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

Argentina 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. [Neoliberalism, criminality, white-collar crime, pharmaceutical politics, drug trafficking, Mexican drug gangs, Argentina]. The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class. Aristotle Introduction: an epic homicide in Buenos Aires Three pharmaceutical entrepreneurs in their mid-30s disappeared in August of 2008 from Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires. A few days later their tortured bullet-ridden bodies appeared—dead—in a ditch on the side of the road. The middle class identities of the victims— three thirty-something entrepreneurs involved in the legal pharmaceutical industry—combined with the gangland shooting and violence on their bodies caught the attention of the Argentine public. It soon bs_bs_banner City & Society, Vol. 24, Issue 2, pp. 218–239, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2012.01076.x. became clear that this triple homicide was part of a complex web of drug trafficking, fraud, and white-collar corruption that linked criminals from different classes and countries. The case also clearly linked entrepreneurs (read: upper and upper-middle class) of the legal pharmaceutical industry to gangs (read: lower class) involved in the production of illegal drugs, and both of these groups to a broad range of normative and mostly white-collar criminal and corrupt activities across Argentine government, union, police, judicial, and health care sectors. Since that time, the “triple homicide case” began to figure prominently, in numerous stories on a daily basis, in newspaper reporting in the capital city, as journalists and police investigators attempted to piece together the events that had led to the murder of the three young upper-middle class entrepreneurs. In this essay, I argue that this case garnered, and then reproduced, this iterative media attention because it exhibits the rudiments of what anthropologists are coming to interpret as “epic” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) crimes; crimes that through (excessive) media representation work to construct and intensify a sense of shared citizenship among a certain “public.” That public within the Argentine context is an already exclusive bourgeois public (as in Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere) that expresses its perspectives in the news reporting and editorial sections of the major urban newspapers of Buenos Aires. Summarizing the work of many anthropologists and other social scientists studying violent crime, Jean and John Comaroff (2004:804) write about the anxieties of a public constantly exposed to the “banal theatrics” of a mass media that both racializes crime and criminalizes race. They explain how in the context of neoliberal capitalism, crime and punishment have become “obsessions” of both rulers and subjects, creating new geographies of crime and terror. More “flexible” than ever before and extending across nation-states, crime has joined terror in gaining the attention of national security institutions. The Comaroffs focus on quantifacts: “statistical representations that make the world factual” (2006:211). Similar to epic crime portrayals, these statistics are inevitably consumed by an anxious middle class not as a representation of reality, but as reality itself. “Epic” crimes thus intensify the sense of shared citizenship (2006:235) by using the power of mass mediation. “Mass mediation is integral to the process converting extraordinary happenings into a generic intimacy, a shared sensation of fear. Their victims are at once unusual and horrifically commonplace: you, I, could be next” (ibid:235). Journalistic portrayals of crime are interesting to urban ethnographers because they demonstrate the purported recursiveness between mass mediation and the middle class “publics” that anthropologists, at times, seek to describe. Anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz (2008) reflects on the role of historiography and public commentary in the media, drawing from his experiences as a columnist writing for a newspaper in Mexico City in the mid-2000s. He discusses the ways in which professional historians are drafted into media commentating work and come to draw on a series of “stock images” as part of their participation in public mass In the context of