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This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women's agency through care - care of their children, global care, and green care - offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district's countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving - by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations - fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mandatory confinement decreed in Argentina in the early 2020s positioned the security forces as essential workers. The police/pandemic/confinement relationship thus revolved around two differentiated poles of meaning: one that heralded a police force that takes care of use and another that denounced police violence. This paper explores this debate on the basis of three inseparable concerns: the police roles and policing practices that encourage these current crisis scenarios; the lessons they teach us given their potential reiteration; and, above all, the local and regional data revealed that allow us to reflect empirically and politically on our specific Latin American experiences.