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- Convenor:
-
Charles Beach
(University College London)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Charles Dolph
(University College London)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 401
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to use ethnographic material and anthropological theory to reframe the concepts of contraband and smuggling in Latin America and the Caribbean, and reconnect these concepts with wider social processes and the cultures that bring them into being.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to present ethnographic research that deals with narratives, representations, practices and imaginaries of smuggling and extra-legal or informal circulation practices, across and between the Latin American region (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas. Countering a fetishizing and hegemonic imaginary (typically stemming from the Global North) of smuggling activity in Latin America as chaotic, lawless, violent, and somehow ‘exotic’, this panel will aim to reframe such activities through the lenses of kinship, political movements, economic exchange, and resistance to capitalist state hegemony. The panel aims to combine ethnographic research that explores the efficacy and valence of ‘smuggling’ or ‘contraband’ as a lens onto modes of personhood, materiality, statehood, and political (dis)connection across Latin America.
Papers can include themes such as:
- Small scale trading economies, ‘blurred lines’ between informal and formal economies and the strategies of local agents within these
- Smuggling (or bootlegging, piracy, etc) as a force of cultural expansion
- Smuggling as a culture unto itself, or a mode of ‘being’
- Smuggling as a postcolonial phenomenon
- The art of ‘making do’, sobrevivir or inventar as part of everyday life
- Smuggling as a political or social movement, or an anti-capitalist movement, broadly understood
- Smuggling as subversion, challenge or extension of borders
- Smuggling as a response to state sovereignty within Latin America
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Paper Short Abstract:
Macehual Maya villagers engage in community forestry, but accusations of illegal logging persist despite government regulations. This presentation suggests that “pachocheo” (timber theft) allows Maya communities to reclaim sovereignty over their territories against environmental regulations.
Paper Abstract:
Since the late 1980s, Macehual Maya villagers in Carrillo Puerto (Quintana Roo, Mexico) rely on community forestry for their monetary income, extracting tropical timber within their commons for the wood and construction industries. Despite heavy government regulation on logging activities to prevent overexploitation and deforestation, accusations of fraud, theft and contraband are rampant in the timber supply chain. Participants often label each other as “pachocheros”, implying that they exceed legal logging limits, operate outside designated forestry areas, and use false permits or lack official documentation.
Drawing from approximately a year and a half of fieldwork (2021-2023) in this indigenous region, I will delve into a specific ethnographic case in the Maya village of Naranjal, where an internal conflict arose after the entire community received fines from the Mexican environmental agency for burning a protected forest area for agricultural purposes. Due to the community assembly’s effort to shift the collective fine onto Timo, the peasant deemed responsible for the fire, he threatened to retaliate by revealing the common, albeit illegal, practice of extracting wood outside the village’s designated forestry areas.
In exploring the accusations and justifications of “pachocheo”, expressed from both moral and ecological standpoints, I will argue that, for my Maya interlocutors, this form of illegality represents a form of ‘social banditry’ or ‘gleaning’, aiming to reclaim individual and collective sovereignty over territories legally theirs but subject to complex and at times contradictory environmental legal frameworks.
Paper Short Abstract:
Fayuca, a term used in Mexico to refer to merchandise smuggled across the border, is a phenomenon characteristic of border economies. This paper describes how people living along the Mexico-Belize border assert their right to move fayuca across the border and maintain their livelihoods.
Paper Abstract:
Fayuca, a term used in Mexico to refer to merchandise smuggled across the border and sold on the informal market, is a phenomenon characteristic of border economies and "globalization from below." The community of Subteniente López, located on the banks of the Rio Hondo in southern Quintana Roo, is the most important crossing point into Belize and the Corozal Free Zone. Most villagers earn a living by working as “hormigas” or "ants”, people who walk across the international bridge and bring fayuca with them on their way back into Mexico. Their livelihoods depend on access to the old bridge that connects their community to the Corozal Free Zone. The opening of a "new" international bridge called "Chactemal" on the periphery of the town and the closure of the old bridge will pose a serious threat to the economic survival of the community. This paper describes how, over the past decade, community members have asserted their right to use the old bridge to move fayuca across the border while striving to maintain their livelihoods in the context of limited economic opportunities.
Paper Short Abstract:
Colombian smugglers of Venezuelan gasoline turn to collective action and trade unionism to militate for the decriminalisation of gasoline sale and the provision of vocational retraining programmes, and start up capital. These programmes give us insight into the production of the Colombian subject.
Paper Abstract:
Through the 90s and 2000s the Colombian border city of Cúcuta was famous for its contraband and in particular the smuggling of cheap, state-subsidised petrol from Venezuela into Colombia. The petrol smugglers and vendors are known as pimpineros and are named after the four litre petrol cans known as pimpinas. A huge community thrived around these activities and a movement of political organising developed. A formal trade union for the pimpineros was formed in 2013 that helps its members with human rights abuses perpetrated against them by armed gangs. The union has also negotiated state funding for the set-up of several consecutive, co-operative, businesses aimed at providing an exit from the smuggling trade.
This paper looks at these entrepreneurial projects and their supporting institutions to help us to frame pimpineros as a vulnerable population who are seen as needing state intervention rather than being Illegal actors such as paramilitaries or mafia. The term emprendedores forzados – forced entrepreneurs (a play on the legal term desplazados forzados – forcefully displaced peoples) emphasises the vulnerable aspects of the population, as well as hinting towards the heavy influence of Colombia’s entrepreneurial culture on the programme.