Police officers called to the stand. The Criminal Justice System and Police's Corruption and violence in the Buenos Aires province during the 1950s and 1960s

Las investigaciones preliminares sobre la Historia de la Policía de la provincia de Buenos Aires en el siglo XX dan pie a una hipótesis acerca del recrudecimiento de la violencia policial en su accionar cotidiano desde finales de la década de 1950. Este proceso habría estado acompañado por un "salto" cuantitativo y cualitativo de casos de corrupción en las filas de la policía. Algunos de estos casos fueron llevados ante la justicia. El tratamiento que los jueces ordinarios en materia criminal dieron a los mismos y sus eventuales resultados, absolutorios o condenatorios, pueden arrojar luz sobre los permeables límites entre lo legal e ilegal en términos de accionar policial, al tiempo que permiten estudiar los complejos vínculos entre policías y jueces.Este trabajo aborda dichas temáticas a partir del estudio de 57 casos de causas criminales en la que resultan imputados policías, principalmente en jurisdicciones del conurbano bonaerense. El rango temporal inicia desde finales de la década de 1950 y se extiende a lo largo de los años sesenta.Preliminary research on the History of the Police of the Buenos Aires Province during the XX Century gives ground to a hypothesis: police violence grew up from the late 1950s on. Not only that, such process was accompanied by a quantitative as well as qualitative “jump” in corruption cases within the police ranks. Some of those cases were taken to the Criminal Justice. In fact, the treatment Penal Judges could have given to those cases, and their results in terms of absolutory or condemnatory sentences, shed light on the elusive boundaries between legal and illegal police actions and operations. Those sentences also speak about complex links between police officers and judges. This article deals with such topics based on a study of 57 criminal cases where police officers were accused. Most of those cases were from political districts surrounding Buenos Aires city and they go from the late 1950s all the way through the 1960s. The charges varied from misdemeanors to abuse of authority, torture, bribery, etc. In this sense, the piece attempt to study an obscure complex party including crime, police and penal justice and its results in historical terms during the analyzed time period.Fil: Barreneche, Osvaldo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin