Title: Forms and Functions of Protest Policing Practices in Contemporary Argentina

FERNANDA PAGE POMA

San Francisco

Congreso; XXX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association; 2012

LASA

According to Argentine human rights organization CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales), beginning in 1996 there has been an increase in the number of state-led repressive actions against different forms of collective action. Thousands of protesters have been prosecuted and criminally charged for their participation in demonstrations (CELS 2003). Additionally, and also during protests events, several people have died, others were seriously injured and tortures or brutality during detention have been reported. This increase in repression, CELS reports, has been followed by a disproportioned and illegitimate use of violence by different state forces ?at the national and provincial level. Other forms of repression have also been active in the state?s control and discouragement of collective actions. Drawing from secondary sources and a working dataset on protest events, in this paper I present a brief review of the literature on repression and contribute to the literature on protest policing by examining Argentina?s police practices from the 1990s and until 2011. I then propose main questions and problems still unanswered by the literature that need to be empirically tested.