Crisis of Sovereignty and Militarization of the Northern Border. State Fragility in the Face of the Threat of Organized Crimes in Argentina

Abstract

The demilitarization of the State, which was one of the faces of the democratization process initiated in the 1980s, was reverted in the early twenty-first century, along with an exercise of sovereignty where the Gendarmerie and the Armed Forces would have a prominent place. The research intends to give an account of the continuity between governments of opposite political sign in the enunciation of the State’s fragility in the northern border of Argentina, where the threats associated with organized crime (drug trafficking and international terrorism) degraded the State’s sovereignty. From an ethnographic perspective of the operatives that involved the military, we show how they became guarantors of a threatened State sovereignty. We argue that the critical conceptualization of the phenomenon as militarization of internal security is limited in understanding the crisis of sovereignty in times of devastation of State protection.