While the legislative agenda has been firmly geared to the 2011 presidential elections for the last couple of months, the average citizen would like to see more safety and order in the streets here and now. The first day of the week saw the public order disrupted at two levels at least — a fresh revival of crime fears following the weekend shooting of the former soccer player Fernando Cáceres and the picket camps blocking what is claimed to be the world’s broadest avenue, the 9 de Julio. These two blows to civic peace were met with contrasting reactions — on the one hand, Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli openly spoke of the police shooting to kill where necessary in the harshest anti-crime rhetoric since Carlos Ruckauf’s “slugs for thugs” in 1999 while on the other, national authorities meekly permitted less than 2,000 pickets to inflict traffic chaos on millions.

Crime and social disruption may proceed along parallel lines but they are definitely linked. The government may or may not be responsible for fomenting political violence (as charged by Civic Coalition leader Elisa Carrió in the wake of the Jujuy picket attack on Radical party chairman Gerardo Morales) but it is manifestly failing to control the pickets. Throwing money at the problem in the form of the ambitious plan to create 100,000 co-operative jobs via “social organizations” does not work, especially when implemented in the typically discriminatory form of giving all the opportunities to pro-Kirchner pickets with the exclusion of anti-Kirchner groups — this was the genesis of the latter’s blockade of the 9 de Julio since Monday. The more money pickets are given, the more they seem to demand. Meanwhile it is a serious challenge to institutional normality that, for example, the Jujuy pickets who attacked Morales command subsidies equivalent to almost half the Jujuy City Hall budget — a dangerous parallel power in the making.

But if pampering pickets does not solve social problems, neither does Scioli’s tough line. Governments at all levels will need to combat poverty as one of the main roots of crime but the prevailing attitude is denial — even last week’s laudable announcement of universal child benefits threatens to become a target of picket claims instead of going straight to the families. Scioli speaks of “responding to the popular clamour” but leaders are chosen to lead the way towards finding solutions, not to act as echo chambers for the general public’s complaints.