Editorial

Crime and global warming

By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor.

The fact that Victory Front deputy María Laura Leguizamón (a former Senate colleague of
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) should have her car stolen on the same day as 127
of her colleagues were being sworn into the Lower House should serve to place the
importance of politics into perspective amid rising crime. Car thefts (sometimes accompanied
by lethal or near-fatal violence) are becoming positively epidemic. Local car thieves may not
often consider themselves to be objective allies of the global climate change conference
unfolding in Copenhagen this coming week but they supply a major addition to the various
hassles already plaguing a motorist’s life — traffic which is reckless at best and chaotic at
worst, the numerous expenses (petrol, insurance, licences, parking, highway tolls, etc.) and
the racket which extorts protection money for professedly looking after parked cars (a
growing menace). Within this context car ownership thus becomes not only a minor
contribution to global warming but also a major risk to personal safety and even survival.

But car thefts to feed the illegal workshops of Greater Buenos Aires are only part of the crime
problem. On Wednesday night the wave of often wanton slayings by criminals found their
inevitable response in a case of vigilante justice or at least self-defence in Villa Santa Rita
when an elderly man gunned down two burglars breaking and entering into his house,
severely wounding a third — this phenomenon has gone unreported until now but would
seem to be the 10th such case in the last two months. Vigilante action confronts justice with
impossible dilemmas — stamp it out and the citizenry is deprived of its legitimate right to
self-defence while giving a green light opens the door to the danger of innocent people being
killed. Perhaps gun control would be one way of defusing the situation (there are around 1.25
million registered firearms in circulation beyond the security forces, never mind millions of
illegal guns) but this could also tilt the balance in favour of criminals, given the greater ease
of cracking down on legal weapons.

Crime is hardly less universal a problem than global warming — nobody is really immune
even if criminals generally show a distinct lack of chivalry in singling out the elderly, women
and other vulnerable groups for their depredations. Society urgently demands that cross-
party agreement should not be limited to parliamentary posts but should find a solution
which mobilizes everybody against a scourge which affects everybody.