Opposition presidential primary candidate Horacio Rodríguez Larreta said on Thursday morning that he would militarize Argentina’s borders, ramp up use of security tech and arm police with tasers, in addition to service revolvers, if elected.
The Juntos por el Cambio coalition candidate and Buenos Aires mayor unveiled his security policy proposals on the banks of the Paraná river, in the Santa Fe province city of Rosario, where the incursion of drug trafficking and organized crime has significantly increased murders and other violent crimes in recent years.
“Rosario is the example of what a city suffers when the national and provincial governments abandon it, when they let drug mafias advance,” Larreta said, flanked by running-mate Gerardo Morales and ally Maximiliano Pullaro, the former provincial security minister who won the JxC provincial primaries and is likely to win the Santa Fe governorship.
“I was told the other day of people who don’t want to order a pizza at the weekends anymore because they’re scared that [a criminal] will come.”
He went on to outline 14 campaign proposals to combat insecurity. These included sending the army to Argentina’s borders to combat drug trafficking, forming an elite “FBI-style” unit to use advanced security technology including facial recognition, rewriting the country’s 102-year-old criminal code, increasing psychological support for victims, and providing more training and gear to police.
“You might not believe it, but there are police going into the streets, with four, six months of training,” Larreta said. “That’s irresponsibility.” He pledged that, if elected, officers would receive at least a year of training.
Under the proposals, police would be armed with tasers, he said. The BA city government and the national administration have fought over permission to import and use the electric stun guns for almost 15 years, with human rights organizations and security experts warning that officers can use them inappropriately and seriously harm those targeted.
Larreta announced in late May that Buenos Aires city government had imported 60 tasers, which would be used from June.
He acknowledged that some proposals, such as signal blockers in prisons to stop inmates from communicating with the outside world, are already established in national law, but said that in practice they are not enforced.
On security policy, Larreta’s playing field is marked by his Juntos por el Cambio presidential nomination rival, Patricia Bullrich, who was security minister during Mauricio Macri’s presidency and has consistently pushed for an iron-fisted approach.
Her running-mate, Luis Petri, was one of the authors of the “Chocobar bill”, a 2020 initiative to establish “a legal presumption of duty fulfillment” for police officers who “defend a victim’s life, physical integrity, freedom or property” while off duty. The project was created after police officer Luis Chocobar was convicted of murder for killing a teenage boy who had stabbed a tourist he was mugging in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca.
