In our region, we are witnessing a growing prominence of security forces and other non-police control bodies, both state and non-state, in the administration of populations, territories, and goods. The phenomenon of insecurity, in its particular configurations for each era and each nation-state, seems to have justified this prominence (Rangugni et al., 2010; Galvani, Mouzo, and Rios, 2010; Antillanos, 2017). While until the 1980s, in much of the region, this prominence was due to de facto military regimes, since the 1990s it has been due to increasing insecurity and the diagnosis of a rise in organized crime associated with illicit markets for drugs, fuel, grains, spices, people, clothing, urban and rural land, among others. But, as we have noted, this prominence has not been exclusive to the police or the military. State control agencies, comprised of judicial, immigration, and customs officials, among others, and non-state agencies, such as private security companies, have also gained renewed prominence. Over the last two decades, they have grown in number and capabilities, and their coordination mechanisms have deepened through the incorporation of digital technologies, audiovisual monitoring centers, and business networks linked to public and private security (Ríos, 2019).

Phenomena such as migration, land occupation, smuggling, and illicit drug trafficking have strengthened this on-the-ground coordination through the creation of large emergency monitoring centers in major cities, border areas, and other high-traffic zones (train stations, bus terminals, etc.). This accumulation of control mechanisms over specific geographic areas—border zones, large and medium-sized cities—has produced networks of agents, conflicts, alliances, and tensions, as well as connections and associations that persist over time, such as those maintained by retired police and military personnel who engage in private security businesses.

This phenomenon, known as the securitization of social and political life, has required an ideological, political, and expert effort to align the actions of these agencies with the rule of law and democratic regimes. However, at the same time, it has been overwhelmed by the volume of people, goods, and species that fall "outside the law" and the way in which they enter new processes of globalization (Zepeda, Beatriz; Fernando Carrión Mena, Francisco Enríquez Bermeo, 2017). In countries like ours, where wealth is concentrated, asymmetries deepen within and between states, and new forms of inequality present us with the challenge of rethinking the logic of violence (Antillano, 2016). Simultaneously, securitization faces the paradox of a growth in informal and illegal markets that frequently overwhelms state actors, generating great impotence and fostering a perception of low effectiveness that negatively impacts the legitimacy of the police (Mohor, 2019).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, whose most acute phase occurred between 2020 and 2022, restrictions on the movement of people, or lockdowns, strengthened the collaboration between these public and private agencies. However, they also forced some states to ease restrictions precisely because of the recognition of the value of informal (unregistered) markets for vulnerable social sectors. For this reason, some governments, such as Mexico, implemented compensatory measures or reduced the duration of the restrictions to just a few weeks. Nevertheless, according to an ILO report (2021), the recovery of employment led to an increase in informality, with 70% of jobs now in this situation. Simultaneously, the pandemic boosted the circulation of goods and services through digital applications, which often lack official registration.

We are interested in analyzing, from the perspective of these police and non-police control agencies, how, while oriented towards preventing or combating theft, robbery, assault, violence, and/or homicide, they are also complicit in defining and regulating licit and illicit markets, as already pointed out by authors such as Brígida Renoldi (2021), in her studies of border zones, and Matías Dewey (2015), who specializes in extensive informal markets. We understand that, within the web of exceptions and overlaps between agencies and actors, the portion of these illicit activities that will be condemned and those that will not—that is, those that will be prosecuted and those that will not—is determined. This is what Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish, conceptualized as the “management of illegalities.”

Although illegality and informality are categories that are distinguished in the regulations so that the sanction differs depending on whether it is an illegal act or a contravention or infraction, it is possible to find overlaps and processes that move activities from informality to illegality, due to the way in which they are addressed or omitted by the security forces and other non-police control agencies, that is, due to the management methods.

Our interest lies precisely in comparing how agencies, from the perspective of their members, define the universe of phenomena upon which they can act and which constitute crimes or offenses. We are particularly interested in recognizing the hierarchies, mechanisms, and both formal and informal connections that keep certain acts within the sphere of illegality and others within legality.

We understand that, over the past few decades under a new global neoliberal order, our states, even those that seemed most robust, have had their room for maneuver curtailed. This has occurred due to the pursuit of fiscal deficit reduction, the implementation of mechanisms—not always effective—to combat corruption, and processes of decentralization and/or privatization of public services, among other factors.

