Introduction
When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic in March 2020, following the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Government of the Republic of Argentina issued Decree 297/2020 (PEN 2020), establishing preventive and compulsory social isolation (ASPO) for the entire national territory. The ban on movement and travel enforced by ASPO was waived for those workers considered essential in the management of the health emergency. This included the security forces personnel.1
ASPO gave rise to a particular situation, namely that the need to guarantee maximum populational confinement —as the main measure to avoid a health crisis— intensified these forces’ power of control along with their faculties. In fact, Decree 297/2020 authorized the Ministry of Security to undertake permanent checks on roads, highways, and in public spaces, and to “immediately stop any offending behaviour” upon finding non-compliance with the rules established to protect public health within the ASPO framework.
The measure, initially in place for eleven days, was extended time and again over for months, as controls were updated and relaxed (and tightened again), in step with phases, geographical segmentations, and shifting infection curves. By early June, eighteen Argentine provinces entered a phase of reduced monitoring: social preventive and obligatory distancing (DISPO). By the end of 2020, the metropolitan area of the city of Buenos Aires entered (one of the last areas in the country to do so) the DISPO phase, while other areas re-entered ASPO, in a game of advances and setbacks still ongoing today, midway through 2021. Indeed, the situation has returned to square one, with a new phase of strict restrictions in the month of May, to tackle the “second wave.”
I speak, of course, in formal terms. If the early days of the confinement were characterised by significant compliance with ASPO regulations (and grateful applause for the health staff every day at 9pm from our windows and balconies), the end of 2020 and the first four months of 2021 were marked by non-compliance with regulations (and a resurgence of clandestine parties). A few days into the second year of the pandemic, health regulations and precautions were largely at odds with day-to-day real life. Adherence to confinement and social distancing, along with state control of compliance, had long since begun to fade.
Reference to this shift is important if we are to understand the arguments set out in the text, even if it does not deal with this diachronic movement. This article is based, instead, on those early stages of ASPO that I mentioned previously, and if I offer this broad overview here, it is intended as a relativisation and a preview. On the one hand, it serves to advance a “vision of the future” to which I will return at the end of the paper. On the other, to set the boundaries of the validity of the arguments that I will discuss in the text, since this work focuses on events concentrated in the first few months of ASPO and the reflections that it prompts cannot be extrapolated —without risk— to later stages.
The focus, then, is on a relationship —the one formed between the pandemic and the security forces— that has given rise, at least in our country (although I understand that in many others too), to many debates and discussions. This can be summed up, provisionally, in a condensing question: how to view security forces in the pandemic? And, beyond that, how to view them in the post-pandemic future? The question arises in the heat of our current —unusual— context and the certainty of inevitable transformations that it will bring. The crisis scenario —both current and future— makes it possible to reformulate this question: What does this crisis scenario have in store for the security forces? What dilemmas, challenges, and obstacles will it bring for them? What does it expose them to and what does it oblige them to do?
In my opinion, the link between the security forces and confinement2 has given rise to two major issues on the local scene, which revolve around two distinct poles of meaning. The first, in chronological order, has to do with certain practices that came to light, as soon as ASPO began. To propose a certain paradigm, that of the security forces as caregivers:
The situation we are in today is extremely exceptional, and the security forces have a fundamental role to play in dealing with it. The pandemic —through preventive and compulsory isolation— has changed the common sense on security […] It is therefore an exceptional and unprecedented situation that requires doctors and nurses, but also police officers. Such a situation brings us up against a dilemma: sometimes surveillance and monitoring also constitute practices of care. And policies involving security forces are not always fascistic nor do they always involve institutional violence.3 (Seghezzo and Dallorso 2020; bold type in the original)
The second issue came to light a little later, when the security forces made the headlines in connection with other events: cases of torture, assassinations, and disappearances. These incidents were highlighted in the annual report of the Coordinating Committee Against Police and Institutional Repression (Correpi), presented at the end of 2020:
In a year made extraordinary by the coronavirus pandemic and the consequent decree establishing preventative and compulsory social isolation (ASPO), something that did not change in Argentina was state repression. Indeed, according to Correpi’s annual report, someone is killed by the security forces every 20 hours. (“En el año de la pandemia” 2020)
So, we have two issues at hand: care and violence. Of course, neither of these two poles of meaning are novel. On the contrary, they are linked to powers that, while pre-existing, developed significantly during ASPO: the security forces’ state as essential workers (the practices of care) and their power to exercise state control (police violence).4
Thus, these faculties are not particular to ASPO. What is “particular”, one might say, are the opportunities for reflection that the very relationship between security forces and pandemic/confinement entails. In other words, it is in the emergence of this pandemic context (of course, global, but with local overtones) that the potential for these two issues to emerge lies, not as new issues, but rather as intensifications. What is it that ASPO brings to the surface?
