Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARGENTINA: Now Hiring – Honest Police Chiefs

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 3 2003 (IPS) - Argentina’s two main police forces, the federal and Buenos Aires provincial forces, have been left without police chiefs due to corruption scandals.

Federal police chief Gen. Roberto Giacomino was removed from his post late Thursday after the Justice Ministry reported that an investigation found that he had awarded inflated contracts for the installation of computer hardware in the Churruca police hospital to companies with ties to his relatives.

Giacomino, who was in France when he heard the news, was the only top-ranking federal police official to survive the purge ordered by President Néstor Kirchner in June, when 11 police chiefs were sacked as part of an offensive to clamp down on corruption.

The shake-up, carried out shortly after Kirchner took office in late May, also extended to the top echelons of the armed forces, which were purged of commanders who had been junior officers during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship and ”dirty war”.

Justice Minister Gustavo Béliz said Friday that it would take the government seven days to replace Giacomino. He also promised ”further changes in the federal police.”

Béliz added that he would ask the new police chief to make a sworn financial disclosure statement before assuming the post.

”It should be clear to the public that this government will not be an accomplice to these scoundrels,” said cabinet chief Alberto Fernández, who added that ”when a corrupt official is found, they must be removed immediately, and must not be allowed to continue to act.”

The federal police is the second-largest force in this country of 37 million, with 33,000 agents, most of whom are assigned to the capital.

The Buenos Aires provincial police is the largest force, with more than 45,000 officers. The force also lost its chief, Alberto Sobrado, in August, in another corruption scandal.

The Buenos Aires provincial government asked Sobrado to resign after a local magazine, Veintitrés, reported that he had deposited 330,000 dollars in a bank account in the Bahamas. The police chief said he had inherited the money, but was accused of tax evasion and illicit enrichment.

Since then, the provincial government has ordered investigations of the financial disclosure reports of 135 police officials, to verify whether their declared assets are in line with their incomes. On Friday, two were dismissed on charges of ”unjustified expansion of wealth.”

Sociologist Gustavo Palmieri, an expert on police affairs at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, told IPS that ”the government is having a hard time replacing police officials who are removed in connection with corruption scandals, because the top ranks of the police forces are conflict-ridden.”

Corruption and human rights violations are the main ”ills” embedded in the Argentine police forces, said the analyst.

Palmieri remarked that Giacomino’s swift removal was unprecedented, because in the past, top-ranking police officials denounced by the press as corrupt have generally been kept in their posts, or belatedly dismissed on other pretexts.

The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Felipe Solá, said in August that Sobrado was dismissed out of a need to ”renovate” the leadership of the provincial police force.

The Justice Ministry said the office of legal affairs had warned Giacomino about irregularities in the concession of the overpriced computer contract. But he went ahead and authorised it nonetheless, with no public tendering process.

The need for effective police leadership is keenly felt today by Argentine society, in the grip of a continued economic crisis, which has been accompanied by a rise in crime in the last few years.

Kidnappings for ransom, which were a previously rare phenomenon, rose from one every 36 hours to one every 24 hours in the past two months. A total of 17 have been reported in the past 16 days.

Palmieri said many police are involved in the very crimes that they are supposed to be fighting. A number of police officers have been arrested and prosecuted for participating in kidnapping, prostitution and gambling rackets.

Police brutality is also a serious problem in Buenos Aires, say watchdog groups like the New York-based Human Rights Watch. According to the Buenos Aires police internal affairs unit, 1,100 inquiries have been opened in the past year, including 257 cases of officers investigated for illicit enrichment, and 124 for ”unlawful coercion.”

In the past few years, the public mistrust of the police and rising crime have given rise to a boom in the number of private security companies, many of which are run by retired police officers who provide security in companies, transport vehicles, and private homes in exchange for a monthly fee.

According to investigative journalists, only 50 percent of the country’s 70,000 private security guards have the required permit for carrying arms and working as guards.