REGION: FEELING OF INSECURITY USED AS POLITICAL TOOL.
By Andres Gaudin
Citizens' insecurity, or the feeling of insecurity, as those who study the matter prefer to call it, has recently become a cause for worry in South American societies. During recent electoral campaigns, citizens were bombarded by a propaganda onslaught that, in general, was monopolized by the most extreme sectors of the political right. During the months of campaigning before the June 28 Argentine midterm and Uruguayan primary elections, the issue was on the agenda every day. In Argentina, one candidate even proposed a game in which voters could interact on his Web page, creating what was called "the citizen-insecurity map," an idea with such scant scientific validity that it was taken down shortly after it was posted. In Uruguay, crimes that were no different in either number or type from what would be considered normal in any modern society were used to unleash a merciless campaign against Interior Minister Daisy Tourne, who resigned, beleaguered by accusations that, ultimately, proved to be false.
The issue was used in early 2009 during electoral processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, and in mid-June, the Venezuelan opposition put the matter on the front pages as if it were something new in a country that has historically been the most violent in South America. Even in Colombia, where in recent decades the internal war turned violence into a dramatic everyday occurrence, and in Brazil, where cities such as San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have insecurity indices among the highest in the world, the conservative press treated the issue as if it were a new phenomenon.
The discourse, said Argentine sociologist Alcira Argumedo, "always ends up offering the same false prescriptions, repeatedly favoring resolving the problem through greater repressive state activity: zero tolerance, lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility, constructing more and more prisons, reforming the national penal codes to punish criminals with increasingly severe penalties." And, in some cases, the idea surfaces to legalize the death penalty, dangerously trumpeted by the press.
In February 2009, caught in a settling of scores among criminals, a young man was assassinated who worked as an interior designer for Argentine celebrity Susana Gimenez, one of the country's most popular TV hosts. After the incident, Gimenez's voice became one of the most influential in affecting public opinion. She referred to the crime as "the worst example of the insecurity...
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