Abstract

In a situation of advance and consolidation of the ultra-right in Latin America, in which security claims and government interventions in the name of the “combat against insecurity” have been one of its most dynamic vectors, this work is aimed at exploring the contours of another approach to the question of crimes and punishments. During the seventies, in the heat of dictatorships and exiles, a critical, combative, partisan criminological model was forged in Argentina. This other model is tributary of a strategic assembly between the “Foucault effect” in Argentina and Latin American critical criminology. Specifically, the traces of this process are covered through three strong ideas: 1) the “Foucault effect” in Argentina and critical criminology are the ties of a certain critical attitude; 2) that history is realized in a topological structure: it unfolds in the ups and downs experienced by intellectuals here in the dictatorship and there in forced exile; 3) these imports, readings and uses of Foucault overflow and dislocate Foucauldian analysis itself.