The three million right-wing votes that nobody went to seek

If there is one thing that characterizes the police and security forces in general, it is their high ideological homogeneity: they are all right-wing. However, they do not vote. They do not participate in the electoral process, which can be explained by two reasons: the first is the absence of a voting culture; having been extremely precarious in their jobs and marginalized from political life and institutional participation, they have become accustomed to not voting. They were never incorporated into the democratic process as subjects of rights, but only to act as its custodians.

The second reason is explained by the general occurrence that on election days they must work and are not allowed to vote; even if they want to, the electoral authorities do not include them in the list of voters for the polling stations or establishments where they must perform their duties, thus prohibiting them from casting their votes.

We see, then, how the electoral will and influence of a spectrum of more than three million right-wing voters is neutralized, including the approximately 850,000 members of the forces at all levels of governance and in all situations, multiplied by four for the family unit.

There is another factor that we must mention when describing the police ecosystem: they have high suicide rates. In the Province of Buenos Aires alone, it is four to five times higher than the average in society. More police officers die as a result of suicides than those who fall in the line of duty. While the issue of suicides is multifactorial, the impact of job precariousness on the psychological wear and tear of police officers is clear. However, we never hear any human rights organizations, leftist parties, or the usual Peronist and radical governors speak out and offer solutions regarding the epidemic of police suicides. The explanation is simple: they do not constitute their electorate. The suicides of right-wing voters are not relevant to the elite.

A question then arises: how to reverse this situation, what measures would be suitable and viable to adopt to improve the life project of the forces and involve them in politics, collectively and organically, for the first time, within the framework of democracy.

The proposal is to unionize them. A union is a governing instrument to guarantee correlating rights, such as collective bargaining, the right to strike, union protection, a tool to denounce labor exploitation and illegal orders without being exposed to sanctions or even the loss of their careers.

However, we must face a harsh truth: we do not like unions; they have always been part of the problem. We all know this, and in that line, the national government promoted the foundational law and labor reform, timid but welcome first steps.

Unfortunately, there is no plan B; given the Argentine legal context, the only reasonable option is for the national government to grant union registration to the police unions that exist, de facto and literally, in all jurisdictions of the country. It is the only power that the national executive possesses, unilaterally, to influence the issue.

Labor law is substantive law, meaning it is up to the national government to resolve the matter, according to Article 75, paragraph 12 of the National Constitution. Furthermore, this measure would not imply any budgetary expenditure for the national government and is a process that can be regulated and managed. Far from a Manichean perspective, gradual and incremental recognition of the right in the different provinces that make up the country is feasible.

The alternative would be to place expectations on provincial legislatures to enact a law recognizing the unionization of the forces, which is delusional. They respond to the governors, who would lose economic and political power in two ways: first, they would be responsible for financing the rights arising from union freedom; second, they would be deprived of the income derived from illegal collection schemes imposed, against their will, on the police.

In the Province of Buenos Aires, which has 95,000 police officers, being the largest force in the country, there are many precedents of police participation in illegal collection mechanisms, with police officers being sanctioned for refusing to participate in them. Governor Axel Kicillof hides the scandalous problem of insecurity under the rug, allowing police officers to work under precarious conditions, not allocating budgetary resources commensurate with the operational needs of the province, and overlooking their impact on the quality of citizen security service. Granting a union to the “bonaerense” would be an atomic bomb for Kicillof and his presidential aspirations.

That said, and aware of the disvalued symbolic burden that characterizes unions, it is necessary to appeal to pragmatism by recovering the figure of the union as an instrument that would allow reconfiguring the working conditions and organizational regime of the forces, with the teleology of involving them in political activities. Specifically, it would allow them to improve their salaries and establish more reasonable working hours, more liquidity in their pockets, and greater availability of time, necessary conditions for them to develop their political and electoral potential.

