Exceptional Argentina Di Tella, Glaeser and Llach - Thomas Piketty

2001. Negative includes any non positive perception.
3. A Reversal of Fortune
To enlarge our question marks, this difference in the Police was exactly the opposite one
hundred years ago. In the late XIX century different authors argued for the superiority of the
Argentinean Police, at least in the capital city. According to Vera (1899), a century ago “[In
Chile you can easily see] policeman drunk in the street, [...], supporting thieves and covering
up crimes for a small tip. […] In contrast, the Buenos Aires police admirably fulfills its
mission”. Even the Mayor of Santiago de Chile severely criticized the local Police at the time,
in spite of his obvious incentive to overstate the quality of amenities in his city (see
Vicuña-Mackenna, 1875). Thus, it is not that Chile always had a better Police; the fortune of
security forces in these two countries was reversed. The timing of the reversal of fortune seems
obvious in Chile: 1927. That year, General Carlos Ibañez merged the rural and urban Police
Forces – with dependence from local authorities - with a gendarmerie that was previously part
of the Army. This lead to the foundation of a national and centralized Police: Carabineros de
Chile. Unlike Ibañez’s government itself, this new organization survived the devastating
effects of the Great Depression in Chile – which was much deeper than in Argentina -. In
Argentina it seems harder to find a clear cutoff, maybe because secular deterioration of
institutions can happen with delays. In the early 20th century policeman in Argentina had a
high status in society, which can be summarized by the fact that one of them, Hipolito
Yrigoyen, became president in 1916. Moreover, Argentina was the center of many innovations
in the Police practices in the region, as evidenced by the Latin American Police meetings held
in Buenos Aires in 1905 and 1915. By 1964 the CIA still reported that the Argentinean Federal
Police was “universally considered one of the best police forces in Latin America, only behind
Carabineros de Chile in its efficacy.” However, that same document discusses the low status
that Police was getting within the Argentinean society. This report blames the first and second
government of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955) for this deterioration, but without further
justification for the conclusions. While it is true that the Police supported the uprising of Perón
in 1946, his government also increased police wages and improved working conditions overall.
Nonetheless, it is unclear that these measures translated into lower corruption. In contrast to the
CIA report, Barreneche (2007) dates the origins of the problems some years before Perón.
According to him, the political instability of the 1930s “infamous decade” coincide with a
strong deterioration of the Police. Interestingly, during this period the Police started to provide
paid private security for events (Rodriguez et al, 1999), which may have fostered rent-seeking
within the organization. Not without controversy, we can date the first decay of the Buenos
Aires Police at some point between the 1920s and 1950. Nonetheless, between the anecdotal
CIA report in 1964 and today, the Police in Argentina seems much worse evaluated. Neither
the trustworthiness nor the bribing indicators rank the Argentinean Police even close to the
mean in Latin America, despite being a much richer country than the average in the sample (see
Figure 1). As an extreme symptom of institutional decay, as well as signal of wrong incentives,
Stanley (2005) shows how Argentinean policemen in the 1990s framed innocent victims to
make arrests and get Press coverage. The 20th century history of Argentina and Chile share
many commonalities. Notably, there were dictatorships on the two sides of the Andes.
Moreover, these autocracies usually used the Police Forces for political purposes. Also, Police
wages tended to be comparable in both countries, with a very strong amount allocated into
pensions. It’s not to say that military dictatorships, human rights problems and wage
compensation are not reasons behind the differences. But to be a reasonable explanation, these
hypothesis need to interact with something else; otherwise the Chilean Police would have
followed the same pathway as the Argentinean one. The next chapters will make comparative