The “soldaditos del narcotráfico ” (little soldiers of drug trafficking)in Rosario. Discursive constructions and governance practices

Abstract

Behind an alleged argentinization, or strictly speaking a “rosarinización”, of the “narco world” there is a curious and tidy outline around the figure of the so-called “soldaditos del narcotrafico”. Its relatively recent renown challenges a rigorous problematization of the conditions that enable its existence, not only physical but also political and discursive. The criminalization of infancy, as well as the infantilization of crime, are aspects of our disturbing reality and are put into play in the complex and strategic configuration of multiple forms of lawlessness, such as drug trafficking and its own relations of domination, subjugation and hierarchy. However, as Michel Foucault (2014) asserts, any governance practice of the others, even under coercion, needs to assume a free subject who commits to be what he asserts to be. Is it possible to break the naturalized binomial “victim-offender” so as to think the social, media and political construction, in other words, the discursive construction of the so-called “soldaditosnarco” in Rosario? To unravel the power webs inherent to this complex figure, besieged everywhere, and to put into evidence some of its conditions of existence in the city through the press is the central proposal of this work.