Inter-Urban Policing Networks

The Rise of South American Police Cooperation, 1905-1920

Diego Galeano

Instituto de Filosofia e Cincias Sociais, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

(Prepared for delivery at the 2010 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Toronto, Canada October 6-9, 2010)

Abstract

This paper looks into formal exchanges between the urban police forces of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo,
and Buenos Aires, which were consolidated over the first two decades of 20th century. This network
developed over a period during which policing institutions had undertaken considerable internal reforms,
which shared common problems in the kinds of urban development experienced by port cities with an
influx of European immigrants. Cities that in the past used to be areas of socialization were becoming
conglomerates where people hardly knew each other. The State had to develop new technologies to
manage urban society and one of the main resources it deployed was, precisely, police reform. One of the
main challenges was to control a population in constant movement: immigrants who arrived by sea and
workers arriving in big cities from all corners of their own country made up a new social configuration.
The police force had to deal with this emergent urban society, which was increasingly unfamiliar, as well
as with new crime phenomena that acquired a transnational status. In order to deal with this problem,
proposals were made to coordinate urban police forces, starting a period of meetings, trips, information
and technological exchange. The culmination of this process was the organization of two Police
Conferences in Buenos Aires (1905 and 1920). The main hypothesis is that the organization of a network
of cooperation among the South American police officers should not only be thought of as an experience
of international police cooperation, but as the creation of an inter-city police network, which signifies a
leap from the urban level to the regional level, during a period in which the South American cities had
increased notably in their connections via overseas circulation.

1
 La polica se debe al miedo, y el miedo es cosa
tan natural, que poco o mucho no hay quien
no tenga alguno; y esto sin contar con los que
tienen demasiado, que son los ms.

[Police owes its existence to fear, and fear is

such a natural thing that more or less intensely
nobody can be said not to have some; and this
without taking into account those who have too
much fear, who are the majority]

Mariano Jos de Larra (Madrid, 1835)1

1
Published under the pseudonym of Fgaro, in Revista Espaola, No. 472, Madrid: 7th February of
1835.

2
 Police, security, and urban space are the three concepts that intertwine this work.
The modern police are born in the city, to impose a certain conception of urban order. In
the writers of the 18th century, policing was definite like an art of government
responsible for guaranteeing the inhabitants of the cities a tranquil and comfortable
life. For it was them, the police, who were necessary to regulate the circulation of
common spaces, to impose certain rules in the squares; to the markets, rules for selling
and buying; rules for utilizing the river waters, the burial of the dead, etc. Policing was
an essentially preventative activity, oriented to guarantee the security of the life of the
city interior (L Heuillet, 2000).

In Latin America this model of security policy was implemented at the

beginning of the 19th century. In the Spanish Empire, it was diffused thanks to the
Bourbon Reforms of 1790, from Mexico (Nacif Mina, 1994), which was the largest city
in the colonial period, to Buenos Aires, in which the first Police Department was
installed (1821). In the Brazilian Empire, the Police Commissariat (Intendncia Geral
da Polcia) was created in 1808, when the Portuguese court was relocated to Rio de
Janeiro (Bretas, 1998). The project of policing the colonial cities was centered on
releasing all that hindered the provision, traffic, commerce, industry, construction,
work, and urban salubriousness. Maintaining an internal equilibrium among all those
elements was the challenge of police control. The capital cities should be especially
watched, not only because they were offered as models for all other cities, but because
they were thought of anatomically as the heart of the entire circulatory system.

This model of policing resisted the process of Latin American independences,

because of the strong tendency toward the idea of the sovereignty of the cities, against
the advances of the modern principles of sovereignty of the People or of the Nation.
Members of the urban elites were opposed to all the abstract language of modernity
being grasped at its political value, of the concrete company that offered them privileges
as neighbors: the city (Annino, 1994; Chiaramonte, 2004). It was not a simple matter to
balance the interests among, on the one hand, territorial unification and political
centralization that implied the foundation of nation-states and, by the other, the growth
of the old cities, the important extension of its areas populated.

During the first half of the 19th century, most of the literature on Latin America
had been written by travelers. The plethora of stories of distant lands, exotic landscapes
and barbaric customs flooded the worlds written culture. The vision of the French and
3
English explorers that traveled the different regions of South America stimulated an
aesthetic of the large territorial extensions, that was now being taken up by the local
intellectuals. The great part of the Latin American writers of the 1850s and 60s
considered the city as the cradle of the democratic virtues (Morse, 1978). In countries
like Brazil and Argentina, which included immense and scarcely populated territories,
the countryside was identified with barbarism and the city with civilization. This is the
origin of the doctrinal formula, to govern is to populate.

Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of the founding fathers of Argentine modern

political thought, wrote in 1845 that the extension of the countryside, the immensity of
the plains and the shortage of population (a cocktail that was called desert), conspired
against the forces of civilization. In contrast, populated cities were a promise of
civilization, always awaited by the rural barbarism. In this author, the opposition
between country and city was thought of as a primitive, clear, and ingenuous fight
between the last progresses of the human spirit and the rudiments of the wild life,
between the populous cities and the somber forests (Sarmiento, 1845: 55).

The liberal intellectuals prescribed to counteract the desert with the arrival of
European immigrants. In the Constitutional Republic of Argentina (1853) was legally
consecrated the proposal to promote the arrival of immigrants. In the 1869 census, the
immigrants already represented 40% of the population of the city of Buenos Aires
(Otero, 2006: 139). Showing a slightly lower rate, in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the
Brazilian Empire, immigrants reached 30% of the population of the city. That same
year, the Argentinean chief of police wrote to the government notifying them of the
proliferation of thieves and con men, foreign to the majority, acquaintances of time
behind the bars of jails in Montevideo, Rosario and Buenos Aires. The chief suggested
to expand the extradition treaty in force with the Eastern Republic of Uruguay, in order
to facilitate the capture of delinquents and to move away from the population the
considerable number of con artists and thieves to whom he has never known any whose
names appear periodically in the books of the entrances of the police (MDP, 1869:
555).

In this way, the police reflected an issue that was periodically reinforced in the
press: the association between crime and immigration. The intellectual ideas of 1850,
based upon the influx of laborious and thrifty foreigners, were being gradually displaced
by growing distrust toward the recently arrived. I would like to indicate in this work a

4
fundamental change that was produced in some South American countries
approximately between 1850 and 1880: the good cities imagined by the first modern
intellectuals gave way to the large cities that were imposed like a demographic reality.

The good cities planned by the first liberal intellectuals did not know any
crowds. In the large cities, it is not isolation and distance that causes outcasts, but the
fear of the multitude. The criminal does not imagine to be separated physically from
their peers, but like a danger that travels in line with them. In these large cities, the
criminal not only has hidden himself by changing places, but fundamentally changing
identity, by name, or also face. The urban experience is characterized by anxiety and
fear with respect to the world of strangers, in which complex relations intertwine
between the government of the self and the government of the others, in which the
construction of subjectivity is inextricably linked to the presence of a radically different
other (Hunt, 1996).

In Latin America, the Babel-like setting of the city incited each day greater
suspicion on the actual effects of massive immigration. Any indication of modernization
of the social life that was resisted was attributed to the foreigners deterioration of the
city. Thus, the acceleration of the interpersonal transactions based on the monetary
economy was interpreted like a foreign territory filled with con artists, and was judged
covetous and materialistic. The Russians and Jews were considered the only ones to be
blamed for the boom of prostitution. Increasing violent crime was itself due to the
characters of Spaniards and Italians, etc. The phenomenon of moral panic about the
foreigner is seen clearly in Buenos Aires from 1880, a city that had experienced such an
undocumented population growth as to erect it firmly as a major Latin American city.

If the desideratum of the police of the first half of the 19th century was to cause
to circulate, in the sense to release the bonds and to improve traffic, at the end of the
century all that appeared was rhetoric on the need to control and select the elements that
entered the cities. Some time before the boom of economic protectionism, the liberals
propped up flow-control policies that acquired that name of social defense. These
policies concentrated, above all, on detection systems, and classification of those
elements that were judged undesirable.

The association between foreigners and criminality appears to be a privileged

channel of expression of the modern phobopolis, of the fear and anxiety of the social
relations that emanate from the cities. The anonymity and the fast conglomeration of
5
changing images constituted the new urban experience of the old inhabitants, so much
so that Georg Simmel characterized it as the intensification of the nervous stimulation
in the large modern cities (Simmel, 1903: 247- 248). Ben Singer (1995) has analyzed
the hyperstimulants of sensationalistic journalism as an aspect of the neurological
dimension of urban modernity aimed at by Simmel. In fact, the police chronicles of the
popular press combined narrative resources and graphic diffusing a chaotic image of
metropolises packed with foreign criminals.

These perceptive shocks were aimed at to channel attention onto predetermined

dangers. Nevertheless, an attentive analysis of the characteristics that are indicated like
dangerous existed as a greater anxiety toward the material transformations of life in
the city. It would explain why the desire to reform the police, between the end of the
19th century and the beginning of the 20th, was often overlooked in favor of
technological modernization. If the need to maintain the tone of the police forces with
the most recently arrived innovations to become an imposition for political power, this
itself was due to the anxieties linked to the process of urban growth.

