The Hitchhiking Cop

We're driving through the Salta and Jujuy border provinces. He's not stopping every car for control, but to get a ride to San Salvador city. "I'm a policeman," he says after a short silence, while I'm struggling to find words for such an unexpected request—his way of making clear he's not a potential threat. We take him. He can't help but spend the entire ride sharing stories about himself. "We work in 8-hour shifts. We issue 20 infraction tickets per shift. Less than that, and the bosses aren't happy. Less than that, and you earn hate from the other groups, because then they feel pressure to do more. We try to get most of them done at the beginning of the shift, then we slow down," was one of his monologue highlights. He said this with pride, completely unaware of what he was revealing: that traffic enforcement isn't about safety—it's about quotas.