Organized Crime and Ministries Without Politics

Civilian control of the security forces never evolved into genuine political leadership of public security. A reflection on the origins, limits, and strategic crisis of the Ministry of Security in the face of the advance of organized crime.

The State builds new structures to control a world that has already changed shape.

Seen from a hot-air balloon, the scene looked like a Boy Scout camp. But up close, those structures were not the classic orange camping tents. The only orange objects were tarps staked into the ground and held up by improvised wooden poles. They were not tents. They were merely precarious shelters against the sun and rain.

On December 7, 2010, these improvised structures spread across the 120 hectares of Parque Indoamericano in a variety of colors—mostly black. That day, officers from the Argentine Federal Police and the Metropolitan Police entered the area and evicted the 1,500 families living there. The Federal Police fell under the Ministry of Justice, Security and Human Rights. The Metropolitan Police answered to the City of Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security.

During the eviction operation, Rossemary Chura Puña and Bernardo Salgueiro were killed, while five other people were seriously injured. During the four days of occupation, Emiliano Canaviri Álvarez was also murdered. The occupation of Parque Indoamericano starkly exposed the difficulties faced by working people in accessing decent housing. It also revealed the links between sectors of organized crime and political actors, but above all the political inability to direct the security forces—a state within the state—and their use as a mechanism for regulating community life.

The blood of impoverished workers soaked the southern districts of Buenos Aires City and, only days before another anniversary of December 19 and 20, triggered an urgent and disorganized response: removing federal security forces from the authority of the Ministry of Justice and creating the Ministry of Security.

The new ministry was born burdened by a heavy bureaucracy tasked with overseeing more than one hundred thousand police officers, prefects, and gendarmes. Since then, security policy has remained trapped between overlapping structures, constant changes in leadership, and spasmodic measures disconnected from the rest of public policy.

A Ministry Created to Respond to a Crisis

Security crises often become political crises. The early years of Néstor Kirchner’s presidency were marked by an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom and growing demands for greater security. Public demonstrations became massive following the kidnapping and murder of the young Axel Blumberg. Pressure from the streets led to a series of legislative reforms that increased penalties for various crimes.

A few months later, between June and July 2004, two events once again placed the Argentine Federal Police at the center of the political stage. On June 25, a drug trafficker murdered Cristian “El Oso” Cisneros, a grassroots activist who ran the Los Pibes community kitchen in La Boca. Cisneros’ fellow activists and local residents occupied the neighborhood police station for several hours and accused police commanders of collusion with local drug traffickers.

On July 16, while the Buenos Aires City Legislature was debating a reform of the new Contraventional Code, the Argentine Federal Police carried out a violent crackdown. These events deepened a political crisis that would ultimately lead to the resignation of Justice Minister Gustavo Béliz and his closest collaborators, amid allegations of police corruption and the autonomy of the intelligence services.

Four days before Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took office as president in 2007, the National Congress passed a law transferring responsibility for internal security from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. Law No. 26,338 altered one of the central architectures of Argentine political power. The Ministry of the Interior—historically responsible for managing relations between the presidential administration and the provincial governors, and one of the traditional super-ministries of Argentine politics—lost control of one of its main tools for negotiation and territorial power-building. Yet this new bureaucratic arrangement lasted only three years.

The deaths at Parque Indoamericano marked a new breakdown in trust between political leaders and the security forces, particularly the Federal Police. On December 14, 2010, four days after the eviction, the president issued a decree transferring the four federal security forces—the Argentine Federal Police, the National Gendarmerie, the Argentine Naval Prefecture, and the Airport Security Police—from the Ministry of Justice to the newly created Ministry of Security.

The Ministry of Security was born, above all, as a response to a crisis of governance.

Control Without Strategy

Efforts to limit police autonomy were directed primarily from outside the security forces themselves. Although police institutions have always been—and continue to be—suspected of corruption, the Argentine Federal Police entered the twenty-first century burdened by a series of politically significant incidents that deepened doubts about its functioning, its practices of institutional violence, the extent of internal corruption, and its links to organized crime.

In an attempt to curb the autonomy of traditional police forces and regain territorial capacity, the authorities of the newly created Ministry of Security deployed thousands of gendarmes and prefects to patrol working-class neighborhoods in Greater Buenos Aires and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. They were assigned routine surveillance and social control functions that had previously been monopolized by the Federal Police and the Buenos Aires Provincial Police.

With the renaming of police academies, reforms to training curricula, the rapid acquisition of technological resources, and the creation of special units to monitor impoverished working-class neighborhoods, authorities became convinced that control over present and future security forces had passed into civilian hands and that police self-government was beginning to erode.

