Bayres Crime Wave?

The recent spate of Palermo "resto invasions" we noted recently continued Thursday night at the restaurant Ummo (and, the article notes, started on May 16 at Meridiano 58, at Borges and El Salvador). This naturally leaves us to wonder if Buenos Aires (or at least Palermo) is enduring a kind of crime wave. It's not as obvious as it seems that there is one, as you can string together a few crimes in any zone, publish a few articles about them, and make then seem like a wave. If you listen to statistics from the Policía Federal published by La Nación, robberies were up 3.77% in the first four months of the year (and 11% in April compared to April 2005) and in the southern, poorer, part of the city were up 16.5% from 2004 to 2005. The Minister of the Interior, Anibal Fernández, said that there was not an increase in insecurity in the capital and that it was a media creation, and then said he didn't mean to say that (though he said the above police figures were "false" and "unofficial"). In the end, according to an opinion survey by the Centro de Opinión Pública at the Universidad de Belgrano, 42.1% of residents surveyed had changed their habits becuase of perceived insecurity, including 24.2% who say they walk less on the streets--a sense of insecurity attested to by a recent march in protest of a random shooting in the Belgrano nabe. One note: these stories largely came from La Nación, which is seem as the more right wing (anti-Kirchner administration) of the two major dailes.