Ethnography of a contraventional judicial process in the City of Buenos Aires:

the crazy one, the bad one

Abstract

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Argentina subscribes, establishes a series of guarantees that signatory countries must guarantee to their population. Regarding the legal system, the most relevant guarantees related to the purpose of this work are: “everyone is equal under the law”, “every person has the right to an effective recourse in front of the competent nacional courts”, “every person has the right, in conditions of full equality, to be publicly and fairly heard by an independent and impartial court”, 2every person accused of a crime has the right to presumption of innocence until proven guilty”. Regarding the latter, both the National Constitution, in its article 18, and the Criminal Procedure Code of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in its article 7, determine the same thing. In this work I propose to describe and analyze the injuring of the rights described above in a judicial process, due to a transgression according to the Contraventional Code of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
Through an ethnography of this process, I try to describe and reflect on the institutional violence suffered by people who pass through them, crystallized in the framework that regulates, allows and reproduces it, reporting their punitive and repressive role, violating the rights that the National Constitution establishes and that the Declaration of Human Rights guarantees.