Oil‐rich Venezuela is being hit by the largest crisis in living memory. Now, more than 4.8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in search of food and safety. News about migration and humanitarian aid dominate. Yet, many Venezuelans stay and seek alternative strategies to cope with scarcity and insecurity. Ad hoc solutions mainly depend on alternative economies in the borderlands that do not always fit within frameworks of human rights and rule of law, but do provide relief and produce opportunities along with new inequalities that (un)willingly sustain the crisis. Amid collapsing state infrastructures, these transborder economies tie into the global trade of basic supplies, narcotics, drugs, natural resources and human trafficking that operate in the interface of the legal and the illegal. The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is as much about poverty and scarcity as it is about wealth and abundance benefiting only a very few. An ‘anthropology of abundance’ allows us to grasp these underlying socio‐economic dynamics that turn crisis management into crisis maintenance.

The renewed anthropological debate on morality has invoked the idea that local moralities can be analyzed through the phenomenological arrangement of moral breakdown, which is followed by a liminal period of performing ethics that reinstates the unreflective moral disposition (i.e., home) of everyday life. The ethnographic example of the heterogeneous group of Argentinian victims of the last military dictatorship (1976–83) illustrates how ongoing ethical performance about trauma produces a reflective way of engaging with and in the world. These ongoing ethical performances are coined as “traumatic home” and constitute an everyday reflective moral disposition. From this local perspective, trauma is an intrinsic aspect of being alive that needs ongoing verbalization and reflection. The enduring traumas become expressible and meaningful by means of ongoing, shared practices of truth telling and informal therapies. Thus, by ongoing expression, trauma also becomes an influential source for everyday moral comfort.

Empathy is an intersubjective process that transpires during ethnographic fieldwork. This article deals with the ethics of empathy during fieldwork with Argentinian military officers indicted for crimes against humanity. Failed attempts of empathy were not the consequences of the ethnographer's inner shortcomings to bridge existential differences between self and other(s) or proffered resistance on behalf of the military officers but essentially arose out a desire of otherness with the indicted military. In a social context where psychic content is a profoundly social matter, feelings and thoughts that stick through intense engagements. Otherness, then, is not an existential fact but arises from everyday warnings and social practices of avoidance. By introducing the notion of 'sticky empathy', I investigate in this article how the daily engagements with indicted military officers defy the fundamental idea that an ethnographer is different or separated from its object of study. KEYWORDS Military; crimes against humanity; empathy; otherness; Argentina In 2009, I travelled to Buenos Aires on a first field trip to study the transitional justice practices concerning the military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina from the perspective of both the victim and the perpetrator. During that period, thousands of Argentinians were captured, tortured, assassinated, or disappeared. These crimes were carried out clandestinely in small and autonomous task forces that were under the command of the military authorities and consisted of military officers, and to a lesser extent, police officers and civilian intelligence agents. In 2005, the Supreme Court in Argentina annulled two amnesty laws that had protected members of the armed forces for two decades. Once more, hundreds of military personnel faced prosecution for crimes against humanity, such as torture, child appropriation, and the infamous death flights above the South Atlantic. The courtrooms were my initial focus. During the legal proceedings, victims repeatedly demanded truth and a sign of remorse from the indicted officers. The indicted officers, in return, kept silent or emphasised their

In post-authoritarian Argentina, veterans who participated in the brutal counterinsurgency of the last dictatorship (1976–1983) inhabit an extremely inconsistent citizenship, alternatively violating and respecting legal rights and entitlements. This article looks at how alternating transitional justice practices and the ever-changing moral discourses about warfare and accountability create highly unstable access to rights, resources, and entitlements for these veterans in Argentina. Th e recent shift toward retribution for crimes against humanity in Argentina has legally consolidated their moral downfall. From being untouchable and exemplary officers until the early 1980s, the now convicted military officers have been demoted twice by the state and the military institution. Based on long-term fieldwork with the convicted officers and their kin, this article traces the contingent relation between the moral and legal practices that underlie this double downfall that constitutes a fluctuating process of un/becoming veteranship for these veterans. Their veteranship, for that matter, depends on highly conflictive and transformative sociopolitical processes that speak to broader moral dispositions surrounding legal rights, entitlements, and worthiness for veterans.

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