BUENOS AIRES - Police Corporal Mariano Lewicki has made a habit of looking over his shoulder. Seated in an upscale cafe in a suburb north of Buenos Aires, the 31-year-old glanced nervously at passing waiters and a handful of other customers.
In the past three years, he said, he has been knifed on a train, threatened at gunpoint in his house, and beaten and burned with cigarettes in a police station. Such is the price one pays for turning on one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Argentina: maldita policia, literally ``the damned police,'' a network of corrupt officers that patrols the dense urban sprawl in Buenos Aires Province, which surrounds the capital.
In April 2000, Lewicki blew the whistle on a ranking officer, whom he suspected of masterminding a bank robbery. Within two weeks, Lewicki was charged with driving a stolen car, suspended indefinitely from the police force, and thrown in jail for two months.
The band of corrupt police "is the biggest mafia in the country,'' according to Ricardo Ragendorfer, who has written two books on the abuses of the Buenos Aires provincial police.
"The police profit from every crime in the penal code. The narcotics police deal drugs, the police in charge of auto thefts steal cars, the police that deal with robberies rob, and so on,'' Ragendorfer said. ``In other countries in Latin America, parts of the police force are on mafia payrolls. Here, it's the other way around.''
Not even the president, it seems, is immune from the gangster-like tactics of the corrupt officers.
Within days of publicly accusing the Buenos Aires provincial police of complicity in a recent spate of kidnappings, President Nestor Kirchner told reporters that his family had received threats.
Kirchner has coasted relatively unscathed through his first eight months as president of this crisis-torn nation, winning popular support by leading an assault on an entrenched political elite dominated by his own Peronist party.
But analysts say his attack on corruption in the Buenos Aires provincial police could be his riskiest initiative yet. The move also threatens to unleash a power struggle within the political party that brought Kirchner to the presidency and that, until now, has provided him with critical support.
The profits the provincial police receive from rake-offs and direct participation in criminal activities provide a major source of funding for the Peronist party, the dominant force in Argentine politics, according to former police officers and political analysts.
For the first time since Kirchner assumed the presidency, a rift appears to have developed between him and former president Eduardo Duhalde, a Peronist who once called the Buenos Aires provincial police ``the best in the world'' while governor of the province in the 1990s.
Most of the province's 14 million people and around half of its 46,000 police officers are concentrated in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a vast urban area with triple the capital's population. Once an industrial belt, the area is now a slum-strewn haven for organized crime that has been swept by a spate of headline-grabbing kidnappings.
The abductions, unabated crime, and poverty have provoked protests and marred Kirchner's efforts to convince a wary public that Argentina is finally recovering from the worst economic depression in its history.
Analysts say the protests have served as a wake-up call for the new administration, which has assigned blame to the very police force charged with fighting the kidnappers.
``In the majority of the kidnappings, police have been discovered, and many times, police from Buenos Aires Province,'' Kirchner said in November. ``Argentines are waiting for a profound purging of that police force.'' He added: ``If 10 have to go, then 10 will go. If 100 have to go, then 100 will go.''
According to Marcelo Sain, former deputy minister of security in the province of Buenos Aires, the provincial police have been profiting from illegal activities such as prostitution, gambling, quack medicine, and other miscellaneous, nonviolent crimes for decades. But since the 1990s, the police have become increasingly involved in violent crimes, such as drug trafficking, kidnappings, car thefts, and armed robberies.
The police have also been accused of recurring human rights abuses, including tortures, extrajudicial executions, and the unnecessary shootings of suspected criminals as well as innocent bystanders, a practice dubbed ``easy trigger.''
The provincial police force is technically under the purview of Governor Felipe Sola, a Peronist, not the president. But Kirchner has nonetheless made his influence felt.
Last month, Sola accepted the resignation of his security chief, who was seen as a political ally of Duhalde and as an opponent to reforming the police force. The shake-up was interpreted as coming at the behest of Kirchner.
The new minister of security, Raul Rivara, has pledged to make the police's internal affairs department more independent in order to crack down on corruption, and he has set a goal of reducing the crime rate by half within four years. But analysts say an attack on police involvement in organized crime could risk undermining Kirchner's own political foundation, by challenging interests linked to the Peronist power brokers who respond to Duhalde and whose backing is crucial to the president.
The Peronist party controls most of the governorships and mayoralties, a majority in the Senate, and a plurality in the lower house of Congress. But the core of Peronist power lies in populous Buenos Aires Province, where political bosses play a decisive role in national elections.