In the modern cities, the police position was always represented appealing to
hunting metaphors, that is, to the idea of a hunter that pursues its prey. The modernist
writers of the 19th century utilized the comparisons with the natural world to describe
the physiognomy of the first metropolises: the streets were like the labyrinthine forests,
in which they were inhabited by mysterious species (Frisby, 2007: 70-71). Just like in
the rural shooting, in the urban landscape the figures of the police and of the delinquent
are braided in a dialectic of pursuer and pursued. One has the obligation to restore order,
while the other slips away in the dark corners of the city to survive.

The problem of locating a criminal in a large city, which in detective novels is

resolved by appealing to deductive logic, is the discursive resource that supports the
constant claim of technological endowment for the police. The areas to the ones that lay
the claim were many, but it is possible that several of them condensed the issue of
kinetic modernity. We refer to the easiness of mobility and displacement that alter
the spatial-temporal scales (what is far away is close, what is fast is slow) inside the
city, as well as also the communication between the city and country.

The kinetic involves two large aspects: the transportation of passengers and the
transfer of information. The immense revolution of transportation that began in the 19th
century with the advent of the steam engine created ambiguous relations between
6
modernization and progress in urban life. The enlargement of transatlantic routes
improved the connection between the Latin American cities and the remainder of the
world, but at the same time supplied a new species (the traveling delinquents) into the
international circulation that challenged local police resources. The same ambiguity is
verified in the case of the media of internal transportation, like the railroads and trolleys,
that were political symbols of modernization and progress (Weinberg, 1998: 113-122),
but also the most frequented places by the new thieves and con artists.

One of the main bets of the police to take advantage of the impulse of the
technological modernization was the incorporation of the telegraph service. In the
second half of the 19th century, the arrival of the electric telegraph produced a
fundamental change: a breakthrough in the sense that it makes speed of transportation
and that of information coincide. The enlargement of the Latin-American telegraphic
network inaugurated a new field of possibilities in police matter, in that words could
arrive before people. Raoul Tremblie, a defendant to a court matter in France in 1894,
was captured at the moment of disembarking in the port of Dunkerque thanks to a
telegram sent by the Argentinean police (Ruggiero, 2004: 99-101), and is a perfect
example of this new police ability.

The kinetic revolution also produced other ambiguous changes in the area of the
transportation of passengers. At the beginning of the 20th century the police
incorporated the first motor vehicles, and were leaving behind the old horse and buggy
patrol. The commissioners were the first to receive cars, then the police officers
incorporated motorcycles with sidecars and later an inspection service with voiturettes.
But the presence of the car in the city showed a functional multivalence: as well as
having served to become independent means of transportation of some people, they had
also invented a new form of accidents, so much so that in the first decades of the 20th
century they were already the main cause of violent death in various countries (Elias,
1995: 7-42).

Nevertheless, in the South American graphic press, the association between car
and death was not associated to the problem of accidents. In the same epoch in which
police statistics showed that the professional category responsible for the greater
quantity of violent deaths were the chauffeurs, the press lent all the attention to another
problem linked to the car: the rise of abductions and bank robberies in the full light of
day (Caimari, 2007). This is criminal face of kinetic modernity was shown, set against

7
the presence of a new appliance (the car) that, however, contained other possibilities of
less damage indicated.

Subsequently, I will concentrate the analysis in one of the answers that the South
American police officers offered before the problem of the kinetic revolution of the
cities. I refer to the creation of a network of police cooperation that happened at the
beginning of the 20th century. The police officers argued that the precincts, organized
inside strict jurisdictions, were more and more being phased into antiquity as
delinquents became more and more technologically adept. It was an appeal that was
inserted in a more extensive speech on the spatial-temporal leveling of two worlds,
the criminal and the police. My main hypothesis is that this process of the rise of South
American police cooperation is an answer to the kinetic challenges of urban security. I
believe that the organization of a network of cooperation among the South American
police officers, in the first two decades of the 20th century, should not only be thought
of as an experience of inter-national police cooperation (Deflem, 2004) but like the
creation of an inter-city police network. It seems to me that this network signifies a leap
of the urban level at the regional level, in a period in which the South American cities
had increased notably in their connections via overseas circulation.

In 1914, some time before World War I frustrated European aspirations for
police cooperation, the Prince of Monaco, Albert I, declared:

We live in an age of constantly traffic. With the railroads one can move about
quickly all over Europe. Travelling criminals take advantage of that! But our
police methods still hail from the Middle Age () That has to change! () I will as
soon as possible organize an international conference in Monte Carlo, a police
congress or something like that. (Deflem, 2004: 97)

This bit of news was something that, in truth, had already been realized and
practiced in South America for almost a decade. I refer to the formation of a network of
cooperation between South American police whose web began to grow toward the end
of the 19th century and acquired force from a series of meetings held in Buenos Aires at
the beginning of the 20th. It is necessary to situate this network within the larger
processes of political and cultural internationalization that connected the continental

8
South American republics with the Old World: the spread and influence of the
anarchist movement, the establishment of the Second Socialist International, the
international alignments with respect to the world war and the Bolshevik Revolution
definitively installed in history an international plan.

