Buenos Aires, January 14, 2026 - Total News Agency - TNA - The debate over the reform of the state intelligence system has recently been joined by a voice of significant political and institutional weight. The former Minister of the Interior and former head of the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE), Miguel Ángel Toma, described Decree 941/2025 as 'untimely and inefficient' and warned that its wording generates 'enormous doubt' about a possible authoritarian intention behind the changes promoted by the Government. Toma, who led SIDE during the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde, harshly criticized the decree published at the end of December, which modified the structure of national intelligence and granted new operational powers to the agency's agents, including the possibility of detaining people without a prior judicial order. In his view, that formulation is not innocuous and carries the risk of taking the country back to the worst stages of state terrorism, when intelligence structures were used as tools of political persecution and social repression. The former head of SIDE emphasized that the norm 'tends to resurface ghosts of the past,' by enabling a diffuse scheme of control and surveillance that could lead to abuses of power. From different sectors, it is warned that the expansion of SIDE's powers, without clear controls and with ambiguous conceptual definitions, weakens the republican system and erodes basic guarantees such as individual freedom and due process. In this context, Total News Agency has been warning for months about the risk of an opaque expansion of the intelligence apparatus, with articles that focused on the actions of SIDE, the role of its officials, and the lack of effective controls over its operations.
