Abstract

Within the framework of broader processes in Latin America Argentina has seen a progressive policing of the governance of security. Criminal policies in recent decades have focused on police militarization, increased incarceration, spatial segregation and judicial expansion that especially affect the sectors that are economically most impoverished. I am interested in showing, from ethnographic cases, how the dynamics of delinquency mainly affect young men from popular sectors, both residents and police. Each one of the deaths and disappearances with which I have been working in my investigations reflects these complex daily frames of the economy defined as “illegal.” In these contexts we usually see young people’s mothers who are responsible for generating complaints and patrimonializing death, thus confronting the hegemonic meanings that stigmatize them, making it possible to narrate them “from below” and endowing them with their own emotions, versions and experiences that the relatives mobilize around them.