For Social Emergencies “We Are 9-1-1”: How Journalists Perform the State in an Argentine Border Town

Abstract

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.

Crimecraft: Journalists, police, and news publics in an Argentine town

“…As with the new social media, such as Twitter and YouTube, people used the online forums in Iguazú’s digital newspapers as pragmatic tools for sharing information and as venues for expressing alternative political imaginaries (Bonilla and Rosa ; Fattal ; González de Bustamante and Relly ; Juris ; Postill ). Although residents also participated in local radio and especially politicized television call‐in shows, which were used to pressure municipal government and other state actors into delivering social services (Jusionyte ), they were much more outspoken online, where constraints of the limited schedule of live programming were lifted, allowing people to join ongoing discussions around the clock. The popularity of online media as a site for producing distributed narrative also extended across the boundaries of social class.…”

States of Camouflage

“…From the early days of my ethnographic fieldwork with news journalists in Puerto Iguazú (see Jusionyte , ), I have visited the firehouse regularly. Press reporters I accompanied stopped there several times a week to inquire about emergency calls and rescue operations.…”

“…Thus, when Yiyo and his companions used the disguise of the fire service to transport drugs, they were not imitating just any institution but one with a particularly positive status in the grassroots political imagination. From the early days of my ethnographic fieldwork with news journalists in Puerto Iguazú (see Jusionyte 2013Jusionyte , 2014, I have visited the firehouse regularly. Press reporters I accompanied stopped there several times a week to inquire about emergency calls and rescue operations.…”

“…It was a public secret that some employees in the customs office enabled their family members, business associates, or those who agreed to pay bribes to sidestep border trade regulations. As such, it was not easy to distinguish illegalized yet socially legitimate practices, such as small-scale contraband for personal consumption, and unlawful illicit flows, like drug trafficking (see Jusionyte 2013). But it was even harder to estimate to what extent the outlawed activities intertwined with formal state institutions and practices.…”

On and Off the Record: The Production of Legitimacy in an Argentine Border Town

“…For Iguazúenses, their Spanish programs were a preferred alternative to the powerful Brazilian radio and television signals broadcasting in Portuguese from across the border, or the unreliable, poor transmissions of Argentine national media. Over the years in a remote border area, where infrastructural and ideological reach of the state was weak, news outlets even took on some of the practical functions of governance, assisting residents in solving such problems as failures in water and power supply (Jusionyte forthcoming).…”