RIGHTS: Police Abuse Widespread in Argentina, Say Rights Groups

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 16 2000 (IPS) - The police shooting of an Olympic medal-winner in a bank where he was cashing a State scholarship has once again put the question of police brutality into the national spotlight in Argentina.

Pan-American rowing champion Walter Balunek, who won three medals in the 1999 games in Winnipeg, Canada, was shot and seriously injured when a police officer guarding the bank thought the 27-year-old looked “suspicious.”

The police officer asked Balunek for his documents at gunpoint. But when the young man – who was accompanied by his father – put his hand in his pocket, the police officer shot him pointblank in the stomach.

According to the Coordinator Against Police Repression, a local human rights group that monitors police brutality, the phenomenon of “trigger-happy” police is a holdover from the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

The de facto regime’s crackdown on real or suspected opponents led to the abduction, torture and – in most cases – the disappearance of some 30,000 people, according to human rights groups. (The government puts the figure at 10,000).

“Up to 1983, the military was the armed defender of an economic system,” María del Carmen Verdú, an attorney with the rights group, told IPS. “But after the dictatorship and during these 16 years of democracy, the police have taken on that role, mainly lashing out against youths and the poor.”

The Commission, comprised of more than a dozen lawyers, as well as law students and relatives of victims of police brutality, keeps detailed files on cases in which people are killed by security agents in conditions in which they represented no threat to their assailants.

Since 1983, around 500 people have been killed by State security agents, according to the Commission’s latest report, from 1999, which states that just 20 percent of the cases ended in the trial and dismissal or conviction of the implicated police officer.

Among the cases of victims of police shootings documented by the group figure suspected criminals, passersby caught in the middle of shoot-outs, and others who like Walter Repeto – who was shot and killed in his car parked outside his home – simply turned out to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Repeto’s mother pointed out that the police officer who killed her son was carrying his gun even though he was on leave for stress. He apparently became irritated when Walter, 28, drove at high speeds before parking in front of his house.

According to experts on the question of police brutality at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, another human rights organisation created during the dictatorship, the police in Argentina have a violent, authoritarian tradition and are not trained to respect the rights of the very citizens they are supposed to protect.

“This form of acting, shooting in almost an accidental manner, is quite widespread among police in Argentina,” Gustavo Palmieri, the Centre’s coordinator of research, told IPS.

“For them there is no step previous to pulling out their weapons. In the face of a threat, they immediately pull out their guns without any control, and shoot at the first gesture by the detainee or supposed suspect,” he said. “When someone calls them, they go with their firearms in hand before they even know what’s happening.”

He said killings by police to prevent crimes were seen as normal by their superiors, and that in fact “police effectiveness” was measured by the number of confrontations with civilians, which are on the rise.

According to the data compiled by the Centre based on reports published by Argentina’s four leading newspapers, the number of civilians killed in incidents with the police rose 78 percent from 1998 to 1999 – from 113 to 202 – on the outskirts of Buenos Aires alone.

“They have no tradition of respect for rights,” said Palmieri. “They have a repressive and authoritarian method of resolving conflicts,” which is even based on certain government policies dating back to the dictatorship, which urge heavy-handed tactics, he added.

In October 1998, the US-based Human Rights Watch, in conjunction with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, issued a report titled ‘Exacerbating Insecurity: Police Brutality in Argentina’.

The 250-page report concluded that judicial and civilian authorities did not exercise sufficient control over either the federal or provincial police forces, which were in urgent need of reform and professionalisation.

Some of the abuses documented by the report included disappearances of people in police custody; killings by police in alleged shoot-outs in which investigations often found that the victims had been shot at point-blank range, and evidence was fabricated to simulate a shoot-out; and the killing of innocent bystanders during armed confrontations between police and criminal suspects.

According to the two rights groups, the 1998 report, the first of its kind to focus exclusively on the problem of police abuse in Argentina, “demonstrates that the problem of police brutality is not an isolated or occasional one, but rather an ingrained practice in police systems.”

The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Carlos Ruckauf, who caused a commotion during his election campaign after calling on police to simply shoot criminals, has been attempting to expand the margin of action for police in their law enforcement function.

After visiting Walter Balunek in the clinic where he was hospitalised, Ruckauf said Tuesday that he did not want anyone “to take out their arms to hurt innocent people.”

“I want the weapons of the law to be used against criminals,” he stressed.

The governor said he would not tolerate police brutality, and pointed out that he had ordered that the officer involved in the shooting incident be sacked.

But according to Palmieri, Ruckauf’s statements actually constituted an invitation for police to continue using violence.

“The argument that the public is calling for strong-arm tactics by the police is not true,” he said. “In public opinion polls, respondents link the rise in crime to the rise in poverty and unemployment. And in second place, they blame police inefficiency in crime prevention.”