The question raises two inseparable concerns: that of the performance of these forces both in the present and in the future. Which police roles and policing practices encourage such situations? What lessons do they teach us, given their potential reiteration? And, above all, what data —local and regional— do they reveal that can allow us to reflect empirically and politically on our experience? It is therefore this particular process —not born of the pandemic or of confinement, but enhanced by them in our Latin American geographies— that I intend to explore in these pages.
The Police that Takes Care of You
It is clear that combining confinement, security forces, and massive population control has given rise to a multiplicity of practices of various kinds. This section sheds light on those that have to do with care, but with a caveat: it does not refer to the concrete and real protection events involving members of the security forces —which have been (and continue to be) of great importance— but rather to their translation in terms of the paradigm of care. To clarify this nuance requires the introduction of a few preliminary images.
In principle, those featured in the spots of many national security forces, when the ASPO promoted the circulation of control campaigns designed to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If the common denominator of these spots showing “results” used to revolve, roughly speaking, around the various modalities of the fight against crime, in the pandemic, confinement brought back another kind of image of success: closed-down nightclubs (Policía de la Ciudad 2020a) and long lines of policemen with masks (Policía de la Provincia de Jujuy 2020) spraying antibacterial products on people’s hands or taking passengers’ temperature on buses (Policía de la Ciudad 2020b). And these institutional announcements repeated, time and again, the same phrases: “We are here to take care of you”, “It’s time to start respecting those who always take care of you,” “The usual heroes that take care of us no matter what happens.”
What the images in these campaigns reveal is the exploitation of a figure that is not necessarily new, although undoubtedly strengthened (and re-signified) by ASPO, namely, that of “the police that takes care of you.” I say it is not new because we can find similar meanings if we go back in time. In July 2016, for example, and to end the thread of institutional campaigns, the Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires or Buenos Aires Provincial Police (PPBA) culminated one of these with the same appeals to care: “a better trained police force takes better care of you” (Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires 2016). But perhaps we can find a more direct semantic reference in the more recent past. In December 2017, also in the PPBA, a non-commissioned officer named Luis Chocobar shot a young man in the back and killed him. Minutes earlier, the young man had stabbed an American tourist who had attempted to stop his camera being stolen. He had fled, but two passers-by managed to intercept him and keep him on the ground. Chocobar arrived on the scene and, as the young man had managed to escape, the police officer shot him. He died a few days later from his injuries. From that point on, there was a succession of expert opinions and conflicting voices (that he was right to have shot him, that he acted outside the law, that he is a hero, that he is a criminal). The police officer was indicted and charged with “homicide in excess of legitimate self-defence” (Sirimarco 2021).
With the indictment already in place, the heads of the then national and provincial governments immediately stepped up to support him. The Argentine president, Mauricio Macri, received him in the Casa Rosada, telling him that it made him proud that the country had police officers like him; the Buenos Aires security minister, Cristian Ritondo, expressed his support; and the national security minister, Patricia Bullrich, said “we are going to take care of those who take care of us,” and added:
On the prosecution of the local policeman Chocobar, I again make it clear that our goal is to take care of the people. There are 43 million citizens who expect us to take care of them and for us to build a safer country. This also implies taking care of those who take care of us, that is, some 300,000 police officers throughout the country […] We will continue to maintain our idea that if a police officer defends a citizen at risk, as in the case of the stabbed tourist who Chocobar defended, we understand that the police officer did what he had to do. (“Tenemos que cuidar” 2018)
These brief images help to outline a picture that we can only mention here. “Taking care of those who take care of us” was, in fact, a recurring slogan during the Cambiemos government,5 especially expressed by the security minister: “perhaps this cold weather can provide an opportunity to connect affectionately with the police officer on the corner [she tweeted, for example, in the winter of 2019]. Take the officer a cup of tea. It’s a good way to reconnect, to spend some time with, and to take care of those who spend their days taking care of us” (Bullrich 2019).
Categorizing policing as care is, as we can see, not such a new concept. But in the current context, it acquires new meanings. The comments we have been discussing —those of the Cambiemos government— seem to configure a field where care is, in a certain sense, security-based. There have been, of course, tentative attempts at creating other associations, especially by citizens (the need to “take care of those who take care of us”). Among these, care which takes the form of pampering (the hot tea on the cold corner) or care as defence (of justice that ties the hands of the police). But the central association, intended to redefine policing, ends up in the same place where other old slogans also converge (“the fight against crime,” the police “at the service of the community”). What I mean is: “the police that takes care of us” defends us, mostly, from what (they say) Chocobar also defended us: from crime, from offences, from delinquents.
However, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic established a new twist to the meaning of this pre-existing figure. One that broadens and complements it. Because the security forces are taking care of us now in the pandemic —and here we have the institutional spots to illustrate this— from clandestine parties, from the unregulated opening of premises, from non-compliance with hygiene protocols, from people wandering around with symptoms in the street. In short, they protects us from the virus. The paradigm of care thus exceeds its more traditional security-based barriers in order to enter a terrain that is not always easy to cross: that of health-related practices and associations.
Of course, I am not trying to suggest that the association between police and health was born with this pandemic. Suffice it to recall an episode already analysed in research on the police —on the yellow fever outbreak in Buenos Aires in 1871— to evoke the role played by what was then known as the Policia de la Capital6 in ensuring compliance with health regulations. It was the police’s duty to remove objects that were harmful to health from the streets, fill in swamps, prevent water stagnation, inspect tenement houses, fumigate rooms, burn the bedding of the infected, clear houses in case of overcrowding and even transfer the sick and corpses to lazarettos and cemeteries (Galeano 2009 and 2011).
But if the police-health control link is not new, perhaps —in the current context— the coordinates in which it is semanticised are. When commissioner Ramón Cortés Conde revisited the yellow fever epidemic in 1934, he did so in the following terms:
The work of police officers and agents during those fateful days in the city was more than intense, it was heroic. With their ranks thinned by the epidemic, and having to pay special attention to public health, they too had to deal with that other harmful plague that haunts peoples scourged by misfortune. They had to prevent the looting of houses abandoned by their dwellers, and it was to this arduous and demanding task that the police, with their meagre numbers, devoted themselves. Even the chief of police himself was engaged in this mission, and his conduct and that of his subordinates deserved the most resounding approval. (In Galeano 2009, 110-111)
Heroism. Public health care. Mission. In the institutional narrative, the definition of policing seems to be played out in terms of coercion —Galeano points out—, but also in terms of ‘assistance.ʼ Because, the author goes on, the Policia de la Capital turned the epidemic into a pillar on which to build professional prestige and begin to cement the selfless, heroic, and sacrificial figure of the “fallen in the line of duty” (2009 and 2011). Heroism, then. And sacrifice and mission. But not necessarily care. The 1871 epidemic spawned a story —that of the fallen— which spanned decades,7 and thus began to build institutionality around vectors associated with combat; risk; daring; sacrifice; and, of course, martyrdom (Galeano 2011; Frederic 2013; Sirimarco 2017; Garriga Zucal 2017; Galvani and Maglia 2017; Bover and Maglia 2017). Policing qua heroism was thus inseparable from the health context.
In the network of meaning that is formed, which is also inseparable from the context of the current pandemic, is policing qua care. One requires the other: the pandemic is the scenario that allows this notion of care to be deployed, by underpinning it in the terms of health care. It is the crisis in this field that makes it possible to thematise policing under such parameters; that is, if the population’s health depends on everyone, and social distancing becomes a way of ensuring collective wellbeing, then to guarantee that distancing becomes a form of protection. That is, a form of care (Castilla, Kunin, and Blanco Esmoris 2020).
But while the health context of the 19th century forged a sense of sacrifice and heroism, that of the 21st century seems to call for other meanings. Therein, perhaps, lies the novelty: the emergence of another narrative, that of policing as care. What is new here is the insertion of policing into this web of meaning, because we are witnessing, as in 1871, the emergence of the police as an agent of care. The function is the same, but its narrative differs, it is no longer one of heroism and sacrifice, but —underlying it all— is a narrative of care. The fight to protect life —and I paraphrase López Petit (2020)— no longer exclusively applies to the language of martyrs, but, now, also to that of caregivers. The tasks of monitoring and vigilance are now being replaced by protection and assistance.
The paradigm of care, under the impetus of this pandemic, thus unfolds old and new meanings, mixing different acceptations within it: from policing as care (“the police who take care of you”) to the need to care —both professionally and emotionally— for members of the forces (“taking care of those who take care of us”). A few days following the decree of ASPO, the coordinators of the Observatory of Security of the School of Social Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, advocated these combined meanings in a text that we already mentioned at the beginning of this paper:
This unprecedented situation also sheds light on the fact that an important part of the police’s daily tasks are more akin to care work than to criminal prosecution and repression: for example, mediation in neighbourhood conflicts, providing assistance to women who are victims of violence, and support to the vulnerable, among many other tasks.
