THESIS 'They Deserve It': Media Crime Discourse in Argentina
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THESIS ‘They deserve it’: Media crime discourse in Argentina during the 1990s A socio-semiotic analysis on the punitive approach towards crime By Cynthia Fernández Roich A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Social Sciences Faculty of Arts April 2014 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the conditions of production of the punitive crime discourse in the Argentinean press. Specifically, it focuses on the media’s dissemination of the premise that ‘they deserve to die’ in reference to petty criminals; how this type of discourse was developed and consolidated throughout the 1990s; and how it helped to create consensus on a punitive approach towards crime, which was then crystallised in ‘zero tolerance’ crime policies. To trace the origins of such a discourse, this research analyses several features of Argentinean history such as the country’s military past, its weak democratic traditions, its society’s high tolerance for corruption, and the police practice, inherited from military forces, of detaining and torturing civilians. The questions guiding this thesis led to a comparison of the narrative features of the military discourses of the 1970s and the media crime discourses of the 1990s. This analysis assisted in understanding the persistency of the ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘iron fist’ discourses when reporting crime in contemporary Argentina and the possible implications of this for Argentine democracy. A key component of the originality of this thesis’s contribution to this topic lies in the way it bases its visual and textual analyses of media discourse on the theory of social discourses elaborated by Argentinean semiotician Eliseo Verón: it uses social semiotics to analyse more than 500 front pages and 380 editorials of three Argentinean newspapers Clarín, La Nación and Página 12. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the assistance of both of my supervisors Dr Paul Jones and Dr Alyce McGovern. Their expertise, advice, patience and encouragement have been invaluable, and completion of this thesis would not have been possible without their guidance. I would also like to thank the School of Social Sciences at UNSW for providing me with the necessary resources to undertake my research, the staff at the Library, who were particularly helpful and the University of New South Wales for granting me the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) scholarship. I would like to also thank to Dr Gabriela Zabala, Dr Marivic Wyndham, Dr Mara Favoretto, Dr Christopher Wylde, Dr Gabriel Kessler, Dr Damian Fernández Pedemonte, Cintia Agosti, Monica Jackson, Giovanna Szalkowicz and Marcelo Sain for their comments and suggestions. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my husband, Heath Barclay. Thanks to his invaluable support – emotional, psychological and financial – I could not have completed this thesis. I believe that ‘it takes a village to finish a PhD’ and without my husband, it would not have been possible to succeed. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 ‘They deserve to die’ 4 State crime 8 Research questions 8 Inequality and crime 9 Chapter overview 10 Significance and contribution 15 CHAPTER 1 18 LITERATURE REVIEW Definition of crime 18 Causes of crime 20 Inequality 23 The economic policy of the military junta 26 The Convertibility Plan 28 The Neoliberal paradigm 30 The 1990s cultural change 34 Social construction of reality 35 Media discourses 38 Argentinean media discourse 41 Criminalisation of poverty 43 Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean 45 Crime in Argentina 48 Zero tolerance or ‘iron fist’ policies 50 Questioning ‘iron fist’ policies 55 CHAPTER 2 61 A COUNTRY WITHOUT LAW Latin-American democracies 62 Argentinean democracy 65 The role of the economy 67 The vicious circle of hyperinflation 68 The ‘new poor’ 73 The ‘patients of the state’ 78 Attitudes towards the law 80 Systemic corruption and anomie 83 Populism 86 Authoritarian practices 88 The role of the press 92 Media ownership concentration 94 Soft censorship 97 CHAPTER 3 100 METHODOLOGY Research questions 103 Epistemological framework 105 Methodology 108 Method 112 Period 114 Sample 115 Fieldwork 117 Semiotics 118 Discourses 121 The reading contract 125 Tabloidisation 131 Reading paths 132 Photographs 135 Denotation/Connotation 136 Cartoons 137 Headlines and sub-headlines 137 Modality and subjetivemas 138 Editorials 139 Newspaper selection criteria 140 CHAPTER 4 146 FINAL DISPOSITION (1976–1983) Definition of ‘subversive’ 147 Armed forces and print media 150 Dictatorship 154 Guerrillas 168 Order/Disorder 171 Society and the coup d’état 181 Metaphors 183 Biological metaphors 185 A path to democracy: The Falklands factor 189 CHAPTER 5 194 DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION (1983–1995) The Armed forces’ self-criticism 197 Balza and his biological metaphors 212 Social imaginary 