Special Section: Latin American Voices on Illegal and Marginally Legal Practices at Borders (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
I present here selected articles that originated from the Simposio de antropología "entre lo legal y lo illegal" in Monterrey, Mexico, November 2019. These articles focus on Latin American borders: the U.S.-Mexico border, the Brazil-Paraguay border, and the Argentina-Bolivia border. These Latin American scholars resist the top-down agenda of seeing threat in everything that has been illegalized, because as they show, many smuggled goods are normalized and present few risks and many benefits to civilians. Yet at the same time, they draw attention to the terrible levels of criminal and state violence that do occur around intensely illegalized commodities. They do not offer a solution, but they do offer insights for progress on this crucial question.
On Narco-coyotaje: Illicit Regimes and Their Impacts on the US– Mexico Border
Abstract: Many have debated whether or not human smugglers, known as coyotes, are involved with drug trafficking organizations. Scholars have largely rejected so-called “narcocoyotaje”, however; we hope to problematize this narrative by adding a new theoretical layer to the discussion. Namely, we explore the ways in which different criminal activities produce hierarchies and control illicit activities within the clandestine geography of the US–Mexico border. These “illicit regimes” operate against the State, creating a hierarchy that dominates other illicit activities in order to maximize profit, avoid detection and consolidate power. While other studies have explored the relationships between the State and illicit practices this article takes the relationship between two illicit industries as its object of study. Doing so will help us move past the simple binary question about whether or not coyotes are involved with drug cartels, and allows us to understand what is being produced by this relationship, and its consequences for everyone involved. Resumen: El presente artículo analiza el debate sobre el fenómeno del coyotaje y si los coyotes (traficantes de indocumentados) establecen una relación con las organizaciones del narcotráfico. Hasta ahora los estudios han descartado la idea del “narco-coyotaje” (una asociación entre narcotraficantes y traficantes de migrantes). Sin embargo, la investigación presentada retoma este tema y le da un giro empírico y teórico. Examinamos como las diferentes actividades criminales crean jerarquías que controlan los negocios ilícitos en la frontera de México con los Estados Unidos. Estos “regímenes ilícitos” operan en contra del Estado y construyen estructuras compuestas de diversas ramas de negocios “chuecos” para producir mayores ganancias, evitar la ley y consolidar su poder. Aunque otros estudios abarcan la relación entre el estado y los grupos criminales, este articulo toma como tema de investigación la relación entre dos importantes industrias ilícitas (el contrabando de migrantes y el de narcóticos). Este nuevo enfoque nos ayuda a comprender las limitaciones de las investigaciones que se reducen solo a la cuestión sobre una posible relación entre coyotes y los carteles de drogas; a la vez esto nos da una nueva visión sobre las consecuencias sociales de esta relación criminal.
Hazy Borders: Legality and Illegality across the US-Mexico Border
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
This paper analyzes the different trading networks, the flux of merchandise, and the actors involved in the act of crossing goods through the United States-Mexico border, particularly in the Tijuana-San Diego region. It argues that the line dividing both countries works differently depending on who travels through it, what kind of items are brought across, and which direction a person is going. These different patterns can be further analyzed when comparing northbound and southbound traffic; roughly speaking, products crossed into the US are usually prescription drugs, herbs, food, and cigarettes, among others; whereas, items crossed into Mexico are usually construction materials, electronics and electrodomestics, toys, marijuana, guns, and so forth. This paper proposes that the border is not a well-defined barrier when it comes to different types of merchandise, instead becoming hazy and allowing for the small-scale smuggling of products without incurring legal and/or problematic situations.
The 'Arrangement' as Form of Life on the Mexico-Texas borderline: A Perspective on Smuggling
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
This article aims to explain the smuggling of goods in the Mexico-US border from Wittgenstein's perspective on the worlds of life and language games. This work advocates for an approach that considers the diversity of circumstances, the hierarchical inequalities, the amalgam between actors and 'legal' and 'illegal' activities, and the 'arrangements' happening as part of the way each individual interprets whatever he watches, and what he and those he is interacting with are doing. This work is based on observations and interviews with merchants and customs employees that make 'arrangements.' The question to be answered is: what are the meanings and assumptions that make such 'arrangements' happen between merchants and customs employees, so that the goods can cross the border illegally? Based on Wittgenstein's perspective, this paper also tries to analyze the 'irony' resulting from the transformation of the 'arrangement' once the drug cartel members started participating in it.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2002
This article is a critique of two different types of essentialisms that have gained widespread acceptance in places as distant as the U.S.-Mexico border and different Mercosur frontiers. Both essentialisms rely on metaphors that refer to the concept of "union," and put their emphasis on a variety of "sisterhood/brotherhood" tropes and, in particular, the "crossing" metaphor. This kind of stance tends to make invisible the social and cultural conflict that many times characterizes political frontiers. The article wants to reinstall this conflictive dimension. In that regard, we analyze two different case studies. The first is the history of a bridge constructed between Posadas, Argentina and Encarnación, Paraguay. The second is the community reaction toward an operation implemented by the Border Patrolin 1993 ("OperationBlockade") in a border that for many years was considered an exemplar of the "good neighbor relationships" between Mexi...
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
A remarkable change in security matters set the course for politics in Latin America in recent years. The putative causal relationship between migration and crime cyclically sustains the discourses that require more safety and police force intervention, police autonomy to suppress, and reduction of the age of criminal responsibility. This panorama, accompanied by the state postponement of prison and security infrastructures, is framed and worsened by the tendency to criminalize borders, which are seen as porous and dangerous zones. The notion that these spaces favor the contamination and corrosion of the nation-state promotes rhetoric about borders that need to be disassembled. Simultaneously, an odd growth of the technological market specialized in border security, suggests specific forms of relationships between the social and environmental conditions, illegal markets, security policies and nationalist discourses in favor of sovereignty. I analyze the municipality of Aguas Blancas, bordering with Bolivia, where the transit between the legal and the illegal shapes specific ways of life and exposes the nets woven through the managing of illegalisms at diverse scales (Goldman 1999; Foucault 2014). My analysis connects 'simulations' in Baudrillard's (1978) sense, performances of imaginary scenarios that become reality, with 'temporary autonomous zones' in security matters, areas outside routine legal-administrative governance (Bey 1996). The anthropological approach in this work was based on in situ interviews and observations aimed to understand the relationship between illegal practices and security.
México y Colombia: el narcotráfico, más que un destino común, un proyecto común
2018
El estado colombiano y mexicano, se han convertido en dos centros de analisis de un mismo fenomeno: El narcotrafico; estudiar las causas, los contextos que permiten su expansion, las politicas utilizadas por los Estados para combatirlas de manera legal y de manera ilegal, son temas de alta recurrencia academica. El proposito del presente texto sera analizar las estrategias politicas que se han utilizado en Mexico y Colombia para frenar la proliferacion de actividades ilicitas propias del narcotrafico; fenomeno que ambos paises comparten con rasgos distintivos y que han afrontado haciendo uso de todo el andamiaje juridico del que disponen. The Colombian and Mexican state have become two centers of analysis of the same phenomenon: drug trafficking; studying the causes, the contexts that allow their expansion, the policies used by the States to fight them legally and illegally, are subjects of high academic recurrence. The purpose of this text will be to analyze the political strategie...