4 - The Endurance of the “Damned Police” of Buenos Aires Province

Summary

Chapter 4 traces the development of the Police of Buenos Aires Province since Argentina’s transition to democracy and accounts for its institutional persistence in the face of extensive extralegal violence and predation of the citizenry. Despite the integral role of police in the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the transition to democracy in 1983 did not entail efforts to reform the country’s police institutions in accordance with democratic principles, as occurred with the military. As crime rates and societal demands for improved security increased, structural police reform was not on the agenda, and countless short-term efforts to root out corruption largely floundered. While other provincial institutions, such as the judiciary, underwent structural reform, the police strategically used its control over coercion to raise the cost to politicians of constraining police authority. The resulting accommodation between police and politicians largely kept police reform off the public agenda and allowed the provincial police to thwart external accountability efforts. I demonstrate that societal demands regarding policing and security were largely fragmented and often contradictory, such that politicians saw little electoral incentive to address police violence, corruption, and poor performance.