214 The military accountability 215 The guerrilla self-criticism 221 CHAPTER 6 227 CRIME ON THE AGENDA (1995-1999) Military legacy 232 Police brutality, corruption, trigger-happy cases and torture in detention 234 The murder of José Luis Cabezas 246 CHAPTER 7 253 BEYOND THE POLICE REFORM (1999-2013) The Ramallo massacre 253 The role of the media 255 The reading contract analysis 257 The use of ’subjetivemas’ 267 Electoral consequences 269 Disappearances in democracy 272 The cases 274 The double disappearances of Julio López 275 Disappearances in democracy in the media 279 Contemporary crime policy 281 CONCLUSIONS 283 Order, disorder and biological metaphors 287 The role of the economy 288 Scapegoats 289 Key narrative media features 292 The practice of torture 294 Police dependency 296 The Argentinean media 298 Final comments 301 References 304 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Given v. New 133 Table 2. Ideal v. Real 134 Table 3. La Nación editorials and headlines prior to the coup d’état 177 Table 4. La Nación editorials and headlines after the coup d’état 178-9 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Magazine Gente, June 8th 1989 67 The headline reads ‘Dramatic confession “If they come to rob me, I shoot”’ Figure 2 100 Discurso (Discourse), Producción (Production), Reconocimiento (Recongnition) Operaciones (Operation), Representaciones (Representations), Circulación (Circulation) Figure 3. Source: Triquell (2000) 120 Figure 4. Clarín, March 4th 1976 156 Figure 5. La Nación, November 13th 1976 157 Figure 6. Clarín, March 4th 1976 161 Figure 7. Clarín, March 7th 1976 162 Figure 8. Clarín, March 9th 1976 163 Figure 9.Clarín, March 10th 1976 163 Figure 10. Source: La Semiosis Social 2, Eliseo Verón, page 293 168 Figure 11. La Nación, March 20th 1976 174 Figure 12. La Nación, March 24th 1976 174 Figure 13. La Nación, March 20th 1976 176 Figure 14. Clarín, April 25th 1995 199 Figure 15. La Nación, April 25th 1995 199 Figure 16. Página 12, April 25th 1995 200 Figure 17. Clarín, April 26th 1995 204 Figure 18. Clarín, April 27th 1995 204 Figure 19. Clarín, May 30th 1995 205 Figure 20. Página 12, April 26th 1995 207 Figure 21. Página 12, April 30th 1995 209 Figure 22. Página 12, May 30th 1995 209 Figure 23. La Nación, April 27th 1995 216 Figure 24. La Nación, April 27th 1995 217 Figure 25. La Nación, May 2nd 1995 219 Figure 26. La Nación, April 29th 1995 219 Figure 27. La Nación, April 29th 1995 (close up) 220 Figure 28. Clarín, May 3rd 1995 225 Figure 29. Página 12, May 4th 1995 225 Figure 30. La Nación, May 3rd 1995 225 Figure 31. La Nación, February 25th 1996 229 Figure 32. La Nación, February 25th 1996 231 Figure 33. Clarín, March 17th 1996 237 Figure 34. Clarín, September 28th 1997 239 Figure 35. Página 12, October 14th 1997 245 Figure 36. La Nación, August 11th 2002 250 Figure 37. Clarín, September 18th 1999 258 Figure 38. Mano dura by Horacio Cecchi 259 Figure 39. Clarín, September 19th 1999 260 Figure 40. Clarín, September 21st 1999 260 Figure 41. Clarín, October 5th 1999 261 Figure 42. La Nación, October 7th 1999 263 Figure 43. La Nación, October 8th 1999 263 Figure 44. Página 12, September 20th 1999 265 Figure 45. Página 12, September 27th 1999 265 Figure 46. Página 12, October 3rd 1999 267 Figure 47. Página 12, September 23rd, 2006 277 Figure 48. Página 12, September 26th 2006 277 Figure 49. Clarín, September 26th 2006 278 INTRODUCTION On December 22nd 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four young men in the New York subway. All of them had previous criminal records. In the aftermath of the shootings, the tabloids labelled Goetz the ‘Subway Vigilante’ and the ‘Death Wish Gunman’; it seemed he had fulfilled ‘the secret fantasy of every New Yorker who had ever been mugged or intimidated or assaulted on the subway’ (Gladwell, 2013, p.135). On June 16th 1990 in Buenos Aires, engineer Horacio Santos executed two men also with criminal records, who tried to rob his car stereo by shooting them in the head at point- blank range (Malamud Goti, 1999). Overnight, he became a sort of ‘national hero’, with tabloids dubbing him ‘Payback Santos’1 and ‘The Vindicator’ (La Nación, 2007). It seemed he had fulfilled the secret fantasy of every Argentinean who had ever been assaulted on the street of Buenos Aires. Reflecting on these two cases, I wondered what motivated these individuals to decide to take justice into their own hands. What was it that triggered such an extreme reaction, to the point of killing two people each? More importantly, I was interested in finding out the reasons why the public and the press praised such actions. It appeared that such reactions were prompted by support for ‘fight back’ (Fein, 1985). The notion of ‘fight back’ implies to resist an attack or to counterattack. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘to defend yourself when someone attacks you or causes problems for you’. 1 I did all the translations of the feature articles of this thesis (headlines, sub-headlines, chronicles, editorials) from Spanish to English.