Now, if we believe that we have to provide care for all those who work in the health sector, for scientists, for transport workers, we cannot forget others that are equally responsible for care tasks at this juncture, such as waste collectors; commercial employees; civil servants with government responsibilities; and, of course, the security forces. We must take care of those who take care of us […].
Although the war metaphor has been used recurrently in this time of pandemic (partly because of the strategic planning and logistical effort that the enterprise entails), the police’s work has been far removed from the war model and is much closer to the caregiving model. In care work in general, as well as in monitoring the confinement imposed as a result of the coronavirus in particular, police officers have put their health and well-being at risk […] today we need to value and empathise with those who take care of us. (Seghezzo and Dallorso 2020; bold type in the original)
The text was welcomed by many officials in the security portfolio, who encouraged these new understandings. The minister herself, Sabina Frederic, retweeted: “a new form of statehood is possible that assumes a policing model centred on care […] This is what our administration at @MinSeg is all about” (Frederic 2020). But the text also generated deep unease in the public arena, and was contested by countless voices in politics and academia.8 Criticisms ranged across a broad spectrum, but pivoted around the same idea: the need to avoid romanticising the police (meaning: our police).
The critical approach was thus based on two analytically separable instances of the same movement. The first instance concerns the very use of the term care. I am not, of course, referring here to a mere interchangeable term, but rather to an analytical category: that which is part of a specific tradition of analysis, discussion, and debate. The critical voices that were raised in response to this approach spoke out, first and foremost, against the intention to inscribe policing within this paradigm.
An exhaustive development of this paradigm is far beyond the scope and extension of this paper. Indeed, the topic of care has long since established itself as an important node in analytical agendas, and has produced a vast, heterogeneous and interdisciplinary field of study. We must remember, however, that in the framework of these approaches, care considers people’s action and agency in sustaining their environment. That is, the activities required to satisfy the basic needs of their existence and reproduction; those that provide them with both physical and symbolic elements that enable them to live in society. Addressing care provisions therefore involves domestic spheres, and public and private institutions alike (Esquivel 2011; Daich 2011; Pautassi and Zibecchi 2013; Faur 2014; Rodríguez Enríquez and Marzonetto 2015; Faur and Pereyra 2018).
It is clear that the pandemic helped to proliferate considerations about the social and political organisation of care; to rethink it as a social phenomenon with repercussions for public policy (Glenn 2000; England, Budig, and Folbre 2002; Orozco Rocha 2011; Castilla, Kunin, and Blanco Esmoris 2020). It is not surprising, then, that the emergence of such a health context has encouraged the inscription of policing within this paradigm, in turn propitiated by the establishment of a synonymy; or, rather, by the occurrence of a reflexive shift: from the essential worker to the caregiver. Can any activity (considered) essential for the maintenance of a given social order —whether carried out by a greengrocer, a policeman or a street sweeper— be immediately and indistinctly interpreted in terms of care?
The critical voices that were raised against the discourse of the care police spoke, secondly, against its context of use. Or rather, they uncovered a relationship perceived as incongruous: one that referred to the part for the whole; that is, it established certain practices as a unifying semantic trope. If the appeal to care is problematic from this perspective, it is not primarily because of the categorisation itself, but because of its narrative contextuality. In other words, because of the political articulation of this discourse in terms of a referent —as suggested in the Correpi report mentioned at the beginning of this paper— that recognises innumerable practices of abuse, violence, and death:
In the exceptional context in which we live, the police and security forces were called upon to monitor compliance with preventive and compulsory social confinement. Rarely has it been so clear that there is a “common good” to take care of: health and lives. We also know that some bodies are more vulnerable than others, so the less we simultaneously contract the virus, the more lives will be saved. The instruction is to “stay at home,” and who better than those who exercise police power to ensure compliance? They are territorially widespread, have the delegation of state power and authority, as well as the mandate for the potential and concrete use of force. The idea is closed on all sides. What is surprising is that these tasks are today referred to as “care.” Are the police taking care of us, or are we trivialising the notion of care? […]
Control is not care. Neither is vigilance […]
It is not possible to think about care, or at least not in the short term, where up until yesterday there was humiliation, mistreatment, and violence. Social experiences cannot be retraced or “reoriented” according to disembodied intentions and voluntarism. What happens, what is done, even with all the new things that are invented to change things, cannot dispense with the pre-existing, the history, the memories. There are histories, patterns of relationships, historical violence, inveterate enmities, unfinished business. (Faur and Pita 2020; bold type in the original)
Let me reiterate this clarification: it is not a question here of ignoring or undervaluing the prevention and monitoring tasks performed by members of the security forces, nor to suggest that such tasks are unnecessary (or that they respond to political measures bordering on authoritarianism). But what happens when such monitoring and surveillance measures change their name and come to be understood as the politics of care? What does the discourse relating to “the police who take care of you” mean in the context of a form of confinement that has been revealing the violent side of policing? In the next section, I focus this other facet.
