Based on ethnographic research in Puerto Iguazú, an Argentine town bordering Brazil and Paraguay, this article explores how journalists maneuver between stories for, on, and off the record to maintain a locally valid boundary between law and crime. Journalists occupy a multifaceted position in the Iguazú community: as residents, they often participate in the informal circulation of legal and illegal goods across the border; as cultural producers, they create representations about it. Coverage relating to informal trade depends on local schemes of legality and legitimacy that juxtapose the rights and rules for those living in this small border community with national legislation, which disadvantages the remote town and serves to obstruct cross-border exchanges. Due to the discrepancy between local understanding of legality and national laws, many potentially newsworthy illegal exchanges are not addressed in the media. On the border, where consensus regarding the legality and legitimacy of many common practices is unstable, this article shows how local news production plays an important part in determining what is legal, illegal, legitimate, or illicit. [legality, legitimacy, media, border, Argentina] For the Record: A Journalist with a CameraZooming in on a landmass across Río Paraná, the camera moves past an abandoned convention center and focuses on a green and yellow landmark, a monumental version of the border demarcation signs found throughout Latin America. Its colors blend with the surrounding Brazilian subtropical jungle. As the camera swiftly turns in a clockwise direction, it pans over Río Iguazú and the lush vegetation, barely spotting another marker: painted in sky blue and white, an obelisk built in 1903 to celebrate Argentine national sovereignty. Finally, as the camera glides further to the right and returns across Río Paraná, it captures a red, white and blue Paraguayan signpost, rising tall above the river port."We will share the experience of crossing by boat from Puerto Presidente Franco, Paraguay to Puerto Iguazú, Argentina," comments the voice behind the camera. "Unique in the world: three countries, two rivers." Two journalists and I present our documents to a man in a checkered shirt sitting on the rocks by the river. When earlier that morning we took a bus across the Tancredo Neves Bridge from Argentina to Brazil and then across the Puente del Amistad [Friendship Bridge] uniting Brazil and Paraguay, migration control did not stamp our passports, so we could not get departure stamps either. Money for the tickets can be paid for in any combination of currencies: Argentine pesos, Brazilian reais, or Paraguayan guaraníes. We gather our fares and board the ferry.The journalist with the camera records every minute of the trip. Then she briefly turns off the device as she approaches an acquaintance. "Esteche! What are you doing here?
Focusing on a story of former firefighters who used a counterfeit rescue vehicle to perform a false emergency as a cover‐up for drug trafficking in the tri‐border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this article engages the concept of camouflage to intervene in anthropological discussions on statecraft. The article explores how drug traffickers—but also gendarmes, prefects, and customs officers, who help smugglers by accepting bribes—use the camouflage of legitimate political authority to enable illicit transactions. In the tri‐border area, the notion of camouflage helps explain how the contraband and corruption that pervade border relationships are inseparable from formal enactments of political authority. Camouflage, thus, helps illuminate the aesthetic, pragmatic, and moral connections between statecraft and criminality, further enhancing our analytical purchase on how the law and its violation are symbiotically intertwined. I argue that this study of corruption on the border reveals that state effects are created by endless refractions, which do more than blur the distinction between law and crime, between the deceived and the deceiving, between the original and the counterfeit. Camouflage does not merely blend the predictable dichotomous categories by which we approach and analyze the performance of the state, but by obfuscating any clear distinction between the legal, the political, and the criminal, it actually enables states to happen.
In southern Arizona, emergency responders rescue and transport unauthorized migrants who get hurt crossing the border, either when scaling the steel fence in urban areas or taking remote and dangerous routes through the desert. Using data collected during ethnographic research between 2015 and 2017 with firefighters trained as EMTs or paramedics, the article shows how Border Patrol's tactical infrastructure produces specific patterns of traumatic injury that are not only routine but also deliberate, allowing us to trace government's responsibility for what it presents as the unintentional consequence of This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.security buildup on the US-Mexico border. [migration, emergency, infrastructure, border, accident] RESUMEN En el sur de Arizona, primeros respondientes rescatan y transportan migrantes no autorizados que se hacen daño cruzando la frontera ya sea escalando el cerco de hierro en áreas urbanas o tomando rutas remotas y peligrosas a través del desierto. Usando datos recolectados durante la investigación etnográfica entre 2015 y 2017 con bomberos entrenados como técnicos de emergencia o paramédicos, el artículo muestra cómo la infraestructura táctica de la patrulla fronteriza produce patrones específicos de lesión traumática que no son sólo rutinarios sino deliberados, permitiéndonos trazar la responsabilidad del gobierno por lo que se presenta como una consecuencia no intencional del aumento de seguridad en la frontera Estados Unidos-México. [migración, emergencia, infraestructura, frontera, accidente] "The border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country-a border culture." -Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) May 2015, Nogales, Arizona. The ambulance had just finished a run to the Border Patrol station-a seventeen-year-old Mexican boy the agents detained crossing through the desert earlier in the morning had a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit-and was returning to the
Crime narratives emerge from a collaborative process that involves diverse social groups across different locales. This diffused production of stories is captured by the concept of crimecraft, which helps illuminate the relationship among news media, organized crime, and police violence in postdictatorship Argentina. There, news makers must creatively maneuver between official reports and public secrets by shifting the story's authorship from themselves to their audiences. They do this with online news forums, which provide a space for readers to anonymously criticize brutal police practices, sometimes leading to public protests. Such is the negotiated and shifting relationship between law and violence, as well as the processual and performative character of knowledge production, which crimecraft helps unpack. [police, crime, violence, media, publics, journalism, Argentina] Relatos del crimen surgen de un proceso de colaboración que involucra a diversos grupos sociales en diferentes sitios. El concepto de crimecraft captura esta producción difusa de historias y ayuda a aclarar las conexiones entre los medios de comunicación, el crimen organizado y la violencia policial en Argentina. Allí, los encargados de noticias deben maniobrar de manera creativa entre los informes oficiales y secretos públicos desplazando la paternidad literaria de la historia de sí mismos a sus audiencias. Lo hacen con los foros de noticias online, que proveen un espacio para que los lectores critiquen prácticas brutales de la policía de forma anónima y que a veces lleva a las protestas públicas. Crimecraft sirve para esclarecer esta relación negociada e inestable entre la ley y la violencia, así como comprender el carácter procesual y performativo de la producción del conocimiento. [policía, crimen, violencia, medios de comunicación, públicos, periodismo, Argentina]
This article focuses on Puerto Iguazú, an Argentine town bordering Brazil and Paraguay, where the local media create a patchwork of substitute social services that form the basis of governance. More than 1,200 kilometers away from the federal capital, Iguazú was historically neglected by the central government: water shortages, power cuts, natural gas and fuel scarcity, impassable roads, and squatter settlements contributed to infrastructural collapses in a territorial periphery. Local news coverage has been consistently critical of the failing state in Iguazú, treating governmental neglect as social emergency, which requires an urgent media intervention. Through their routine news itineraries and agendas, social solidarity, and assistance campaigns, Iguazú journalists have taken on certain pragmatic functions ordinarily understood to be the task of the government. In reference to Foucault’s theory of capillary power, I call this locally embedded performance of the state, separate from official policies and projects, capillary governance. I pay special attention to the role of infrastructure, showing how different infrastructural networks—from power and water supply to communications technologies—interconnect, at times enabling and other times disabling the work of journalists. Merging anthropology of journalism with political anthropology, this article analyzes media practices on a remote border, where official governmental policies and actions are tentative and uneven, showing how Iguazú journalists take on the role of state actors.
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