Buenos Aires. — Politicians wanted. Competent, preferably. Honest, essential. Applicants should have proven experience of listening before speaking, administering before promising and governing before looking for somebody else to blame.
Political improvisers, miracle salesmen and specialists in explaining why everything is invariably the fault of a predecessor, an opponent or a protesting citizen need not apply.
The advertisement could appear in almost any Argentine newspaper today.
It would probably attract fewer suitable CVs than expected.
Argentine politics produced another of its troubling tableaux this week. While the Senate debated what the Government calls the Law on the Inviolability of Private Property, the streets surrounding Congress once again became a landscape of tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, arrests and injuries.
According to figures compiled by the Provincial Commission for Memory, the security operation resulted in 28 arrests and left around 1,500 people injured or otherwise affected by the police response. Once again, journalists and photographers found themselves in the front line of a battle they had gone there not to fight, but to document. One photographer remained under observation with a fractured skull.
Maintaining public order is both a right and a duty of the State. There should be nothing embarrassing about enforcing it.
But precisely because the State possesses that extraordinary power, it carries an equally extraordinary responsibility: not to turn its legitimate monopoly on force into a licence to use it without restraint.
That is where the difficulty begins.
Victoria Darraidou, who heads the institutional violence team at Argentina’s Centre for Legal and Social Studies, described disturbing scenes: water cannon directed even at a public bus, tear gas fired at close range towards photographers recording the operation, and officers collecting spent cartridges after the disturbances.
These are matters deserving serious investigation.
Not a competition between rival narratives.
In contemporary Argentina, even tear gas appears to come with both a government version and an opposition version.
The demonstration had grown throughout the afternoon despite the rain and despite the Government withdrawing one of the bill’s most controversial provisions, which would have expanded the possibility of selling Argentine land to foreign individuals and companies.
The Senate nevertheless moved forward with provisions allowing faster evictions in cases of unpaid rent and placing further restrictions on the State’s powers of expropriation.
La Libertad Avanza, President Javier Milei’s party, was also forced to abandon proposed changes to legislation protecting forests and wetlands from land speculation following fires.
None of this, however, appears to have placed the parliamentary sitting itself in serious danger.
Then came Act Two.
After the water cannon came Comodoro Py.
For readers outside Argentina, Comodoro Py is Buenos Aires’s federal courthouse complex — the address to which an impressive proportion of the country’s great political battles eventually migrate.
Security Minister Alejandra Monteoliva filed a criminal complaint calling for an investigation into alleged “violent and anti-democratic acts” supposedly intended to hinder or prevent the legislature from carrying out its work.
The allegations invoke offences of considerable gravity: attacks against the constitutional order, criminal damage, resisting authority and even terrorism.
Terrorism.
It is a word worth pronouncing slowly.
A democratic state can — and should — investigate anyone who throws stones, attacks police officers or destroys public property. The right to demonstrate does not come with immunity from criminal law.
But there is a considerable distance between identifying and prosecuting somebody who commits an offence and casting the shadow of terrorism over a political demonstration.
A mature democracy ought to cross that distance with considerable caution.
The broadly framed complaint was assigned to Federal Court No. 7, whose judge is Sebastián Casanello and which is currently being covered by María Servini.
It will therefore be for the courts — rather than a press conference or a party slogan — to establish whether crimes were committed, what they were and who committed them.
With equal seriousness, there should also be scrutiny of whether the security forces remained within the law.
Because in a democracy, the ruler must measure both ways.
While political power was debating in Congress how far property rights should extend, and in the courts how far protest may go, somebody in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Liniers was talking about something considerably less sophisticated:
how far a salary goes.
During Mass at the shrine of Saint Cajetan — traditionally associated in Argentina with bread and employment — the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge García Cuerva, urged people not to resign themselves to rising transport costs, utility bills, rents and food prices.
Nor, he said, should people simply accept wages that are no longer enough.
He required no charts.
No PowerPoint presentation either.
The Archbishop spoke of a population tired of broken promises and delivered a rebuke with a considerably wider address than any single political party: politicians who speak about the poor without remaining close to their needs, while enjoying a comfortable life themselves.
One may debate who the immediate recipient was.
Escaping the plural is rather more difficult.
It would be far too convenient to use García Cuerva’s words exclusively as a weapon against Javier Milei’s Government.
The gulf between Argentina’s political class and its citizens did not open in December 2023.
It is considerably older. It has survived successive governments, numerous political parties and an impressive number of elections.
Presidents change.
Slogans change.
Enemies change.
The bill remains on the table.
Milei came to power precisely because millions of Argentines had grown tired of that political establishment. The difficulty begins when those elected to eliminate its habits risk acquiring some of them: intolerance of criticism, the temptation to divide the country between the virtuous and the enemy, and that remarkably durable Argentine custom of treating every difficulty as evidence of somebody else’s conspiracy.
Governing is not merely a matter of winning parliamentary votes, displaying encouraging macroeconomic indicators or defeating opponents on social media.
It also means enabling ordinary citizens to live under predictable rules, work, pay their bills and express dissent without automatically becoming suspects in a plot to overthrow the Republic.
And demonstrating does not provide a licence to smash, burn or assault.
That elementary reciprocity appears to have become a branch of advanced constitutional engineering.
Perhaps that is why García Cuerva’s reminder that work remains both a right and a source of dignity deserves attention.
It is an elementary observation.
Almost old-fashioned.
Yet remarkably contemporary in a country where public debate too often concentrates on who won today’s political battle while ordinary citizens are performing a rather more urgent calculation:
how many days remain until payday.
Argentina has spent decades looking for saviours and repeatedly finding managers of emergencies.
It has tried Peronists, Radicals, coalitions, progressives, liberals and libertarians. Every new political season promises to demolish the failures of the previous one and finally rebuild the country.
Curiously enough, the same people always seem to receive the bill for the rubble.
Perhaps it is time to amend the job requirements.
Classifieds. Competent, honest politicians wanted. Must be capable of listening without surrendering, exercising authority without abusing it, balancing the books without forgetting who pays them, and understanding that a political opponent is not necessarily an enemy of the nation.
Experience preferred.
Common sense essential.
Honesty non-negotiable.
Applicants without references need not apply.
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