The appointment of officials with little experience and limited legitimacy among rank-and-file officers increased distrust within security institutions, which have traditionally been resistant to change, especially when imposed from outside. Suspicion, inflation, and the government's political weakness led to a wave of protests organized by relatives of gendarmes and prefects, particularly those transferred to Greater Buenos Aires and the capital.

While all this was taking place and the national government sought to give security policy a progressive and non-repressive—though still punitive—orientation, the Buenos Aires City Legislature passed Law 2,894 in 2008, creating the Metropolitan Police. The force emerged from the lack of agreement between the national and city governments. It began patrolling neighborhoods where two federal forces—the Federal Police and the Naval Prefecture—were already present, where common crime rates were extremely low, such as Puerto Madero, and where it could not even hold detainees because it lacked police stations.

In the Province of Buenos Aires, improvisation was no less evident. In 2004, during his second term as Minister of Security, Carlos Arslanian decentralized and demilitarized the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. This brief period of transparency generated strong resistance among traditional sectors and among the more than 1,400 officers expelled from the force, many of whom later became involved in spirals of criminal violence, particularly in Greater Buenos Aires.

With the arrival of new political authorities, three years of work were undone in a matter of days. The nearly one hundred thousand police officers were once again centralized under traditional command structures. Police self-government was consolidated at the top, accompanied by new municipal lieutenants steeped in martial aesthetics. Policies of substitution, overlap, and reform sought to control common, violent, at times disorganized, and tangible crime. When it came to organized crime, however, public policy was even more chaotic.

The Future Arrived Long Ago

For a long time, criminal organizations operated under constraints imposed by state authorities, which established rules and punished those who violated them. But globalization and technological and digital transformations shattered that status quo. With the rise of hyperconnectivity, criminal organizations internationalized, fragmented, and embedded themselves massively and silently into everyday culture.

The extraordinary adaptability of these organizations responds more to the challenges of history than to any obstacles a ministry might impose. With rapid responses and an energy directed toward survival and profit—their primary objective—they have adapted to the twenty-first century better than almost any other form of human association. During the pandemic, for example, restrictions on movement and gatherings pushed criminal organizations to shift much of their drug distribution and sales to digital platforms. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Security and its counterpart in the Province of Buenos Aires publicly debated where to place vehicle checkpoints.

At the beginning of the century, political leaders responsible for security policy promoted and debated a series of reforms aimed at modernizing and specializing security forces. More than twenty-six years later, many of those reforms remain unimplemented.

Several years ago, the preventive branch of the Argentine Federal Police—its personnel, facilities, vehicles, and resources—was transferred to the City of Buenos Aires. This should have been an opportunity to focus its efforts on investigating complex organized crime and transform the force into the much-heralded Argentine equivalent of the FBI.

A quarter century later, the force still performs prevention and protection duties and even retains responsibility for the fire department. Other federal forces expanded their functions to include prevention, protection, and investigation. Gendarmes, prefects, and airport security officers—like the failed Argentine FBI project—are deployed far from borders, rivers, seas, and airports to carry out duties that often overlap with those of provincial police forces.

Reforming the federal forces is unlikely unless provincial police institutions undergo similar transformations. The Buenos Aires Provincial Police alone has more than one hundred thousand members—roughly the same number as all four federal forces combined. It has experienced abrupt and sporadic changes in leadership and training policies, yet its institutional functions have remained remarkably stable for more than fifty years.

Legislative reforms over recent decades assigned provincial police forces responsibilities for investigating criminal organizations of varying complexity, including those involved in retail drug dealing, cargo theft, cybercrime, and auto-parts trafficking. Yet these same police forces must still respond to ordinary thefts and robberies, traffic accidents and controls, neighborhood and family disputes, building security, public events, and even the delivery of judicial notices.

The Politics of Insufficiency

The material and cultural growth of organized crime has generated a level of complexity to which politics continues to respond with analog tools. The overlap of institutions with similar functions and a shared focus on maintaining public order has ultimately diluted any serious effort at specialization. While criminal organizations adapt to the transformations of the twenty-first century, security forces continue to accumulate responsibilities inherited from the previous century.

For years, reform efforts remained trapped in technical discussions. Yet the real debate always revolved around the distribution of budgetary and operational power within the security forces, because every reform alters power balances that have been built over decades. Security institutions represent a source of resources and territorial influence that is often too tempting for political leaders to relinquish. Excessive caution, political opportunism, and short-term calculations in matters such as these become especially dangerous.

The proposals and diagnoses have existed for decades. The decision to transform them into public policies capable of guaranteeing security and confronting the criminal organizations of the twenty-first century requires a degree of political boldness that, so far, has been far scarcer than the diagnoses themselves.