Daniel Barrientos was killed with a shot to the chest during a shootout between thieves and a policeman on top of the bus that he was driving through the La Matanza district. He lacked nothing to retire. In other words, to enjoy life without family schedules. He was a good person. His death was a trigger and the reaction of his colleagues to authority a sample button: society is fed up, angry, disappointed in the lack of responses from the political class.
The provincial Security Minister, Sergio Berni, suffered a beating by outraged fellow drivers of Daniel. He went to put his face as part of a government that, let’s say it, experiences the fight against insecurity as a traumatic, uncomfortable issue.
For the hard kirchnerismo, the task carried out by Berni is furrowed by the tension between the ideological question (which mixes guarantees, lax interpretation of the laws and politically correct positions for vernacular progressivism in terms of criminal rights) and the needs of the people in the districts, coverage of specific demands, which are in the opposite direction. And that, on top of that, obviously only the national forces and their halo of high professionalism can fill, in terms of a certain citizen tranquility. But it took years to reach Greater Buenos Aires due to internal political differences between the two jurisdictions. And that we are talking about the same political party.
It’s hair-splitting, but the impression appears that the virulent inmate in the government party shows an absence of certain basic decisions: Does the ruling party have a comprehensive security policy or is it just a matter of patches? They have governed for almost three and a half years. The National Minister of Security, Aníbal Fernández, and Berni do not speak to each other, they hate each other. Is this disconnection viable in an issue as sensitive as the lives of ordinary people?
The citizens begin to give verdict: yesterday, in the tumult of La Matanza where Berni was beaten, and after he was rescued by the opposition Police Rodríguez Larreta, who works on the other side of General Paz, a protest was heard : “That they all leave, that not a single one remains.” Angry bus drivers sang it. Workers in a dependency relationship who could also be teachers or port workers or bricklayers or kitchen helpers. Anyone who gets up at dawn to go to work and has to pray to get to work alive.
It is a message for a specific, dramatic event. But those who sign up to succeed Axel or Berni should take note. Or Alberto. The margin of tolerance is reduced almost to nothing itself.
The anger of Daniel’s companions dangerously touched the concept of justice by one’s own hand, in this case with the one perceived as indirectly responsible for the crime due to inaction. We already saw it in Rosario, when indignant neighbors destroyed the hold of a drug trafficker linked to the murder of a little boy, Máximo Jerez, struck down when he was playing ball in the wrong place. It is the system that gets out of hand, the non-authority, the popular response without political leadership to the lack of justice and the absence of the State as responsible for the protection of the citizen who pays his taxes as best he can.
From there, from that annoyance that already seems visceral, precisely the new “tough” of politics, the hawks, eat. The anti system. Owners of impracticable discursive vagueness in real life but that, nevertheless, fill the painful situational gap of, for example, the companions of the driver Daniel or the relatives of those murdered by the drug traffickers.
It is clear that insecurity as a central problem is inextricably linked to the general social question, to poverty, marginality, drugs. Which, unfortunately, have been deepening in recent years; the last of Macri, all of Alberto. But a broad spectrum of the citizens of the Conurbano -La Plata is included here- also feels a notable, pronounced orphanhood of the role of the State in the matter. The feeling that authority is on the bad side, not the good side. It is sung by the qualitative surveys that politics manages, those that are not published.
And the meetings of the neighbors with the neighborhood commissioners who can only listen to complaints because they do not have the power to provide solutions are already the divine button; and the requests for more patrol cars, and the constant sarcasm of the middle managers of the Buenos Aires, which is the visible response for the neighbor when an act of insecurity appears in the newspapers and then goes off, deflates with the passing of the days because it happens the same in another neighborhood, where the magnifying glass -the pressure- of the media is moving. And the feeling prevails, the desolation, that we are getting closer to being governed by the law of the jungle.
