Julieta Pacheco’s article Sobrepoblación relativa, acción política y dictadura militar en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires presents a rigorous historical and theoretical analysis of shantytown organisations during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983), situating them within the Marxist category of relative overpopulation. Rather than framing these urban dwellers as passive victims of displacement or mere recipients of aid, Pacheco reconstructs their political agency through forms of territorial militancy, self-managed cooperativism, and the formation of the Coordinadora de Sobrevivientes de Villas de Emergencia. The author disputes the notion that such activism emerged only with the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, arguing instead that the organisational capacity of the urban poor dates back to the 1950s, intensifying under the structural violence of the dictatorship. This period, marked by mass unemployment, state-led spatial cleansing, and the erosion of agrarian rent, redefined the class position of the villa dwellers—no longer just surplus labour but a politically mobilised segment of the working class. Pacheco critiques the discourse that separates the unemployed from productive labour, asserting that the struggle for housing is an intrinsic component of the broader fight for the reproduction of labour power. The article offers a detailed account of the Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia (PEVE) and its authoritarian variants, revealing how urban policies operated as tools of discipline and exclusion, masked as sanitation and urban order. The resistance that emerged, often under the protection of church networks, demonstrates that even under extreme repression, subaltern political forms can survive and adapt. Pacheco’s work powerfully reframes the history of Buenos Aires’s urban margins as one of structural antagonism, memory, and resistance.
Pacheco, J. (2018) ‘Sobrepoblación relativa, acción política y dictadura militar en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1976–1983: las organizaciones villeras frente a la política estatal de erradicación masiva’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(2), pp. 63–71.
