Justice and policy of habitat in Buenos Aires’s City in evictions from land occupations: Papa Francisco y Elefante Blanco

In this article we propose to analyse the Judicial Branch in situations of eviction of urban land occupations carried out by popular sectors without housing.This involves asking ourselves about the ways in which the law problematizes urban conflicts and the sometimes contradictory roles that judicial bodies occupy.In turn, it requires incorporating the context of state intervention processes.To do this we will explore two cases that happened on land owned by the Government of the Buenos Aires’s City, in differentiated portions within the slumsupgrading.The management of the eviction of the Papa Francisco slum was carried out through a criminal court case and the Elefante Blanco was carried out in fact by the local government, after the performance of the Contentious Administrative Jurisdiction in relation to the sanitation of the place. This last expulsion was endorsed by said jurisdiction in a government modality of family arrangement by family.Police violence was used for the first case of eviction and formal and informal institutional coercion was used for the second.This meant dissimilar constructions of legitimization and no legitimization of the occupants and their modes of eviction.We present here the partial results of a qualitative study on the judicialization of conflicts over access to urban land, which resorts to different types of sources that are triangulated: a) documents issued in the courts; b) interviews with key informants within the Judicial Branch, neighbourhood leaders and evicted residents, members of NGOs and universities, etc .; c) written press. En el presente artículo nos proponemos analizar el Poder Judicial en situaciones de desalojo de ocupaciones de suelo urbano realizadas por sectores populares carentes de vivienda. Esto implica interrogarnos sobre los modos en que un ámbito del derecho problematiza los conflictos urbanos y los roles que ocupan los organismos judiciales en ellos, así como el contexto en el que actúan. Para ello indagaremos dos casos que sucedieron en terrenos de propiedad del Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, en porciones diferenciadas dentro de villas en proceso de re-urbanización. La gestión del desalojo de la Villa Papa Francisco (Villa Lugano, cercana al asentamiento de igual nombre) se realizó mediante una causa judicial penal y la del Elefante Blanco (Mataderos, cercana a la Villa 15) fue realizada de hecho por el gobierno local, a posteriori de la actuación del Fuero Contencioso Administrativo y