Looting in Argentine History. Trajectories of a Collective Practice

Abstract

Looting for economic or political motives, with aims of personal gain or ritual destruction, has been a recurrent phenomenon in Argentine history. However, it has received scant historiographical attention compared to other forms of collective action. Its meaning is often opaque to analysis; the distance between protest and individual benefit is not transparent. A clear form of collective violence, its condition as political action is less evident. The article examines the characteristics and significance of looting in different times and places. It then analyses the emergence of the collective practice in three very different historical conjunctures. The first is the war of independence of the Río de la Plata and the disputes surrounding the formation of the national state in the nineteenth century. The second refers to the tensions arising from the establishment of liberal democracy and the emergence of two large mass political parties, Radicalism and Peronism. The third focuses on the new types of social conflict emanating from the process of deindustrialisation and the accelerated growth of structural poverty between the 1970s and the beginning of the present century.