How Corruption Kills: Pharmaceutical Crime, Mediated Representations, and Middle Class Anxiety in Neoliberal Argentina

Abstract

AbstractArgentina is referenced by social scientists as a useful case study for exploring the contours of neoliberal crisis in Latin America. The middle classes of Buenos Aires have played a key role in critiquing neoliberal policies, including those that were responsible for the 2001 crisis and subsequent collapse of the country's economy. Yet these same middle classes are also part of an educated urban elite who both produce and consume the newsworthy journalism that remains implicitly supportive of neoliberal truths. The year 2008 marks the beginning of a journalistic saga that revolves around the case of three young pharmaceutical entrepreneurs in Greater Buenos Aires who were kidnapped and killed by what appeared to be a Mexican drug trafficking gang. The alleged intruders were believed to have entered Argentina in order to gain access to ephedrine, a key ingredient of methamphetamine that is made available from the manipulation of legal pharmaceutical products. From this original incident, two cases have emerged as a subject of intense journalistic scrutiny: the “triple homicide case” and the “medicines mafia case.” This essay analyzes the unfolding of these cases in the daily newspapers Página 12 and Clarín as an illustration of the ways in which journalistic portrayals of crime in contemporary Argentina are inflected by class. The cases reported could well be characterized as “epic” in that they point to a new form of neoliberal modernity that is populated by entrepreneurial middle class criminals operating at the borderlands of legal and illegal activities. The case suggests that in Argentina, new forms of sociality may be emerging among the middle classes, who have not only experienced neoliberal collapse but have also been subjects of journalistic reporting that predicts their inevitable pauperization.