This article makes connections between violent deaths, public problems and changes seen in the past 30 years in Argentina. The authors argue that the ways in which people were killed, the ways in which their dead bodies were handled and the ways in which the dead and their behaviours were described in terms of morality play a key role in determining social reaction and the challenging of public authorities. It is suggested that shock and outrage in the face of the violent death of a defenceless, innocent person trigger political, social and cultural changes in highly complex ways. Where contemporaries tend to establish almost immediate causal relationships, a retrospective analysis shows that the ruptures and continuities following each death result from a variety of temporal and causal chains. A death’s ability to pose public problems can help us think about democratic processes in Latin America, indicating that democracies in the region are judged in terms of their capacity to solve the public problems embodied by deaths like those analysed here.