The Police that Kills You
A few days following the ASPO decree, three members of the Argentine National Gendarmerie were dismissed —as were, around the same time, some members of the PPBA— from their duties for forcing two youngsters who were in breach of mandatory confinement to bailar. Footage taken by neighbours shows the gendarmes forcing the youths to squat and walk with their hands on the back of their necks. The incident, which took place in the town of Isidro Casanova, involved making the bailados do frog jumps; push-ups; to shout; and, to top it all off, sing the Argentine national anthem (“Cuarentena” 2020).
For those who don’t know, bailes or milongas are sadly infamous and persistent practices followed in our country, which can lead to hospitalisation or even death.9 They involve, in a nutshell, a battery of physical routines in gruelling concatenation: running, jumping, bending down, dropping to the ground, crawling, and running again. The motivations behind subjecting people to them are varied. They can be seen as an effective device for obedience or as a normalising sanction that acts on those who deviate from a rule. They also serve, in the pursuit of submission, as mechanisms of endurance (Sirimarco 2009; Garriga Zucal 2016). This sum of functionalities is clearly intertwined with obedience, pain, bravery, cruelty, and harshness. Or, in other words, a deep-rooted link between the experience of suffering and the legitimisation of morality. All of these variables appeared in the examples mentioned above, insofar as the bailes served as institutionally legitimised tools to correct an infraction.10
But abuses of authority —the bailes— were not the only illegal practices in which the security forces were involved. The events reached alarming levels and revolved around other events of a more criminal nature. At this point, it is clear to everyone that the security forces in our country —and, I understand, in much of the region as well— are as discredited as they are feared. Corruption, inefficiency, repression, ‘trigger-happyʼ behaviour, harassment, brutality, deaths, disappearances, and links with organised crime have been and continue to be the backdrop against which these forces have been constituted as actors at odds with the democratic spectrum (Tiscornia 1997, 1999, and 2008; Eilbaum 2008; Frederic 2008; Pita 2010; Sain 2008 and 2010; Barreneche 2010 and 2011; Dewey 2011). This was also the backdrop against which the cases mentioned at the beginning of this paper occurred. In fact, the Correpi report points to a significant number of them for 2020:11 348 cases following the implementation of ASPO, all involving enforced disappearances of persons, later found dead, and deaths in detention centres.
While it would not be possible to list all of these cases here, I would like to point out at least three that managed to transcend the usual silence reserved for the majority. Despite their broad scope, they are representative examples of the modes of police administration during the confinement period that I am particularly interested in highlighting in this section.
The first I report on occurred on April 5, 2020, when Florencia Magalí Morales, 39, was found dead in a police station in the province of San Luis, where she had been detained for breach of quarantine:
She was stopped by the police near the bank […] for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. She ignored the police order and decided to go to the city’s 25th police station on her own, where she knew one of the police officers. She was asked for her ID but didn’t have it. She only gave her name and her ID card number. The last number was not one that was authorised to be driving on that Sunday. She was then informed that she was going to be detained for breach of quarantine as established under Covid-19.
Magalí resisted and three policemen tried to prevent her from escaping […] After restraining her, and due to her alleged state of nervousness, they took her to the hospital where she was treated by a doctor. She was then taken back to the police station to be placed in a cell with regular prisoners. The charges against her were breach of quarantine, resisting arrest, assault, and causing injury to officers.
At 7.30 p.m. that same day, Commissioner Heraldo Clavero called the judge to tell him that Florencia Magalí Morales “had committed suicide in the cell where she was being held at the Santa Rosa de Conlara police station” […]
No one saw Magalí’s body hanging. The other two detainees saw nothing, but heard her scream for help. By the time the judge and the rest of the retinue inspected her body, it was on the cell floor, already lifeless […]
The lawyers representing the family […] requested that the autopsy be furthered. Her sister Andrea Morales […] reported that the extension of the expert report indicated that her sister’s body showed signs compatible with self-defence on her left wrist and forearm, and abrasions below the kneecaps. (Vázquez 2020, online)
This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the case. Instead, I would like to outline two points that contribute to the purposes of the central argument of this section. The first: “suicide” while in detention. The second: the appeal to her “state of nervousness.” I mention these two, among many other possible points, because they are representative expressions. That is, they are recurrent landmarks in the violent exercise of police power. If violence, as Tiscornia (2008) points out, is a discourse that leaves its author’s signature, the events mentioned act as such marks.
