"Around the corner, there was a drug dealer": from the involvement of male adolescents in drug trafficking towards a methodological proposal for the mapping of organized crime in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

In this article, I present a methodological proposal for the mapping of drug trafficking in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a non-definitive, bottom-up approximation. In other words, it rises from the 'lowest' rung of drug trafficking to gain knowledge about the higher structures. I use 13 in-depth interviews with young people and adolescents residing in Greater Buenos Aires who in November 2017 were undergoing treatment for problematic drug use in a therapeutic community in Lomas de Zamora. The methodology used systematizes the stories of interaction with drug trafficking in a semantic network and a synthesis map, thus reconstructing some forms of spatialization, some power relations in its internal hierarchy, and some of its actors. Finally, the effort culminates in a methodology which can illuminate the spatial action of other organized crime activities such as arms trafficking and human trafficking.