(Re)defining the security issue: tensions and openings in the problematizations around a «democratic security policy» in the period 2000-2015

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the problematizations that were articulated through the proposals for a «democratic security policy» in Argentina. In particular, we will examine the way in which these discourses linked security and crime prevention. To that end, we have established two moments. The first emerges at the end of the nineties, during the first period of intense politicization of «insecurity» in Argentina, which focused on preventive measures and their “social” modalities as the core of its «project» of democratic security policy. Here, we have considered the National Crime Prevention Plan as well as the Multi-Agency Intervention Program, which emerged in the late 2000s and established similar intervention mechanisms. The second moment introduces an important revision of that initial project: the central concept of the project for a democratic security program ceases to be the social prevention of crime and instead focuses on the issue of political control over security forces. We are centrally concerned with the problematization of security as it was produced in the framework of the creation of the Ministry of National Security in Argentina in 2010. The corpus was made up of strategic and programmatic documents, work reports, internal training documents, institutional magazines, dissemination materials of the National Crime Prevention Plan, Vulnerable Communities Program, Multiagency Intervention Program, as also of the Ministry of Security of the Nation during the period 2010-2015.