Gritty Slum Becomes Showcase for Change

On a cold afternoon, Deputy Cmdr. Omar Azpiazu and patrolmen of the Buenos Aires provincial police stood in a driveway inspecting a shattered getaway car used in a stabbing among thieves.

The officers whirled when sounds of a shootout blared over their radios, an officer’s distorted voice screaming, “Pull the trigger!”

Azpiazu and his men piled into their cars. They clattered down unpaved roads past tumbledown shacks and shops with hand- painted signs, churning up dust, hurtling the wrong way on traffic-snarled boulevards.

“Epah! That’s great, they’ve got an assault rifle and a machine gun!” Azpiazu exclaimed as he listened to the description of three gunmen who had robbed a factory payroll office.

The commander reached the scene as a police helicopter swooped low over a vacant lot, rotor wind whipping waist-high weeds. A young patrol officer and a detective cornered a suspect in tall vegetation by a brick wall. And gunned him down.

The long-faced gunman, who went by the street name of Julio the Chilean, was sprawled on his back. A .45-caliber pistol lay by his hand. An ammunition clip was tucked in one of his high-top basketball shoes. Officers converged around the corpse, blowing off steam, exchanging the macho kisses on the cheek common among Argentine men.

They were celebrating their survival. At least 50 police officers have been killed in metropolitan Buenos Aires this year, and La Matanza averages a shootout a day.

This is another face of the besieged force Argentines call “the accursed police” because of its longtime image: outgunned officers risking their lives every day in a gray landscape of angry industrial slums and uneasy suburbs.

Making life on the street even tougher, last year La Matanza district became a laboratory of police reform. Abolishing a centralized bureaucracy, reformers made district chiefs the pillars of a command scheme closer to U.S. city departments than paramilitary Latin American police forces.

In essence, the chiefs run semiautonomous departments and shoulder the accompanying power and accountability. As in U.S cities, there is great emphasis on analyzing and responding to statistical crime trends that were previously hard to come by.

The mass firing of top commanders suspected of corruption made it tricky to find 18 trustworthy district leaders. Some were promoted from below. But reformist Justice Minister Leon Arslanian retained a few old-timers with good reputations and entrusted them with sensitive assignments.

Cmdr. Ruben Parravicini, a bespectacled and measured 32-year veteran, was one of the survivors. He is a 50-year-old Argentine cop’s cop who consumes the requisite industrial quantities of cigarettes, steak, coffee and mate tea.

“Time will be the judge of the reform,” Parravicini said. “Some firings were very justified, others less so. But in such a big restructuring you have to accept the new rules and go to work.”

First the reformers gave Parravicini the task of reshaping the powerful intelligence division of the provincial force. He slashed it from 800 to 150 officers.

“They were spying on unions, politicians, students, many inappropriate things,” he said. “The police are for fighting thieves, not for spying.”

Then Parravicini became chief in La Matanza. The name, which means “The Massacre,” is believed to refer to a battle between colonists and Indians in the 1500s. But some days it seems apt as ever.

La Matanza is a fearsome expanse of about 2 million inhabitants full of machine politics, organized crime, illegal immigrants and hostile shantytowns into which officers venture in platoons.

It is the kind of area where gang members in the funeral cortege of a slain friend recently spotted a passing police car, pulled guns and opened fire on the officers.

Parravicini took advantage of his autonomy. He created a special division that eliminated the plague of bank robberies in his district. He acquired technological tools that are rare in Argentina: Local businesses helped sponsor a state-of-the-art mobile command center. An aide surfing the Internet obtained a Canadian software program that produces composite sketches of suspects.

“There used to be a lot of bureaucracy if you wanted these kinds of things,” Parravicini said. “The mentality was either everyone gets it or nobody gets it.”

Like the rest of the force, La Matanza’s 1,700 officers underwent a comprehensive refresher course in basic police work: fitness, shooting, self-defense, tactics. The new brass realized that many officers were a menace to themselves as well as the community.

“We discovered veterans who could barely shoot,” said Officer Alejandro Otero, head of the training program. “There were stupid incidents in which officers were wounded because they did not follow basic rules.”

The officers welcomed the retraining sessions led by Elisa Caceres, a dynamic woman instructor. As in Mexico and other Latin American nations attempting reform, women are seen as outsiders and therefore better equipped to change an insular culture. Women administrators were brought in to run a revamped academy trying to raise ethical and educational standards.

Despite tight budgets, there also were efforts to increase low pay. Under a new version of the overtime system that was once pillaged by unscrupulous chiefs, officers can now earn double the average salary of $400 to $500 a month--if they work grueling extra hours.

In August, a force accustomed to turmoil was shaken up once again with the politically pressured resignation of Arslanian, the architect of the reform, the man who had assigned Parravicini to La Matanza.

Parravicini fared well nonetheless. He became coordinator of the 18 regional departments, one of the highest-ranking uniformed jobs in the force.

He said the reforms would survive political change at the top.

“It’s a change of men, but it’s the same reform,” he insisted. “We will be tough on crime, but within limits. We will be firm, but not harsh.”