The Argentine government has reformed the Federal Police’s organic law to steer the institution toward preventing and investigating complex crimes. But questions remain as to whether its new operational powers will be enough to confront increasingly sophisticated criminal dynamics.
The new statute of the Argentine Federal Police, which redefines the force’s role and could signal a shift in security policy by incorporating a national security dimension, entered into effect on June 16 via presidential decree.
According to Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, the reform merely formalizes a process that began in 2016, when she headed the national security ministry under the administration of former President Mauricio Macri.
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One of the pillars of this reform is the creation of the Federal Investigations Department (Departamento Federal de Investigaciones – DFI), which, according to official sources, was inspired by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and will serve as the new backbone of the federal police.
“This will bring the Argentine Federal Police in line with FBI standards and the leading criminal investigative forces of governments around the world,” said President Javier Milei during the DFI’s launch.
The reform, which did not go through Congress, includes provisions that would allow the federal police to make arrests, conduct searches, and carry out cyber surveillance operations without a prior judicial warrant.
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While a major reform of the federal police had been a pending issue since the return of democracy in 1983, the prospect of granting the force greater autonomy has sparked concerns about its effectiveness — especially given that in other countries in the region, bolstering security forces has not necessarily led to a decline in organized crime.
In recent years, several countries in Latin America — including Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru — have expanded police powers in an effort to curb violence. But in those cases, such changes took place under states of emergency and in response to particularly high levels of insecurity.
This is not the case in Argentina, where insecurity levels remain well below the regional average. The country has the lowest homicide rate in South America and a comparatively limited presence of organized crime.
Nonetheless, the new administration has adopted a tougher stance on security, prompting criticism from opposition parties, local media, and some human rights organizations.
Martín Verrier, a high-ranking anti-drug and organized crime official, told InSight Crime that the controversial provisions — criticized for allegedly expanding police autonomy — are “less about expanding powers and more about redirecting them toward crimes that truly damage the institutional fabric of the country: corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking, organized crime.” He added that the reform “is not the result of a punitive obsession, but of a technical assessment shared by experts: criminality has become more sophisticated than the state’s institutional response.”
This growing sophistication — which has given rise to more decentralized and complex criminal structures — requires the state, and particularly its security forces, to adapt constantly. Unsurprisingly, all the experts consulted by InSight Crime agreed on the need for a new organic law for the federal police.
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However, Germán Montenegro, a former secretary for military affairs at the Defense Ministry and former national director of Argentina’s Airport Security Police, told InSight Crime that the new statute does not introduce any significant changes.
He said the federal police’s organizational structure remains largely the same: overly centralized, with overlapping responsibilities across departments. And the powers under scrutiny were already established in other legal instruments, such as the Criminal Procedure Code and the federal police’s previous organic law.
According to León Carlos Arslanian — a former judge in Argentina’s historic Trial of the Military Juntas, former national justice minister, and former justice and security minister for the Province of Buenos Aires — the greatest flaw in the new statute is that it “creates a process of police autonomization, as it fails to properly link the functions and operational capacity of the new police force to the Attorney General’s Office.” In other words, the lack of institutional coordination could weaken effective oversight of the federal police.
An additional institutional concern is the way the reform was approved. Since it was not debated in Congress, the new statute lacks the political backing that could bolster its legitimacy and long-term sustainability.
In fact, a legal injunction has already been filed by opposition lawmakers, and the Center for Legal and Social Studies (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales – CELS) has submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The federal police reform — part of a broader hardline national security strategy — must now prove its ability to improve the state’s response to organized crime without undermining fundamental rights. The way it is implemented, along with the outcome of ongoing judicial proceedings, will be key to determining whether this legal shift gains institutional legitimacy and endures over time.
Featured image: Argentine Federal Police vehicle, Buenos Aires, May 2008. Credit: Polylerus.