Violent settlements: strategic villages and clandestine burial sites in Latin America

ended

In contemporary warfare the power to destroy cities exists alongside with the power to built urban places ex nihilo. In the 70s and 80s, various Latin American States forcedly displaced people to villages created as an instrument of counterinsurgency; at the same time massacres and forced disappearances occurred in these regions. How does the simultaneous creation of strategic villages and clandestine burial sites affect the ways of inhabiting and imagining space in the aftermath of political violence? My study aims at analysing for the first time the connexion between mass violence and the forced creation of built environment. Based on qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Tucumán (Argentina) and Ayacucho (Peru) and framed within social anthropology, sociology and human geography, this research will produce a seminal in-depth study of the daily life among the strategic villages in Latin America, by analysing the experience of subjects that were forced to inhabit there.