Firstly, because the “suicides” of people in detention (in this case, arbitrarily arrested) have become a classic means by which to cover up a large number of deaths caused by beatings and/or torture in various detention centres (from police stations to patrol cars). And, secondly, because the figure of “agitation” is another hackneyed device used by the police to construct accounts of the victims; disqualifying versions that both “sully” them and legitimise a certain action: the need to “restrain” a person who is agitated or nervous. Thus, the cases of police abuse and violence reveal a constant: the possibility of fabricating evidence and versions —suicide, a nervous outburst— as a way of building a judicially exculpatory case on the basis of an illegal act.
Of course, in this specific case, we are talking about suspicious police actions. This does not in any way invalidate their contemplation. After all, we must bear in mind that we are alluding to security agencies accustomed, as we said, to tampering evidence and, indeed, to creating intra-institutional plots that sustain their violent practices. In other words, security agencies capable of constructing judicially legitimate versions of the facts.
Similar caveats apply to a second case, which occurred on April 30, 2020 in the province of Buenos Aires, when Facundo Astudillo Castro, aged 22, was last seen alive during a PPBA check to ensure compliance with ASPO. His body was found more than 100 days later, half-buried in a local canal bed:
Facundo Astudillo Castro had been missing since April 30. On that day, he left the town of Pedro Luro to go to his girlfriend’s house in Bahía Blanca. He was arrested by police officers on the way to Mayor Buratovich and a report was drawn up for breach of the preventive and compulsory social isolation (ASPO) in force due to the new coronavirus pandemic.
Then there was a second arrest, near the town of Teniente Origone. That was the last time there was any news about him: he never reached his girlfriend’s house […]
The Buenos Aires Provincial Police were removed from the investigation at the request of the family, on suspicion that police officers were involved in the disappearance of the young man. Since then, the Argentine Federal Police has intervened. Facundo’s mother also reported that her son had been the victim of police harassment for years […]
Despite the fact that the local officers denied having taken the young man to the station, a personal item belonging to Facundo was found during the search at the mobile police station where Teniente Origone was based. Two halves of an object were found, which when joined formed the shape of a watermelon, and which, according to Cristina Castro, belonged to Facundo. On the other hand, three witnesses say that they saw Facundo at 3.30 p.m. on April 30, getting into a Buenos Aires police patrol car. Furthermore, photos of Astudillo’s ID card were found on one of the police officers’ mobile phones.
Once the body that finally turned out to be Facundo’s was found in the “Cola de Ballena” canal, the Buenos Aires Ministry of Security’s General Audit of Internal Affairs informed the courts that, according to geolocation data, a patrol car had passed through the area of Villarino Viejo on May 8, near where Facundo’s body was found. (Tarricone 2020, online, bold type in the original)
Facundo Astudillo’s case had repercussions that others did not. His mother was received by the President of the Nation and the details of the event were debated for days on the front pages of the newspapers and on prime time television. To this day, the incident remains unsolved. However, this does not prevent us from affirming that the case has police responsibility written all over it: prolonged disappearance, false witnesses, harassment of family members, failure to prosecute, falsification of police documents, and concealment of evidence (Bover and Sirimarco 2020).
Much of the modus operandi involved the previous case is mirrored in this one. The latter case, however, includes another recurrent element in cases of disappearance and death involving the security forces: the appearance of the body (much later) and in an area that has already been searched. We don’t have to dig deep into our country’s historical memory to find the situations and names that this hallmark evokes. We have, for example, the case of Santiago Maldonado, a young man of twenty-eight who went missing after a police raid carried out by the Argentinean National Gendarmerie in 2017 in the province of Chubut. His body was found in a riverbed, previously raked, more than seventy days after his disappearance. Or a year earlier, the case of Lucas Muñoz, a young policeman who disappeared —suspicions fall on the police in the province of Río Negro to which he belonged— whose body was found twenty-six days after his disappearance, also in a previously searched area. The same happened with the body of Facundo Astudillo, who was found four months after his disappearance in an area that had already been searched. The bodies are presented as further evidence. As a message.