Moreover, it is illustrative to investigate comparative law regarding the approach taken by other countries concerning the political rights of their police. We see that almost all European countries have their police unionized, eight of which even recognize a conditional right to strike; along with the United States, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, the penitentiary service of Colombia, among others.

Additionally, there are supranational police union organizations, such as EuroCOP (European Confederation of Police) and ICPRA (International Council of Police Representative Associations), which function as structures similar to the United Nations. In fact, ICPRA is a member with voice and vote of the ILO (International Labor Organization).

In Mercosur, we can mention Uruguay, which has a single police system, the National Police, unionized since 2009, and Brazil, which, like us, has a decentralized police model, with three federal forces (Highway Police, Penitentiary Police, and Federal Police), of which the Federal Police is unionized, and two state forces, the Military Police and the Civil Police, with the latter being unionized in all 27 jurisdictions that make up the Federative Republic of Brazil.

Furthermore, the rates of affiliation to police unions in these countries far exceed the historical average of general union affiliation in Latin America, which ranges between 25-30%. For example, in Uruguay, the affiliation rate is over 80%, in Costa Rica close to 50%, and in Colombia, the penitentiary service has an affiliation rate of between 70-80%.

And in all these countries, we can clearly observe how, after unionizing, police officers quickly formed political parties and competed electorally. Thus, we saw in the United States the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police), the largest police union in the world, supporting Donald Trump's campaign; we saw Brazilian police unions like COBRAPOL (Brazilian Confederation of Civil Police) supporting Jair Bolsonaro and also reaching dozens of legislators in the Federal Congress and state legislatures, the so-called “bancada da bala”; the APN (Alliance Police Nationale) in France promoting government policies for immigration control; and the SUPU (Unified Police Union of Uruguay) supporting Lacalle Pou, among other examples. Always leaning to the right.

The comparative experience not only allows us to observe that this phenomenon is already a reality in all latitudes and altitudes of the world, but also that in our region there has been a break in the normative legal paradigm of public international law. Specifically, the IACHR (Inter-American Court of Human Rights) issued Advisory Opinion (O.C.) 27/2021, which established that states that have ratified the ACHR (American Convention on Human Rights), including Argentina, have the “duty” to recognize their police forces' human right to free association, which is the terminology used by the Court.

The Advisory Opinions of the IACHR are legally binding for the Argentine state, due to the application of conventionality control, under the risk of compromising its international responsibility.

There are already seven Argentine police and/or penitentiary unions that have submitted a petition to the IACHR requesting a ruling on their right to freedom of association, with the first of those petitions being declared admissible by the IACHR in January of this year. Of the 32 contentious rulings condemning the Argentine state issued by the IACHR, only one has not been complied with (Fontevecchia/Dámico). With that statistic, it is hard to imagine that, sooner or later, any national government will not comply with a ruling from the IACHR.

It should also be mentioned that the jurisprudence of the IACHR is unidirectional, meaning that once they have taken a position on a particular issue, it has never happened in their history that they have changed that position, which is why it is not plausible that when issuing a ruling they will deviate from O.C. 27/2021. Moreover, this O.C. was requested from the IACHR by the IACHR itself, meaning it was a kind of directive within the inter-American system regarding the interpretation of the issue.

I have to say it: this has already happened. The Argentine police will have a union. The question is no longer whether they can or cannot, but about limits and scopes, whether there will be a strike or not, deadlines, and, fundamentally, who will politically capitalize on it.

We are talking about a demand that has over seventy years of history and involves a collective, conservatively, of more than three million people. We are talking about a historic event with a capital H, we are talking about the first libertarian union in history and redefining the concept of loyalty, recognizing rights for people who have always been precarious. Without a doubt, the political move of the decade.

Intelligence is about anticipating. The national government should anticipate the inevitable and politically capitalize on this new configuration as a historical subject of the police. Continuing to act distracted and letting the IACHR ruling be implemented by a government tomorrow would be a mistake