Abstract

During 2001 and 2002, Argentina traversed a serious social and political crisis, reaching unprecedented levels of poverty and exclusion. In this time period all types of urban violence –and especially homicides committed using firearms– increased significantly, turning this cause of death into a social issue with important implications for public health. The present article is the product of a qualitative investigation that uses critical discourse analysis to understand the different ways in which the newspapersLa Nación and Clarín reported on the events occurring in the aforementioned period in the city of Buenos Aires. Data was obtained by compiling material from the newspaper archives and was analyzed using a unique technique derived from the French School of Discourse Analysis. Two elements of the results were most notable: the more popular position adopted by Clarín newspaper (declarative logic of likelihood), as opposed to the search for objectivity in La Nación (verification logic); both strategies assume a complementary nature in the social production and reproduction of meaning in accounting for deaths by homicide