num_pages: 288
description: This highly original work of anthropology combines extensive ethnographic fieldwork and investigative journalism to explain how security is understood, experienced, and constructed along the Triple Frontera, the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The Triple Frontera is one of the major "hot borders" in the Western Hemisphere and a site associated with drug and human trafficking, contraband, money laundering, and terrorism. It's also a place where residents, particularly on the Argentine side, are subjected to increased governmental control and surveillance.But how does a scholar tell a story about a place characterized by illicit international trading, rampant violence, and governmental militarization? Jusionyte has inventively centered her ethnographic fieldwork on a community of journalists who investigate and report on crime and violence in the region. There is a fair amount of petty, small-scale illicit trading that goes unreported—this is a consequence of a community invested in promoting the idea that the border is a secure place that does not warrant militarized attention. Her work demonstrates that while media is often seen as a powerful tool for spreading a sense of danger and uncertainty, sensationalizing crime and violence, and creating moral panics, journalists can actually do the opposite. Those who selectively report on illegal activities use the news to tell particular types of stories in an attempt to make their communities look and ultimately be more secure.
language: English
title: Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border
publisher: University of California Press