Certain departmental brigade personnel of the rural command were assigned to a series of frontier posts scattered at twenty-seven critical points along the borders and at river and lake ports of entry. They included Customs Police integral to the corps, as well as uniformed carabineers concerned with combating smuggling and other forms of illegal border crossing. The carabineers were also heavily involved in civic action in the more remote and less populated regions of the country. In an effort to improve its public relations, the police created the Department of Social Communication ("Departamento de Comunicación Social") in the early 1980s.