Class, police violence and territory. An approach to the processes of politicization of an innocent victim: the crime of Blas

Abstract

In this article, I propose to analyze the social processes arising from the death of a seventeen-year-old boy at the hands of the police in Córdoba (Argentina) in August 2020, during the Preventive and Mandatory Social Distancing declared by the Covid-19 pandemic. From the observation and description of the network of relationships between the victim's relatives and state agencies, public officials and professional political actors, I seek to account for the specificities of the case, and how these current and pre-incident social relations determine the way in which a crime becomes a case, and a case becomes a social, judicial and political cause. Using an actor-perspective approach, I explore the interactions between victims of police violence, state agencies and professional political actors in order to highlight the importance of the ethnographic perspective in the study of politics and the state. Through a comparative exercise, I analyze the moralities and social classifications that surround victims, and how these categorizations intervene in social and political practices, making certain claims legitimate, and enabling certain institutional and governmental processes.