Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina The Gray Zone of State Power

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, multi-sited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides the first available analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina.

1. The gray zone; 2. Party politics and everyday life; 3. Food lootings; 4. Moreno and La Matanza lootings; 5. Making sense of collective violence.

This 2007 book scrutinizes the series of food riots in Argentina in December 2001. It pays particular attention to the secret relationships among looters, political activists, and police forces. These clandestine relationships constitute the gray zone of politics.

Javier Auyero is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is the author of Poor People's Politics and Contentious Lives and has published articles in Theory and Society, Ethnography, Mobilization, Latin American Research Review, and the Journal of Latin American Studies, among others. He is the current editor of Qualitative Sociology.