Security, stake of the G20 of Buenos Aires

• Tweeter

• republish

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich presented on 16 November 2018 the equipment for the safety device to be used at the G20 summit. Argentina Ministry of Security / Handout via REUTERS

A district of the Argentine capital fully cordoned off by security forces will house the summit of heads of state and government, which will involve the world's leading leaders. Outside, but far from the exclusion zone, an event will bring together local and international antiglobalists. Authorities negotiate with organizers to prevent violence.

From our correspondent in Buenos Aires,

The urban guerrilla scenes that marked the Hamburg summit in July 2017 impressed and preoccupied the Argentine authorities. And when Germany took over the presidency of the G20 in November of last year, the government had in mind to prevent this from happening again at the Buenos Aires Summit, which is being held. November 30 and December 1, 2018.

In one year, which opened with the General Assembly of the WTO (World Trade Organization) and in which successive ministerial meetings of the G20 (Finance, Agriculture, Labor, etc.), Argentina has hosted thousands of prominent personalities without major incident. This allowed him, too, to test and improve his safety device for the summit. To do this, she sought and obtained the advice of several member countries of the Group, including the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as Israel.

But this summit represents an unprecedented challenge for Argentina. Superior to the Summit of the Americas, held in Mar del Plata (a seaside resort 400 km south of Buenos Aires) in 2005, during which President Néstor Kirchner and his Brazilian peers Luis Inàcio Lula Da Silva and Venezuelan Hugo Chávez had blocked the project of Continental Free Trade Treaty of the American George W. Bush. Because this time it is the leaders of countries representing 85% of world GDP that will be present. And all will be there, from Donald Trump to Xi Jinping, through Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May. Not to mention Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of IMF (International Monetary Fund) and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, among other leaders of international organizations.

An exclusion zone

The primary goal of the authorities is to ensure the security of foreign heads of state and government, their delegations (7,500 people) and the 4,500 accredited journalists for the summit. As far as they are concerned, the main threat is a terrorist attack: the Argentine intelligence services are on maximum alert, in liaison with Western, Israeli, Russian and Chinese agencies. Rumors are circulating about threats attributed to the attacks of 1992 (Israeli embassy) and 1994 (Jewish mutual Amia), attributed to Iran, but they do not seem very serious. The second objective is to prevent the summit from being disrupted by anti-G20 and anti-globalization demonstrations. The third, that these manifestations do not degenerate into scenes of violence comparable to those of Hamburg.

To do this, 22,400 men will be mobilized. 13,400 belong to the federal forces (gendarmerie, naval prefecture, federal police and border police) and 9,000 to metropolitan police and the province of Buenos Aires. To this must be added 3,500 foreign agents, charged with the close security of their delegations, the most numerous being the Americans and the Russians.

The Summit of Heads of State will be held in Costa Salguero, a convention center bordering the Rio de la Plata, whose shores will be guarded by naval vessels, and an entire area of ​​the city along the estuary, including the large hotels where the foreign delegations and the press center will be housed, will be hermetically sealed. Only duly accredited summit participants, transported by official cars and shuttles, as well as previously registered residents, may be admitted. Another exclusion zone will be set up on the night of 30 November, around the Teatro Colón, where President Mauricio Macri will receive his guests for a gala dinner.

Activists altermondialistes mobilized

In the rest of the city, far from the places that attendees will attend, there will be traffic restrictions for several bus and metro lines between Thursday 29 midnight (the day before the summit) and Sunday 2 December. This, of course, to keep the anti-G20 protesters as far away as possible from the summit and to limit the risk of clashes between militants and the police at the edge of the exclusion zone.

The main protest against the summit will take place on Friday, November 30 in the early afternoon, on a route negotiated between the authorities and organizers, which will leave the south of the city to end in front of the Congress, so some five kilometers where the heads of state will be. Preceded by a "Summit of Peoples" in the same place, this Thursday, 29, the big demonstration of the 30 is organized by the collective "Confluence Fuera G20-FMI" (Confluence Dehors the G20 and the IMF), which gathers 22 international NGOs, of which Attac, and 65 Argentines, including many social organizations. In the steering committee of the collective, the Nobel Peace Prize Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, was the privileged interlocutor of the government in the negotiations to avoid incidents. This is the stated goal of both parties. The organizers say again and again that the protest will be peaceful and warn the authorities against the presence of "provocateurs". For the event to be successful, it is important that it unfolds smoothly.

It's also a challenge for the group: in recent times, a lot of protests in Argentina have ended with violence provoked by small groups who mixed with the crowd at the end of the course to throw stones, even Molotov cocktails, on the police and destroy street furniture, resulting in a response, often disproportionate, the police. Some of these "autonomous", or so-called such, are close to far-right local organizations that have been closely monitored by the security services for several weeks.

As for the eventual foreign altermondialist breakers, they should be much less numerous than in Hamburg: lists of people considered dangerous for having participated in violent actions of this kind in Europe or in North America have been sent by the governments of the countries concerned. to the Argentine authorities. If some of them tried to enter the country, they would be turned back. Moreover, it is obviously easier to take a train to Hamburg, without border control, from any European city than to arrive in Argentina, after a flight of 12,000 km.

If violence is avoided, the demonstration on Friday, November 30 should be a success. Given the mobilization capacity of local organizations, the mistrust of public opinion with regard to the International Monetary Fund, which this year granted a credit of $ 57 billion to Argentina (and this is why the IMF has been added to the G20 in the call to demonstrate), as well as the rejection caused by Donald Trump, who will be one of the main actors of the meeting of heads of state.

This summit puts an end to a year of Argentine presidency of the G20 that has been good in the opinion of most member countries, particularly because it has managed to avoid clashes, particularly with the United States, and to find consensus at ministerial meetings. It will be a success for the host country if it ends with a joint declaration of compromise, especially on international trade, and if the interview between Trump and Xi Jinping , on December 1 in the evening, leads to a positive result. Mauricio Macri will also have seventeen bilateral meetings with heads of state and government present, including US President, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Frenchman Emmanuel Macron and Britain's Theresa May, the main supporters of Argentina's IMF. Any profit. Provided, of course, that there are no major incidents on November 30 and December 1, inside or outside the exclusion zone.