This era of Atlantic crossing affected representations over the criminal issue:
while it formed a police press with standardized written rules and counted readers for
hundreds of miles, an international sensationalist culture was born (Kalifa, 1995: 29-
34). The proliferation of telegraph cables enabled the literate public to follow news of
worldwide criminal celebrities, of noisy anarchist attacks, and also enabled - for
resonant effect- the illiterate to follow the news via the cultural practice of oral
diffusion.

The chronicles of European crimes dovetail with the forced association between
immigration and criminality. The diatribes directed against the effects not desired in the
project of Europeanization of society was one of the aspects that articulated, on one
hand, positivist criminological discourse (Scarzanella, 2004: 29-31) and, on the other
hand, anti-immigrant politics that had very forceful legislative expressions. In 1902,
Argentina sanctioned the so-called Law of Residency, that empowered the
government to expel foreigners without prior judicial review. After the assassination of
the Chief of Police Ramn Falcn in an anarchist attack (1909) and the struggles of the
workers movement during the centennial celebrations of independence (1910), the
Law of Social Defense was passed, which offered extensive faculties for the
restriction of incomes to the country (Zimmermann, 1995: 160-161).

For its part, Brazil passed an expulsion law for foreigners in 1907, and, with
input from the Minister of Exterior Relations, severely punished anarchists and pimps
(Samet, 2008: 248-268). These trends increased ever further after World War I: in 1917
the Judicial Police Conference was held in Rio de Janeiro was consensus was reached
over the necessity to strengthen the legislation referred to above against the dangerous
classes (Tortima, 1996: 241-258). Actually, some time after the legislators convened
to discuss the so-called Law of the Undesirables which further amplified police
powers of the expulsion of foreigners and established new criteria to impede remittances
into the national territory. This time, it not only closed the doors to the propagators of
subversive doctrines, and those that had previously served penal sentences in other

9
countries, but also those who were mutilated, blind, disabled, mentally handicapped,
vagrant, bearers of incurable illnesses and individuals over the age of sixty.

With all the luck of a prophylactic crusade, these police controls took the role of
the protagonist. Police agencies began to draw the framework of cooperation in an
unpublished search of universal models of vigilance that were often abstracted from
laws and enforced penal national codes. How did the growing suspicions of the
pernicious effects of massive immigration waves impact the intentions to reorganize the
role of the police? What strategies did the South American police officers develop to
link each other together, and, at the same time, position themselves in a unified front to
the new international economic relations?

In the 19th century, Latin American hygienists had already exhibited

reservations with the indiscriminate model of migratory flows and the influx of ships in
the ports, alarmed by the spread of infectious diseases. In 1871, shortly after a huge
epidemic of Yellow Fever, a Congress of International Public Health was organized
between Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in which in writing it was agreed as a code, the
responsibility of Argentine doctor Eduardo Wilde (Gonzlez Leandri, 1999: 111). It was
precisely this language of exotic passenger sicknesses that was taken up by the
lawyers, criminologists and police to explain the necessity of selective strategies.

For the urban elites and the police in charge of the management of the city, that
anonymous mass up at the ports opened many diverse questions: how does one
distinguish between virtuous workers and itinerant delinquents? How was it possible to
know that behind the innocent mirage of some expatriate there wasnt a hidden criminal
past, or, worse, criminal intentions? In the narratives of social defense a criticism slid
to a political immigration that had not calculated the possibility of massive infiltrations
of criminals, scoundrels, and anarchists. These people were treated in such a way that
only served to add to the daily police statistics (Blackwelder, 1990: 65-87).

From the point of view of the police authorities, the common denominator of
this passenger fauna was the inversion of the ideal model of skilled labor. It was not
treated only of subjects that fleetingly broke the social pact, motivated by transitory
circumstances (seasonal misery, sudden attacks of drunkenness). They were truly
professional delinquents, as how a Chilean police functionary explained it in 1905:

10
 They come growing in numbers, with audacity and facility these individuals make crime
their profession and means of making a living, threatening the people and the good of all
citizens. And the numbers of them- some years back they were circumscribed to more or
less steady payment, in each of our principal cities- they combine today with traveling
criminals with their ease of transport and movement makes them each year more
numerous, from Europe to these prosperous Atlantic cities: Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo,
Buenos Aires, and here in Santiago de Chile. (CIP, 1905: 19-20)

This Atlantic crime route was a counterweight to the South American process of
modernization, propelled by the agricultural export model. The apprehension of an
example of this kind was a hunting trophy that the police exhibited with special pride.
But the trophy was not easy. The practice of circulating photographs was intended to be
an initial answer to the problem of recognizing delinquent passengers: in 1887,
Aureliano Cuenca, chief of Argentinean police, sent a message to his counterpart in
Uruguay proposing a series of joint measures to track those subjects that continually
crossed the Rio de la Plata (the large river that separates both countries). Among other
things, he suggested that the police should count with a complete collection of portraits
of known criminals and notified him that he had ordered the printing of a book that
intends to fulfill this objective, where the physiognomies, affiliations and lifestyles will
be given of the most famous criminals in this capital (Romay, 1944: 14). This photo
gallery was published in 1887, uniting 200 portraits known criminals that constantly
traveled from one South American city to another.

There was no political archive, or some system of identification, that permitted

the complete tracking of traveling delinquents. According to what the Brazilian police
had written, they did not have any animus of residency: without country or family
they continually transferred from one city to another, inside or outside the country,
armed with a veritable arsenal of false aliases. 2 This problem of traveling delinquents,
that which after had added itself to the issue of the international mobility of seditious
doctrines, motivated the appearance of new police displacements among which two
strategies were emphasized: study visits and inter-police congresses.

Between the study visits, whether individual or in committees, the police

exchanged experiences, technique, and methods. These visits were always linked to

2
Revista Policial (publicao quinzenal), anno 1, num. 2. Rio de Janeiro: 30 de outubro de 1919, p. 14.

11
reform processes and in their great majority were oriented to research European models
of institutional methods. A quite well known example is the trip of Agustn Drago, an
Argentinean police physician, who was sent to Brussels, Vienna, London, Madrid and
Paris. In the latter city he interviewed Alphonse Bertillon and on his return, in 1889,
founded the first Latin American Office of Anthropometric Identification (Del Olmo,
1999: 145). These types of trips procured reform models that almost always
accompanied the production of some text presented to the chief of police of that
geographical area or even included the publication of some sort of book (Silvado, 1895;
Mujica Farias, 1901).

Without a doubt, the Parisian police were one of the most prestigious
institutional references during the second half of the 19th century: the police chiefs of
Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay frequently sought information on the organization,
methods and other administrative data (Rosenberg, 2008: 37). The intention to research
European solutions to local problems diminished notably at the beginning of the 20th
century. Juan Vucetich, the Argentinean creator of the fingerprint technique
(dactiloscopa) that was adopted by the police scientists of different countries,
deliberately affirmed in 1923, on the limited adoption of his method on the old
continent, that in Europe to implant new institutions is to collapse mountains of secular
prejudices (Claro, 1923: 36). So continued the anti-European spirit that had grown
notably among South American police agencies and was decisive in initiating the
organization of police congresses in the south.

Well-known is the importance that the congresses had in criminal anthropology

for the global diffusion of the Italian school of criminology. Since the beginning, in
Rome in 1885, the congresses opened a stage of increasing international cooperation in
penitentiary material and criminology that only was interrupted due to the beginning of
World War I. Attending to the problem of the traveling delinquents, in the meetings
proposals were discussed of extradition treaties and methods of identification that
facilitated the exchange of information between countries (Del Olmo, 1999: 64).

That issue was the center of the debates in the judicial sections of the Latin
American Scientific Congresses (the first being in Buenos Aires in 1898, after that
Montevideo in 1901 and Rio de Janeiro in 1905), and of the Pan-American Scientific
Congresses after the incorporation of the United States into the meeting in Santiago de
Chile (1909). The weight of the ultra-maritime immigrations in the baby boom of

12
American cities, the new social relations and related conflicts with the arrival of the new
urban scenes each time marked by anonymity, stimulated the development of local
investigations in the area of identification of people. After a decade of fingerprint
studies, Vucetich began a new stage of diffusion of the Argentine Method in the
congress of Montevideo. There he presented an ambitious proposal to establish three
intercontinental departments to organize the files: one localized in a European capital,
one in a North American capital and the last in a South American capital (Claro, 1923:
13).

In these Latin American Scientific Congresses the initiative was taken to

organize a specifically police-centered South American meeting. Vucetich pointed out
that police cooperation should be an immediate response to the problem of traveling
delinquents, those whose life was impossible in a single country and that had changed
their destination with outstanding ease, thanks to the easiest and shortest means of
transportation. Their disciple, Luis Reyna Almandos, maintained in the American
International Scientific Congress of Buenos Aires (1910), that the national states were
debilitated by the proliferation of delinquents that the codes had not anticipated,
criminals that were meeting a secure means of impunity protected by the easiness of
communication. The world is large and its defenses weak; we fortify this defense and
we reduce the world to a minimal expression founding on a solid basis the Universal
Police Union (Reyna Almandos, 1910: 5). In their exposition they proposed the
creation of this league based on an international treaty, whose name was inspired by the
Universal Postal Union, which was established in 1874.

