Abstract
Urban crime and violence reflect foundational topics in the urban sociological tradition. A vast literature aims to interpret the interpersonal violence of everyday life in marginalized neighborhoods and communities. A smaller but still significant number of studies have taken criminal organizations such as gangs and drug cartels as their object of investigation or sociological theorization.
Enter Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering’s elegant study of drug crime, violence, and police collusion in Argentina. Departing from Auyero’s ethnographic oeuvre—which for nearly a generation has given us sharp insight into topics ranging from political patronage to the social production of waiting among the urban poor—The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins situates violence and drug crime within a deconstructed theory of the Argentine state. Using wiretapped court transcripts to supplement ethnographic methods, the result is a fascinating methodological innovation and empirical case that sheds light on the age-old exhortation to disaggregate the state as a site of competing interests, rather than a political monolith. Auyero and Sobering lead the way empirically, but with a light-handed theoretical touch, leaving future researchers the task of concluding exactly what this means for theories of the state.
The introductory chapters of the book situate drug use and violence within the everyday lives of residents of Arquitecto Tucci, a pseudonymous town located outside the comparatively prosperous city of Buenos Aires, in its vast metropolitan hinterland consisting of some 14 million people. Auyero and Sobering use the Italian concept of intreccio (typically used to describe mafia-state relations) to unpack the relative presence and absence of the state. While residents describe Arquitecto Tucci as a “no-man’s land”—a place where the state has abdicated its role in protecting citizens—Auyero and Sobering document the rather omnipresent role of the forces of public order in facilitating and regulating drug markets. A vast network of municipal, provincial, and national police—not to mention federal authorities such as the national guard—operate within Arquitecto Tucci and its environs, sometimes suppressing, while at other times supporting drug markets and violence.
Small-scale drug violence in the street spills over into the intimate lives of residents, as Auyero and Sobering document in stark ethnographic vignettes in Chapter Two. Parents beat children to keep them off the streets, children steal from parents to support their addiction, and families do not feel they can turn to the police for support. The police, residents say, are in cahoots with the dealers. Scholars of Latin America will recognize what Auyero and Sobering refer to as “legal cynicism” on the part of the residents—this is the title of Chapter Three, which reflects the widely held belief that the police play central roles in drug markets in Arquitecto Tucci. For scholars who work in communities such as Arquitecto Tucci, untangling fact from fiction and cynicism from harsh reality is no small task. In a context in which cynicism pervades, it can be especially difficult to ascertain the degree to which rumors of collusion explain high levels of violence, rather than simply low police capacity, morale, or wages.
Most sociologists of urban violence would be satisfied with an ethnographic account of resident views of collusion or perhaps—with a little ethnographic luck—a few informants with first-hand knowledge of the process. But Auyero and Sobering offer us something more comprehensive. Chapters Four through Seven reveal wire-tapped conversations between criminal organizations and the police, documenting the complex relational process by which these interactions are established and maintained. The result provides some clues as to how and under what conditions police collusion leads to more violence at times, while suppressing it at others.
Establishing the arreglo (arrangement) with police is a complex interpersonal process for drug-dealing organizations, as Chapter Four shows through wiretapped conversations of a local drug gang operating in Arquitecto Tucci. Protection, weapons, and strategic violence are all part of the collusive process, but the asymmetrical access to information and the importance of outside actors (such as other police jurisdictions unaware of these relationships) mean that they must be constantly negotiated and renegotiated.
Auyero and Sobering zoom out in the following chapters, showing how these relationships work among larger, transnational drug-selling organizations and smaller ones confined to particular neighborhoods. Chapter Five details the resources, practices, and processes that define police-drug dealer interactions and their unique characteristics in organizations of different sizes. Using wiretapped conversations once again, the authors reveal a complex interactional process, whereby resources such as U.S. dollars and car parts are exchanged, practices such as modifying documents and conducting surveillance are negotiated, and processes such as jumping scale (to collusive contacts with state or federal authorities) are invoked.
The final empirical chapter focuses on the fragile nature of collusion and its tendency to result in violence when outside parties intervene or information is withheld. Drug dealers operate in a highly unstable environment in which actors such as the media or federal authorities can intervene at any moment. As wiretapped conversations show, protection is always incomplete and fragile, and no one actor can ensure that other sources of public authority will not intervene at any moment. These collusive relationships are thus transitory, as new actors appear—for example, police authorities from other jurisdictions—who may not be apprised of existing relationships and may demand a new arreglo. The unstable and unknowable nature of these relationships paradoxically can lead to more violence, whereas stable forms of collusion might be reflected in periods of relative calm.
Auyero and Sobering deftly document aspects of the “relational dynamics of collusion” (p. 104), but in reality, the cases presented reflect snapshots of these relational dynamics drawn from necessarily incomplete wiretapped conversations. By splitting the difference in this way—conducting a probing ethnography of everyday residents in Arquitecto Tucci and combining this with wiretapped conversations across Argentina (including in Arquitecto Tucci), one is left with the abiding desire for Auyero and Sobering to turn their formidable ethnographic tools to the task of documenting the process as participant observers. In the end, the world outside academic sociology places limits on the tools we have at our disposal. Sociologists must be content with the significant insights gleaned here even if we can hope for a more complete version of this story.
The concluding chapters summarize these interactional dynamics and show how the work of cross-cutting communities of activists and organizers can shape outcomes in terms of better police oversight. What this means for theories of the state is not explicitly addressed, but future researchers will find this to be a rich resource for exploring a disaggregated view of violence at the nexus of state-society relations. Readers might ask whether this contribution reflects an ambivalent state per se. As Auyero and Sobering point out, the national government has aimed to root out local forms of collusion, but it has been beset by juridical and jurisdictional complications, while the provincial and local police forces offer low wages and morale. Their ranks typically come from the same struggling working classes described throughout the book.
Just this summer, Buenos Aires’ provincial police enacted a labor stoppage, purportedly to protest low wages and suboptimal working conditions. In short, the scholarly urge to cast off stark dichotomies such as strong versus weak states as hopelessly reified categories may deserve further scrutiny here. Why are some states more ambivalent than others? What are the degrees of ambivalence that appear in comparative juxtaposition? These are just a few questions that this important monograph will surely generate.