One totally unconfirmed story about Juan Domingo Perón (which could equally reflect the intensity of anti-Peronism or his singular character, depending on true or false) has it that when asked if it bothered him that one of his consolations between his two most famous wives, Evita and Isabel, was aged 13, he replied: “No, why, I’m not superstitious” – by the same token, the Javier Milei administration would not seem to be superstitious in sending a bill to Congress to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13 (which Security Minister Alejandra Monteoliva wants to drop to 12, while some of the government’s more moderate allies would like to nudge the age up to 14).
There is one very simple statistical argument against this proposal – the other two main Latin American countries, Brazil and Mexico, have both already lowered their age of criminal responsibility to 12 and yet the image of neither is exactly crime-free with murder rates almost five times as high as Argentina’s five per 100,000 (a figure recently boasted by the same Security Ministry pushing this initiative which would seem to have succeeded without it). It could even be argued that the rampant crime in Brazil and Mexico is in part because of rather than despite their lower ages of criminal responsibility since the hopelessly overcrowded prisons are so notoriously schools of crime confirming vulnerable kids on their roads to disaster – as the Catholic Church’s statement on the issue eloquently asks: “Knowing the reality of penal establishments, can we seriously believe them to be the solution?”
But rather than develop the arguments against this bill any further, this editorial proposes to explore the alternatives. Curiously enough, there is a connection between this Penal Code bill and the week’s other big story, the government’s confrontation with Grupo Techint and its CEO Paolo Rocca over the Vaca Muerta pipeline tubing contract. Why? Because the government’s insistence on offering foreign bidders a level playing-field while delaying it for local industry until the uncertain future of its structural reforms is resolved, preferring to place its bets on export-led growth via farming, energy and mining, could have devastating consequences for the sociology of the Greater Buenos Aires industrial belt in particular and the job prospects of the younger generation in general. This editorial does not intend to take sides in the Techint dispute (the manufacturing sector has abused a closed economy for far too long with uncompetitive industries offering overpriced goods and services) but the loss of the formal employment provided by enterprises like Techint might well push more youngsters of the future into contemplating crime alongside meal deliveries or driving hire cars.
The government bill does not even go into where these future young convicts spanning all the teens are going to be lodged by proposing the construction of new prisons to alleviate the current overcrowding, thus making its solution incomplete even within its own terms. The Security Ministry (along with the Church) is at least alive to the most visible plague ruining today’s youth: drug-trafficking. But this problem also exposes perhaps the biggest hole in Milei’s impressive drive to modernise Argentina:education (not even considered worthy of a ministry).
Here the government washes its hands by defining it as a provincial responsibility with the deplorable state of public schooling in Buenos Aires Province valued as a useful electoral argument rather than seen as a problem urgently requiring solution for the country’s future. But while education might be the current challenge demanding teachers with decent salaries and proper training to improve the quality of schooling, training programmes geared to the skills evolving in this 21st century are what is most needed for the future. Embarking on such programmes is also a leap of faith, given the pessimists who present Artificial Intelligence as dooming all human endeavour. Another leap of faith would seem to be having children in the first place, given plunging birth rates – the fact that the almost third of the population below the poverty line is concentrated into 24 percent of the households shows that a disproportionate number of children have deprived upbringings increasing the temptations of crime.
Against all these arguments, opinion polls show around 70 percent of Argentines to favour this bill (93 percent, according to one Rosario survey), surely encouraging its introduction into next month’s extraordinary sessions, and the worst way to bring up children is to deny them any responsibility for their actions, blaming society. But the full complexity of this debate has yet to be recognised.
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