The South American Conference of Police, formed in October of 1905, proposed

to discuss a collective agreement of character administration (that which by definition
wanted to say that their proposals would pass more or less freely into the margins of the
laws of each country) and ad-referendum, hoping to be ratified by the chiefs of police.
The principal objective of this agreement was to foment the exchange of the antecedent
tools for police purposes, with respect to those persons classified or considered
dangerous by society (CIP, 1905: 3).

A great part of the discussions were debates aroused by the definitions of

dangerous person and the definition of the phrase police purposes. The latter
suggested the tracking of previously known delinquents, but had not necessarily
received a conviction, in the end to prevent new criminals and eventually supply

13
information to the justice system in the event of a penal process against them. For its
part, the definition of the dangerous person category was important, because it
habilitated the inter-city circulation of information.

In the definition that the agreement gave to the category of dangerous person
(CIP, 1905: 5-6), as much as the old figure of the known criminal in the rise of the
professional agitator entered the files of dangerousness when they carried out the
double requisite of being considered habitual and professional delinquents. Firstly
it meant recurrent participation these kinds of activities, and to be implicated in a
network of other known criminals. Secondly it presented an inverted mirror of skilled,
docile labor: to be professionalized, to be skilled and to live exclusively of this type of
work.

In the context of the urban reforms at the end of the 19th century, the necessity
of constructing a security policy was insisted, that would delineate the tasks of
material administration in the city, that should assume the new municipalities. In that
sense, the insistence of the category of professional delinquency permitted the union of
diverse problems inside a sphere of action exclusively police. The capital of
Argentinas chief of police referred to grand difficulties confronting their mission to
especially guard and prevent, due to the agitations brought upon Latin American
companies. Why would it allude to the ideas of guardianship and prevention as
definitions of police function? Precisely the centrality of the idea of security: the police
judged the mission to protect society from its enemies impeding, as if stones placed in
the middle of the road of social progress, permitting this extensive development and
without the bonds of commerce and industry (CIP, 1905: 16-17).

Security as absence of obstacles was also a concept utilized by the Brazilian

delegation to justify the policies of expulsion of foreigners. Brazil, as much as the
other countries of America, has always maintained open ports of its country to the
disinherited of Europe; but added: the current situation obliges the American
countries to qualify and select the immigrants in a form such that the men that enter the
breast of the nation do not afterwards result in a serious bond for the best development
of the institutions and industries (CISP ,1920: 95-96). The policy of security was, by
definition, a preventative action.

It was not simply a matter of slippery thieves and travelers: police cooperation
was deliberately presented as an answer to the internationalization of social issues. The
14
anti-anarchist conference in Rome (1898) was considered an historical antecedent to the
unpublished process of cooperation that initiated South American police officers, an
argument fundamentally sustained by some representatives of the Brazilians during the
meeting in Rio de Janeiro, when Vucetich presented the proposal. The fear of the
revolutionary contagion was a descendant of collaboration with the European security
forces that confronted the process of the global expansion of the workers movement.
To that extent, an approach- sponsored by Bismarck- between the German and Austrian
police forces during the Paris Commune was considered against international capital
(Hobsbawm, 1998: 177).

But, as I have tried to demonstrate, that cooperation was not reduced to an inter-
national exchange, but it involved an increase of the relations between urban police
officers. If the treaties of extradition were the scope of diplomatic international
cooperation, these police meetings showed a parallel reality, oriented to improve the
material connections between police forces that did not represent the national
government but the administration of a region. In the 1905 conference, Argentina had
two representatives corresponding to the two more important jurisdictions of the
country. On the other hand, Brazil sent an emissary of the Police of Rio de Janeiro
and the same happened to the Police of Santiago de Chile and Montevideo (that is to
say, urban representations). In such sense, the title of the 1905 meeting (inter-police
conference) was more sincere than the one of 1920 (South American inter-national
conference of police).

