Etnografía de las violencias estatales: desaparición y muerte en contextos democráticos (Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

During Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983), state repression took its harshest forms through the kidnapping, torture, and disappearance of people labeled as subversive, regardless of their class, gender, or social background. With the return to democracy, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) has continued to experience multiple expressions of violence. What distinguishes the democratic period is not the disappearance of violence, but rather the end of the State’s direct monopoly over its systematic use. Violence now circulates through a wider set of actors and institutions that operate with the State’s explicit or implicit consent and protection. This study examines how different forms of violence intersect in the post-1983 era. It focuses particularly on the ways police violence and bureaucratic violence intertwine—within specific structural conditions—to generate persistent scenarios of impunity. The analysis draws on an ethnographic approach centered on the cases of Luis and Bruno, two young men who were disappeared and killed long after the dictatorship had ended. Their trajectories illuminate how direct and indirect forms of harm take shape through judicial, administrative, and state practices involving multiple public institutions and agents. The article argues that the convergence of these practices after 1983 reveals a pattern of outsourced state action that frequently enables fatal outcomes and disappearances. By tracing disappearance and murder ethnographically, the study offers a critical lens through which to understand both the structural expressions of violence in democratic Argentina and the forms of state responsibility that sustain them. It thereby contributes to anthropological debates on the historical continuities and ruptures that shape different kinds of violence in the country’s democratic period.