The walls of the labyrinth: Impunity, corruption, and the limits of politics in contemporary Argentina.

Abstract

This dissertation looks at contemporary forms of social protest in Argentina. The ethnographic focus is on two groups. One of these is Memoria Activa, which developed following the 1994 bombing of an important local institution, the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society (AMIA). Their demands center on the need for a serious investigation and justice in the attack, which remains unresolved. The other group I discuss is the Cooperativa BAUEN. Part of a broader phenomenon know as the recuperated businesses movement, this workers' cooperative was formed by a set of former employees from a central Buenos Aires hotel after its closure in 2001. The cooperative, which took control of the installation and reopened its operations under their own direction, remains engaged in a prolonged struggle with opposing economic and political forces over the legitimacy and effects of their actions. In looking at these groups, I consider the ways that notions of impunity and corruption permeate and structure their demands. I illustrate how these notions have developed out of a particular cultural and historical context, and have come to serve as a source of conceptual unity among and across a number of groups working for social change. I also consider the practical and strategic constraints they face in engaging with national and international legal and political systems. In doing so, I show how differing assessments of appropriate forms of engagement with established institutions and centers of power tend to serve as a source of division for groups with highly similar aims. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how these groups, through asserting and working to achieve their demands, at once conform to and challenge codified forms of institutional practice. They engage with a labyrinthine system of public administration in what is fundamentally a mutually transformative process of continual generation that defines and redefines the limits and boundaries of political action.