Abstract
Ethnographic observation, archival data, surveys and newspaper reports are combined to depict the social transformation of Argentine shantytowns during the last two decades, focusing on three different kinds of violence that impact the lives and social strategies of their residents: daily interpersonal violence, intermittent state repression, and the structural violence of mass unemployment. These violences are interrelated expressions of the broader socio-economic and institutional changes that have swept Argentina as the country adopted and implemented neo-liberal economic policies. As a consequence of the withering away of the wage-labor economy, the official indifference of the state, and the breakdown of the organizational fabric of these territories, shantytowns run the risk of becoming functionally severed from the larger society.
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