The December 2001 lootings in Argentina can (and should) serve to open a broader inquiry into the relational underpinnings of collective violence. The massive damage visited on people and property during that December constitutes an extreme event that, as Marcel Mauss (1979 [1916]) asserted a long time ago, is marked by “an excessiveness which allows us better to perceive the facts than in those places where, although no less essential, they still remain small-scale and involuted.” It is precisely this excessiveness that acts as an invitation to scrutinize the gray zone where everyday life, routine politics, and collective violence surreptitiously intersect and interact. This book has done so by paying special attention to the role of “third parties” (political brokers and police agents) who, as the American Sociological Association's report on the social causes of violence asserts (Levine and Rosich n/d:70), “are often involved or present during violent encounters; yet, our knowledge of their role is very limited.”