The second meeting of South American police forces convened in 1920. This
time they added to the previous delegations with representatives from Peru, Bolivia and
Paraguay. The political tone of the meeting was less contemplative with the individual
guarantees. Various countries sanctioned expulsion laws of foreigners, and had supplied
the police forces significant discretion. Buenos Aires, headquarters for coincidental
nothing of these conferences, was the setting of an escalation of authoritarian groups
that reduced every labor union struggle to the enemies of society. In this way, it
intended to differentiate this conference of 1920 with respect to the conference of 1905,
that was nearer the discussions of the scientific congresses. A Brazilian delegate
affirmed in an open forum during the conference that if once philosophers,
sociologists, criminologists, psychiatrists, and legislators tried to know the causes of
delinquency and prescribe it a medication, the joint made more imperious the duty of

15
all to combat antisocial elements (CISP ,1920: 35-36). And in the closing banquet an
Argentine celebrated that the conference had not sterilized its time in banal
dissertations and had been dedicated to the fruition of practical work, of sum utility
(CISP, 1920: 125).

Since the conference in 1905 the problem presented had implied the growing
geographical mobility of crime, but not another mitigating factor had been planned to
circulate photographs and fingerprint files. This time it intended to diminish the spatial-
temporal gaps in the criminal world and also the polices. The explanation was simple:
the delinquents fled quickly via the mass transportation, they were transferred from one
country to another with absolute liberty, recurrently changed their names and denounced
different nationalities. On the other hand, police officers were obliged to comply with
all the legal procedures in each country and were always one step behind the criminal.

Set against this dilemma, possible solutions were presented in a land clearly
police, for example, a plan to facilitate the persecution of delinquents according to
which police officers that wanted to be transferred to any of the countries that
participated in the conference to stop a suspect, could be excused from meeting all of
the previously required documentation that was requested in those cases. It was
suggested that a simple telegraphic notice should be accepted by police headquarters
to give pass to an agent, with the promise to send via mail the appropriate
documentation in a time limit agreed by consensus (CISP, 1920: 125). Another
approved proposal was a recommendation to the governments to offer telegraphic and
postal facilities to the leaders of large police precincts in order to accelerate the tempo
of communications.

In short, in a new urban context, in which the spatial-temporal scales had

completely changed, the police officers thought that the world of crime had adapted
more quickly than police control. What they worried about was not as much the
dimension of the national security, that is to say, the political integrity of the National
States. It was the urban security of a set of cities that were connected by multiple
networks of exchange, essentially those cities that constituted the main ports on the
overseas route that connected South America with Europe (Buenos Aires, Rio de
Janeiro, Montevideo).

From the point of view of the police officers, the large conquests of kinetic
modernity, the revolution in the transport of passengers and of information, had served
16
more to reproduce criminal activities, increasingly more ingenious, than to organize the
life of the good citizen. The delinquents displaced quickly and easily, utilizing
telegraphs to circulate information. Meanwhile, the police were hemmed in a gridlock
urban space that they could not escape, and, worse, was technologically backward.
Urban modernity had not yet arrived for the police force.

17
Institutional Sources

Conferencia Internacional de Polica (CIP). Convenios celebrado entre las policas

de La Plata y Buenos Aires (Argentina), de Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), de Santiago de
Chile y de Montevideo (R. O. del Uruguay). Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Encuadernacin
de la Polica de la Capital Federal, 1905.

Conferencia Internacional Sudamericana de Polica (CISP). Convenios y Actas.

Buenos Aires: Imprenta J. Tragant, 1920.

Departamento de Polica de la Capital (GLC). Galera de Ladrones de la Capital,

1880-1887, tomo 2. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Departamento de Polica, 1887.

Memoria del Departamento de Polica (MDP). Memorias de las diferentes

reparticiones de la administracin de la Provincia de Buenos Aires y de varias
Municipalidades de Campaa. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Buenos Aires, 1869.

18
Bibliography

Annino, Antonio. Soberanas en lucha. In A. Annino; L. Castro Leiva; F. X. Guerra

(coord.). De los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamrica. Zaragoza: Ibercaja, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. Para una crtica a la violencia (Zur Kritik der Gewalt, 1921). In
Iluminaciones IV. Para una crtica a la violencia y otros ensayos. Madrid: Taurus,
1998.

Blackwelder, Julia. Urbanization, Crime and Policing. Buenos Aires, 1880-1914. In

Johnson, L. (ed). The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and
Policing in Argentina and Uruguay. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1990.

Bretas, Marcos L. A Polcia carioca no imprio. In Revista Estudos Histricos, Rio

de Janeiro, Vol. 12, No. 22, 1998.

Caimari, Lila. Suceso de cinematogrficos aspectos. Secuestro y espectculo en la

Buenos Aires de los aos 30. In L. Caimari (comp.), La ley de los profanos. Delito,
justicia e cultura en Buenos Aires (1870-1940). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura
Econmica-Universidad de San Andrs, 2007.

Chiaramonte, Jos C. Nacin y Estado en Iberoamrica. El lenguaje poltico en

tiempos de las independencias. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004.