The cases mentioned so far underscore a certainty: their very possibility lies in the existence of a network of power and illegalities that goes far beyond policing per se. In other words, for a case of this magnitude to remain within the limits of what is difficult to prove —if not impossible to prove at all— it requires the use of resources for a variety of operations, from the concealment of a body to the presentation of false witnesses, from falsified police documents, to forged evidence. This network of silences and loyalties, but also of implications and sociability, enmeshes security forces personnel in deep and complex webs, cohabited by other agents and other systems (political, judicial, medical, media, etc.). These may not exercise the violence committed by these forces first hand, but they certainly enable and legitimise it (Eilbaum 2004 and 2008; Ugolini 2013; Dewey 2015; Bover and Sirimarco 2020).
The third case occurred on May 15, 2020, when Luis Espinoza, 31 years old, was arrested by the police of the province of Tucumán in an ASPO-related operation. His body was found days later in the depths of a ravine in the neighbouring province of Catamarca; he had been shot by a firearm. The forensic tests proved that it was the weapon used by a police officer:
[The] officers […] approached their destination […] on the pretext of dispersing a horse race with about 200 spectators. They had to do so because it was an illegal race, but there was the added risk of 200 people crowded together during Covid-19. The police arrived on time and the race never happened. Eyewitnesses of the officers’ arrival at the scene said that the police appeared in private cars, firing guns, and without regulation uniforms. They fired shots in the air, without warning and dressed in civilian clothes […]
About 800 metres from the race track, the police came across Juan Antonio […] one of Luis’ 16 brothers […] the agents ordered him to get off his horse, perhaps believing that he was attending the horse show. Juan Antonio says that, as soon as he got off, the agents handcuffed him and began to beat him. Luis, who was riding behind, came upon the scene from a distance and shouted at them to stop beating his brother. The police then decided to leave Juan Antonio handcuffed on the side of a field and to pursue Luis, who was 20 to 30 metres away. That was the last the family heard of Luis. Juan Antonio lost sight of him, but he did see one of the policemen grab a gun and point it in his brother’s direction. He heard a gunshot and fainted, he believes from a blow to the head. When he woke up, he found a pool of blood, but no trace of Luis. The body was found the following Friday, some 100 kilometres away, in a ravine in another neighbouring province, Catamarca, wrapped in a bag and with signs of having been shot in the left shoulder blade […]
Cuevas, Espinoza’s sister-in-law, Juan Antonio’s wife, told this newspaper that “justice has never been done in the province because the police always covered their tracks, they have always done the same thing. The fact that they took Luis to Catamarca means that they are used to committing these crimes. It’s not the first time they do it.” (Halfon Laksman 2020, online)
This case, as others, involves death, its concealment, and impunity. Here too, we have the tactical and recurrent use of geography. To put it crudely: the existence of “dumping grounds:” rivers, canals, cliffs. Known and typical locations for such operations. “It’s not the first time it’s happened,” suggests Espinoza’s sister-in-law. And judging by her brother’s assumption in another interview, it is not the first time it has happened there either.12 The map of police violence thus recognises routine traces: the scenes recur and accumulate; they are mounted one on top of the other, similar and successive, multiplying the same steps here and there,13 returning again and again to the same points. In short, revealing, their hallmarks of authorship.
Which brings us to another corollary. Obvious, of course, but no less remarkable for being so. It is not seldom that these, and many other cases, tend to be labelled in the press, in public opinion, but also in the political arena, as “extraordinary excesses.” Two explanations —both erroneous— come into play here. The first, that of excess, refers to the idea of the overreaching (and undesired) consequence of the exercise of a form of control which, until that moment, had followed normal procedures. The other, that of the extraordinary, refers to the theory of the unforeseen as the unusual. Neither explanation holds up to the facts. Numerous analyses of the subject have shown, time and again, that police violence resulting in death is neither extraordinary nor an excess of otherwise normal procedures. Quite the contrary, they are systematic events that respond to institutionalised modus operandi. They are not “absurd deaths,” in the sense of being unthinkable, but part of a legitimised pattern of harassment and harm (Tiscornia 1997, 1998, and 2008; Pita 2010 and 2019; Kessler and Dimarco 2013; Pita and Pacceca 2017).
Why am I pointing all this out? And, above all, why am I doing so at such length? First of all, to present the ways in which police violence is exercised on the national scene, and especially to unveil a form of population control and intervention which, without being totalitarian or uniformly developed within these forces, is nonetheless systematic and recurrent. In other words, in order to emphasise what specialists in the field have repeatedly pointed out: that police power configures territories of control (mostly over vulnerable groups) that articulate complex forms of the legal, the formal, the arbitrary, the abusive, the illegal, and where violence appears to configure forms of moral disciplinary control. In sum, to propose a context based on which to read the arguments outlined in the previous section.
