5 - Coordinated Protection

Summary

This chapter shows how the Peronist party in Buenos Aires, Argentina, stifled police reforms, tolerated or benefited from police illicit rent extraction, and, for most of this period, controlled the drug market through coordinated protection rackets. While the PJ governed Buenos Aires uninterruptedly between 1987 and 2015, drug regulation shifted in the late 1990s, as bitter factional disputes loosened the provincial government’s grip over the police, exacerbated particularistic negotiations between police and criminals, and increased police and criminal violence. In the mid-2000s the government restored its politicized control of the police. The Bonaerense’s coordinated protection regime contained the advance of drug gangs through Greater Buenos Aires, the vastest metropolitan area in the country, while criminal violence plateaued at the same time it ballooned in Rosario.