This thesis investigates the close relationship between the media representations of crime and insecurity and the acts of collective violence called by as well as “lynching” that took place in our country at the beginning of 2014. The objective is to account for the ways in which these events were represented by the graphic press (specifically in Clarín, La Nación and Página/12), focusing not only on the news, but also on the pictures. The specific objectives of the research were: to analyze the context of the emergence of news of lynching in the speeches of the graphic press, to describe the forms of construction of the subjects participating in the lynching from the polarities Us-them, victim-perpetrator, and investigate the relationship between the construction of lynching as a problem of insecurity and its implications at a political level.

The research design was formulated based on qualitative data collection and analysis techniques, with the aim of producing descriptive data from a design with a defined but interconnected and flexible structure (Maxwell, 1996). We selected the newspapers Clarín, La Nación and Página/12 due to their importance in terms of circulation and their ability to set an agenda. For the analysis of the news, we used the content analysis tool which allowed us to critically approach our corpus in order to achieve the emergence of the latent meanings that underlie the discourse of the media (Piñuel Raigada, 2002). When working with the written press, we are faced with a document that has two languages, the written language, highly codified, and the photographic language, apparently little codified (del Valle Gastaminza, 1993) In this sense, it was essential to analyze, without losing sight of the referential context, the photographic images from their denotative and connotative aspect.

The hypothesis that guided the work maintains that the irruption of the succession of lynching in 2014 corresponds to the demands for greater punishment from a sector of society, present in the media discourses. Lynching imply the violent materialization of certain circulating discourses, mainly in the media, which (re)produce a social border between the “neighbor”, understood as a victim of insecurity, and the “criminal.” The media are relevant actors in deepening this border, by imposing the issue on the agenda, they managed to present the lynching as acts of insecurity instead of showing them as violent and punitive actions in the hands of a sector of the citizenry. Thus presented, the issue served as a political and media input to impose one’s own senses on security and its management.

This thesis aims to comprehensively address the ways in which lynching are represented in the graphic media, based on the construction of the subjects who participate in the event and the interpretation framework used to address the problem. The analysis of the media representations suggested that the lynching were constructed as part of the insecurity problem, which allowed presenting the subjects from the victim-perpetrator dyad, the visual images were an indispensable element to unravel the construction of the subjects, since they allowed to account for an operation of invisibility of the lynching subject as a participant in a criminal act, and the visibility of the lynched subject as a victimizer of a previous act. In this way, the lynching was presented, by a large part of the media, as a “reaction” by a group of neighbors to repeated acts of insecurity. This made possible not only a deepening of the border between the “neighbor” and the “other”, but also a justifying speech for the violent actions.

In short, the thesis aims to reflect on the importance of critically addressing the constructions that the media make on the events that are presented as part of the problem of insecurity. In line with this, we consider essential a critical look from the social sciences to a problem that in various regions of Latin America is instituted as a daily practice by the population. The problem of punitive violence in our country is a subject that is rarely addressed in academic productions, but it is highly relevant since it is presented mainly as a violent action in the hands of one sector of the citizenry towards another that is not considered part of it. In this sense, investigating the problem of punitive violence also requires a look at the constitution of the social fabric and the formation of divisions and borders within it, becoming a problem of great relevance for the social sciences today.