Deflem, Mathieu. Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International

Police Cooperation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Del Olmo, Rosa. Amrica Latina y su criminologa. Mxico: Siglo XXI, 1999.

Elias, Norbert. Technization and Civilization. In Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.
12, No. 3, 1995.

Frisby, David. Paisajes urbanos de la modernidad. Exploraciones crticas. Buenos

Aires: Prometeo, 2007.

Giucci, Guillermo. La vida cultural del automvil. Rutas de la modernidad cintica.

Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2007.

Gonzlez Leandri, Ricardo. Curar, persuadir, gobernar: la construccin histrica de

la profesin mdica en Buenos Aires, 1852-1886. Madrid: CSIC, 1999.
19
Hinton, Mercedes. The State on the Streets: police and politics in Argentina and
Brazil. London: Lynne Rienner, 2006.

Hunt, Alan. Governing the city: liberalism and early modern modes of governance.
In A. Barry; T. Osborne; N. Rose (eds.). Foucault and political reason. Liberalism, neo-
liberalism and rationalities of government. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2006.

Kalifa, Dominique. Lencre et le sang. Rcits et socit la Belle poque. Paris:

Fayard, 1995.

L Heuillet, Hlne. Basse politique, haute police. Une approche historique et

philosophique de la police. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Morse, Richard. Latin American Intellectuals and the City, 1860-1940. In Journal of
Latin American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1978.

Mujica Farias, M. La polica de Paris. Buenos Aires: Arnold Men, 1901.

Nacif Mina, Jorge. Polica y seguridad pblica en la ciudad de Mxico, 1770-1848.

In Hernndez Franyuti. R. (comp.). La ciudad de Mxico en la primera mitad del siglo
XIX (Tomo II). Mxico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jos Mara Luis Mora, 1994.

Otero, Hernn. Estadstica y nacin. Una historia conceptual del pensamiento censal
en la Argentina moderna. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2006.

Reyna Almandos, Luis. Unin Policial Universal: sus bases. La Plata: Talleres
grficos Christmann & Crespo, 1910.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.

Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Rodrguez, Adolfo. Historia de la Polica Federal Argentina. Tomo IV. Buenos Aires:
Editorial Policial, 1975.

Romay, Francisco. Extradicin de delincuentes y cooperacin policial. Buenos Aires:

Talleres Grficos de la Penitenciara Nacional, 1944.

Rosemberg, Andr. Polcia, policiamento e o policial na provncia de So Paulo, no

final do Imprio: a instituio, prtica cotidiana e cultura. So Paulo: Tese de
Doutorado em Histria Social, Universidade de So Paulo, 2008.

20
Ruggiero, Kristin. Modernity in the Flesh. Medicine, Law and Society in Turn-of-
Century Argentina. California: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Samet, Henrique. Construo de um Padro de Controle e Represso na Polcia Civil

do Distrito Federal por meio do Corpo de Investigaes e Segurana Pblica (1907-
1920). Rio de Janeiro: Tese de Doutorado, Programa de Ps-Graduao em Histria
Social, UFRJ, 2008.

Sarchaga, Alejandro. Dactiloscopa y Convenio Internacional de Polica.

Montevideo: Imprenta El Siglo Ilustrado, 1906.

Sarmiento, Domingo F. Facundo (1845). Buenos Aires: Kapelusz, 1971.

Scarzanella, Eugenia. Ni gringos ni indios. Inmigracin, criminalidad y racismo en la

Argentina, 1890-1916. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2004.

Silvado, Joo B. O servio policial em Paris e Londres (relatrio apresentado ao

Ministro da Justia e Negcios Interiores, sendo ministro o ilustrado cidado Dr.
Gonalves Ferreira). Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1895.

Simmel, Georg. Las grandes urbes y la vida del espritu (Die Grosstdte und das
Geistesleben, 1903). In El individuo y la libertad. Ensayos de crtica de la cultura.
Barcelona: Pennsula, 1986.

Singer, Ben. Modernity, hyperstimulus, and the rise of popular sensationalism. In

Leo Charney and Vanesa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Tortima, Pedro. A conferncia judiciria-policial de 1917 no Rio de Janeiro: uma

radical virada conservadora no Estado Brasileiro. In Discursos sediciosos: crime,
direito e sociedade, No. 2. Rio de Janeiro: 1996.

Waldmann, Peter. Justicia en la calle. Ensayos sobre la polica en Amrica Latina.

Medelln: Biblioteca Jurdica Dik, 1996.

Weinberg, Gregorio. La ciencia y la idea de progreso en Amrica Latina, 1860-1930.

Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1998.

Zimmermann, Eduardo. Los liberales reformistas. La cuestin social en la Argentina,

1890-1916. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1995.

21