Genocide in the Neighborhood: State Violence, Popular Justice, and the 'Escrache'

Another justice is possible. Genocide in the Neighborhood documents the theories, debates, successes, and failures of a rebellious tactic to build popular power and transformative justice.

Genocide in the Neighborhood explores the autonomist practice of the "escrache," a series of public shamings that emerged in the late 1990s to honor the lives of those tens of thousands disappeared and exterminated under the Argentinean military dictatorship (1976 to 1983) and to protest the amnesty granted to perpetrators of state violence.

Through a series of hypotheses and two sets of interviews, Colectivo Situaciones highlights the theories, debates, successes, and failures of the escraches-those direct and decentralized ways to agitate for justice that Brian Whitener defines as "something between a march, an action or happening, and a public shaming."

Genocide in the Neighborhood also follows the popular Argentine uprising in 2001, a period of intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse of government after government. The power that ordinary people developed for themselves in public space soon gave birth to a movement of neighborhoods organizing themselves into hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, while the unemployed took over streets and workers occupied factories.

These events marked a sea change, a before and an after for Argentina that has since resonated around the world. In its wake Genocide in the Neighborhood investigates the nature of rebellion, discusses the value of historical and cultural memory to resistance, and tactfully deploys a much-needed model of political resistance that has recently been given new life by feminist groups across Latin America organizing against patriarchal violence.

About the Author
Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. They have participated in numerous grassroots coresearch activities with unemployed workers, peasant movements, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Their other works appear in translation in 19 and 20: Notes for a New Insurrection and Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thought, Practices, Actions, both published by Common Notions.
Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Other writing or translation projects include Face Down (Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, 2013) and the translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Actions, Practices (Common Notions, 2019). He is an editor at Displaced Press and has been investigating new political and artistic movements in Latin American and autonomist political theory for the past twenty years.