurisdiction if the victim were taken across provincial boundaries. The fact that coordination with the provincial police forces is still one of the items on Kirchner's new plan (and that Arslanián is planning an ‚lite antikidnap unit of his own) suggests that the difficulties have not been overcome.
Cohabiting with criminals
When Arslanián took office as security minister in Buenos Aires province, he confirmed that the provincial police - despite an extensive crackdown last year - remained riddled with corruption, with police officers involved in criminal activity and suspected of collusion with gangs operating in the Greater Buenos Aires area. He said one of his top priorities would be to `separate the good police from the bad [through] rigorous selection.' [Last year's purge led to the dismissal in August of police chief Alberto Sobrado, and the chief and deputy chief of operations, as well as an investigation into the personal assets of 149 commissioned officers. The top brass and many of the others are already facing criminal proceedings.]
He admitted, though, that contributory problems had to be solved at the same time. In his view, one of the causes of the `decomposition' of the provincial police is the officers' enforced daily coexistence with criminals. `Some 5,600 prisoners,' he said, `are held in police stations, cohabiting with the police in conditions of promiscuity - and the police lack the most basic qualifications to attend to the detainees.' The intended holding capacity of cells in police stations is not much higher than 700.
This, in turn, reflects the overcrowding of the prison system. There is no up-to-date figure on the intended capacity of the entire system, but partial data shows 37,543 prisoners being held in prisons designed to take 31,897: a surplus of just under 18% (there are another 7,426 inmates held in 16 prisons for which no capacity figure is available). Longer sentences, if accompanied by higher arrest rates, will inevitably place a greater strain on the system. This explains why Arslanián is contemplating the use of army premises as ad-hoc prisons (though he appears to overlook the fact that the soldiers are no more qualified than the police to run prisons). The province of Buenos Aires currently holds just over half of the country's total prison population.
The chain does not end in the lack of prison capacity. One of the causes of prison overcrowding is the slowness of the judicial process: only 40% of the inmates have actually been tried and convicted. Beyond that, the profile of the prison population points to unsolved social problems: 62% of inmates are unemployed or underemployed; 79% have at best elementary education; 41% are unskilled; and almost a third are under 24 years of age.
| Argentina: seeking to deter crime in the penal code (selected offences) |
|
|
Offence |
Prison term (yrs) |
| Aggravated homicide | life |
| Armed robbery | 5-15 |
| Suborned judgment | 29 |
| Embezzlement of public funds |
2-10 |
| Embezzling social security contributions |
2-6 |
| Bribing a government official |
1-6** |
| Unauthorised bearing of firearm |
0.5-3 |
| *Applicable to the judge. **Applicable to both parties in the transaction. |
|
| In the antikidnapping law of 2003 |
|
| Offence | Prison term (yrs) |
| Kidnapping | 8-25 |
| Kidnapping followed by victim's death life |
life |
| In the April 2004 laws (Country of origin, 1996-2003) |
|
| Offence | Prison term (yrs) |
| Armed robbery (with firearms) |
5-20* |
| Armed robbery (with knives) | 5-15* |
| Possession of illegal firearms |
0.5-2 |
| Bearing illegal firearms |
1-4 |
| Bearing military-use firearms |
3.5-8.5 |
| Manufacturing illegal firearms |
5-10 |
| Selling illegal firearms | 3-8 |
| *Without parole. | |