When Aníbal Fernández learned that Sergio Berni was in his ministry participating in a meeting on security in the Conurbano, he sent for him and invited him to his office. “This can’t be between friends of so many years,” said one. “Let’s go back to before, the other agreed.
The reconciliation can be read in personal terms, of course, because security ministers, like journalists, deep down have their little hearts, but above all in terms of management: beyond the bid between the President and the Vice President, the The lack of coordination between the Nation and the Province was not going to be popularly forgiven after events such as the murder of bus driver Daniel Barrientos.
However, the match did not end with Berni aligning with Alberto Fernández. A while later, in dialogue with Diego Brancatelli on AM750, Berni challenged the President: “I don’t want him to get off, I want him above the ring, because I need to go to an intern with Alberto Fernández.”
Berni defined the issue of security as a “complex” issue (he used that word) and said that even if there are 200,000 police officers “that alone will not solve the problem.” He added that “many State actors, regardless of political color, pretend to be distracted” because “the discourse that there are no police officers and patrolmen comes in handy and with that they ignore the issue.”
“The safest societies are not the ones with the most police officers, but the most orderly ones,” he said in the report to 750. “And when I talk about order, I’m not talking about repression, but about the order that work as a promoter of mobility gives ascending social, the family, the order that gives to instill values in the school.”
In another section, he insisted on his thesis of lowering the age of criminal responsibility, although he said that it was “a way of protecting our young people, because it has to do with not opening the way for crime.” At the same time, the Buenos Aires minister did not give any justifying details, from a sociological or criminological point of view, as would happen if homicides committed by boys were on the rise and were not spectacular and infrequent cases.
Berni denied the opinions that compare Argentine crime with Mexican crime, for example. “We are far from complex crimes like those in Mexico,” he said, clearly alluding to drug trafficking. And he said again that “crime is rooted in the negligence of the State, but not only of the Executive Branch.” Translation: look at the Legislative and the Judicial.
Sentry Operative
Regarding the meeting with Aníbal Fernández, he stated that “when we took office we asked that Operative Sentinel be reissued”, in reference to the presence of gendarmes in the suburbs when Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was President and Berni Vice Minister of Security. “The President was very receptive, but then Sabina Frederic came and nothing happened. Aníbal took office and promised to do so, and apparently now it seems that there is a decision to move forward in that direction.”
In reality, the Ministry of National Security has already begun to implement the Conurbano Unified Command, a device of federal forces set up mainly with Gendarmerie and also with members of the Prefecture and the Federal Police.
According to national officials, and they remarked it when asked by this newspaper after the meeting with Berni, the deployment was arranged in a meeting in which the President and Martín Insaurralde, mayor of Lomas de Zamora on leave and head of Cabinet of Axel Kicillof since Together for Change won the 2021 legislative elections.
Then the matter was impregnated, despite which Fernández continued to have meetings with security secretaries of Tigre, Pilar, La Plata and La Matanza.
But after the murder of the bus driver Barrientos and the shock it produced, the meetings resumed with the assistance of members of Berni’s team.
When the Kicillof minister suffered the attack in General Paz and Route 3, Fernández called him, sent him messages and, before the lack of response, in the end he sent him a screenshot of messages and calls.
That is the immediate antecedent of reconciliation.
Fernández and Berni had close contact when the former was Minister of the Interior under Néstor Kirchner and the latter, while reviewing Social Development with Alicia Kirchner, was part of a containment and social negotiation group, especially with piqueteros, headed by the then secretary of Provinces Rafael Follonier. All the members of that team continue to maintain an intense political activity, and although the meetings are sporadic, they feel the typical nostalgia of the inaugural days. “We were the Armada Brancaleone, but we had to negotiate because the country was ordering itself with Néstor and the poverty inherited from the 2001 crisis was still very high,” recalled one of the members of that group yesterday.
The polarization between Cristina and Alberto Fernández confronts Berni and Aníbal today, because one is with the vice despite the fact that in public he alleges that he has not seen her for a long time and the other continues to maintain that the President has the right to seek re-election.
But both know the situation in the province of Buenos Aires and have a pulse of irritation produced by the daily experience of massive cell phone theft in a context of inflation and low income.
In some issues they have a different operational vision. Berni arranged for the Buenos Aires city not only to ask for documents but also to search the passengers of the buses to see if they are carrying weapons. Fernández publicly said that he is against the searches, which affect workers who are the ones who take the buses of Greater Buenos Aires.
In terms of jurisdiction, the differences are no longer doctrinal but legal. The Buenos Aires, the same as the provincial Justice, has no role in federal crimes such as drug trafficking. The concern is national and is the responsibility of federal judges and the forces commanded by Fernández.
An approaching gesture, as this newspaper learned, was given by Aníbal to Berni when he asked him to speak to the Gendarmerie. “Here anyone can talk to anyone, because the one who leads the forces is me,” said Fernández.
