Project description
In recent years, the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has led to a massive inflow of Venezuelan migrants to neighbouring Colombia. In the lack of proper reception facilities, the vast majority of these migrants resettle in city peripheries – spaces largely controlled by criminal narco-gangs, where the most disadvantaged sectors of the Colombian population live. This two-year project (2023-2025), funded by the SNSF, seeks to ethnographically explore the experiences of these migrants, and specifically their relationship with the criminal groups that operate in the areas where they settle.
Following an initial round of fieldwork, the project is focussing more specifically on these migrants’ access to informal housing and the role of criminal gangs in this illegal rental and land market at the city peripheries. Initial findings reveal that, as part of their diversification of income strategy, criminal gangs in Medellín have started to take a more active role in this illegal housing market. Over the past decade, the occupation, plotting and construction of private land, which used to be an organic process performed independently by the occupying residents, has been increasingly co-opted by criminal gangs, which now play a central role in managing and profiting from this informal housing market which rapidly expanded as a response to the migration crisis. Using Verónica Gago’s concept of ‘neoliberalism from below’ (Gago, 2014) and Gago and Mezzadra’s (2017) notion of ‘urban extractivism’ (see also García Jerez, 2019), this project shows that gang-controlled informal housing markets represent the neoliberal capture of decades of popular self-organization, and represent gangs’ own way of benefitting from the migration crisis.
The project is hosted at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding of the IHEID, and will also involve a collaboration the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
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