The lives of people in poor neighborhoods around Buenos Aires are often subjected to violence at the hands of the same people they depend on for safety. Distinctions between drug traffickers and the police are not always felt by residents. These are some of the conclusions Javier Auyero, Professor of Latin American sociology and director of the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas-Austin, came to after 30 months of fieldwork in the Ingeniero Budge neighborhood on the southern outskirts of the Argentine capital. He’s in Chicago to present his research on police-criminal collusion, state negligence and their effects on urban violence tomorrow at the Harris School of Public Policy’s Pearson Lunch and Learn series. Javier joins us to discuss the often paradoxical network of dependencies in Ingeniero Budge that make political violence personal, as well as what parallels he feels could be drawn between Buenos Aires and other global cities characterized by sharp inequalities like Chicago.