Secondly, I also point all this out in order to reinforce something that has already been outlined: that in relation to certain police practices, ASPO did not constitute exceptionality, but continuity. There is no doubt that the particular variables of the prolonged confinement in our country did not give rise to a problem, but rather revived it. The confinement, the suspension of free movement in public spaces, the emptying of those spaces, the paralysis of economic activity, the social crisis, among other factors, became fertile ground for the application of police harassment and violence. Why? Because harassment and violence by the security forces proliferate amidst inequality (such as those that the ASPO inevitably strengthened).
What bailes and deaths laid bare, on the verge of the start of confinement in 2020, was just that: the configuration, for some members of these forces, of confinement as a scenario of possibility. These routines were by no means an accident. They were, instead, the emergence of long-standing institutional logics: the abuse of power, discretion, the exercise of violence. What the ASPO did was to provide police scripts with new tools. The cases reviewed here illustrate this: they all involve arrests for breach of quarantine. In an exercise of police power that tends to use infractions and contraventions as a posteriori excuses (first comes the motiveless police intervention, then the search for “legitimate” reasons), mandatory confinement has expanded the universe of what is considered punishable.
Concluding remarks
It has been fourteen months since the ASPO was decreed in Argentina. Our experience with confinement and the pandemic had just begun, but it was already laden with the assumptions, fears, and concerns based on others that had already started. The novelty and urgency of the situation prompted writers, philosophers, and other professionals from all parts of the world to express their opinions in real time about what was happening. In the field of security and surveillance to which this text refers, the axes of the discussion were centred on concerns related to biopower and the advance of the totalitarianism of digital control in the health crisis (Amadeo 2020).
The months that have passed since the beginning of the pandemic have shown us how far removed our concerns in this area are from those of other countries. If this text has led us through different objectives, one of them has been the need to recover local and regional concerns and agendas that, without leaving aside broader contexts and concerns, nevertheless position the debates on the specific axes that our social and political experiences demand. As far as Argentina —and perhaps the region— is concerned, the discussion involving security forces and pandemic/confinement has not even come close to touching on cyber-control, as it has focused on other aspects.
Outlining the discussion that has dominated the local scene has thus been another of the purposes of this article. Perhaps the main one. If the arguments reviewed shed light on different sides of the security forces’ actions, it is because they reveal, in the first place, diverse aspects of the situation experienced in 2020. We said that the “caring police” paradigm was based on the health crisis. That is, the pandemic. The cases described in the previous section, on the other hand, find a niche in the context of the mandatory confinement. In other words, in the existence of contexts of violence and inequality born of and/or reinforced by the mandatory confinement. To speak of care or violence is thus to point to the weighting of various aspects and political operations: to speak of the actions of the security forces during a pandemic refers to health associations that seem to be the cause of the events; to speak of the actions of the security forces during confinement is to place these health variables as the backdrop for increasing the visibility of a problem that is one of a structural nature (Sirimarco 2020).
The debates in which the Argentine security forces have played a central role over the past year have thus slipped into this spectrum. It is no coincidence that both poles —the resemanticisation of control as care and the cases of police violence— occurred mostly during the first months of the implementation of ASPO. That is, during the stages when both adherence to confinement and state control of its enforcement were stronger and when the presence of security forces in public spaces was governmentally deployed and socially legitimized. I refer here to their presence, not to their violent actions. In essence, when this presence and this action of control and vigilance were ostensible. Following this initial phase, as we have said, adherence and control gradually relaxed and the security forces ceased to play such a central role in the successive stages.
Those first stages are now likely to be repeated today, midway through 2021. Perhaps not exactly, but by calling for new controls and new isolations, at the height of the “second wave” of this pandemic. And it is in the articulation of this recent past and this possible future that the final objective of this text lies. Up to this point, the intention has been to reflect on the role of the security forces in this emergency. In other words, to ask the condensing formula with which we opened this work —how we should view the security forces (in confinement, in a pandemic)?— the questions that best and most appropriately enable it to engage with the contexts and situations we are currently experiencing now, and those we will experience in the future. Indeed, it seems to me that these questions define not only notions of policing, but something that I believe to be even more vital, with a view to the future. And here, then, is that last objective: that these questions also make it possible to identify areas of conflict and, therefore, points and ways of intervening in the new/old scenarios of emergency and inequality —pandemic or not— that await us.