Thus, the actions of state officials influence the existence, regulation, and dimensions of these markets. Their illegal status is the product of a complex web where state and non-state actors play shifting roles. It should be noted, according to evidence from the social sciences in addressing these issues, that the legalization or illegalization of certain markets is not a fixed state of affairs but rather part of a process that shifts actions, human and non-human persons, and goods from one status to another (Heyman 2013). The expansion of a given market into illegality, or vice versa, cannot be understood without considering the role of state and non-state control actors. Consequently, the nature of these businesses is profoundly shaped by the possibility of sanctions, as well as by state regulations.

Furthermore, this formal pressure to outlaw certain markets is what creates conditions for the growth of violence. In this sense, Antillano and Zubillaga highlight the effects of prohibition on the criminalization of the drug market (Antillano and Zubillaga, 2014).

In this context, we find several conflicting issues. One of them is the legalization of cannabis, which, while regulated by various state mechanisms for registration and quality control, generates new markets and products that threaten artisanal and small-scale businesses, as well as triggering state and judicial interventions in areas that fall outside the scope of the established regulations.

Our Working Group seeks to understand the current configuration of the region's states by examining the links and coordination between police and non-police, state and non-state control agencies in their approaches to illicit markets. The persistence and growth of these markets, the diversity of goods traded in defiance of regulations, violations, and laws, and the flows of unregistered money they contain, necessitate reconstructing this framework to understand policy, governments, and state institutions.

The study of this phenomenon has a history of analysis within the social sciences. Much of the literature focuses on how security forces manage the law in illegal ways and participate, through action and omission, in various illicit markets (Dutil and Ragendorfer 1997, Klipphan, 2004, Barbano, 2015, Ugolini 2017). Other studies aim to demonstrate how these practices, framed within what Michel Misse termed "political commodities" (2017), not only fuel and provide cover for acts that cease to be criminal, but also exercise, through illegal means, a function that has been termed the regulation of crime (Sain 2017, Auyero and Sobering, 2021). On the other hand, there are studies aimed at showing, through the analysis of these markets and their key players, the dynamics of their interaction with various state agents, not only with security forces, but also with political and judicial figures, among others (Dewey, 2018). Some proponents of this perspective have highlighted the importance of revising centralist theories of the state, law, and sovereignty to understand how the state establishes its presence at its borders (Renoldi, 2021).

From a socio-historical perspective, illegal markets have been addressed through the analysis of the borders where they operate, more precisely the role of different Latin American countries in the production of illegal substances and/or their place in the circulation of these substances, weapons, etc. (Carrión Mena and Enríquez Bermeo, 2017). Fernando Carrión Mena (2017) has described a new criminal architecture: the expansion of illegal economies and the territories where they are entrenched. He has also pointed out how, since the 1980s, these economies and territories have been reconfigured due to the privatization of security and economic liberalization, evolving from isolated organizations into global networks. He understands that the link between illegal markets and the informal and legal markets in areas of expansion, such as borders, cities, and tax havens, is usually as follows:

Illegal markets thrive on their links with other market segments (informal and legal), for which they are linked with protection services, mechanisms of corruption, extortion and intimidation, with the provision of minimum logistics for their actions, with the development of activities that give them legitimacy in the eyes of the population (work, housing, carnival, football) and with the clearing of the way (social cleansing), among others" (Carrión Mena 2017:402).

Regarding how legal and illegal order merge to create hybrid social orders, Moriconi Bezerra and Peris Castiglioni (2019) conduct an interesting case study in Juan Pedro Caballero, a border city between Brazil and Paraguay. The authors analyze the daily life of the city, one of the world's best places for marijuana cultivation, which unfolds amidst some of the highest homicide rates and some of the lowest rates of common crime in Paraguay. For Moriconi Bezerra and Peris Castiglioni, far from being a matter of state weakness, the expansion and tolerance of illegal activities is framed within a complex order that combines rational legal practices and neo-patrimonial norms. The study explains how the presence and roles of state institutions are redefined, generating alternative hierarchies, practices, and values ​​to produce social, political, and economic outcomes.

The analysis of these circulation spaces challenges the most frequently implemented normative conceptualizations. In this working group, we aim to contribute flexible perspectives to understanding the ambiguities and conflicts in the processes of criminalization and/or legalization (Heyman 2013). Luis Astorga's pioneering research (2016) is a clear example of a type of analysis that allows us to historicize the transformation of practices that were once legal or indifferent to the State into growing illicit markets that became the object of prohibition, spaces of extreme violence, persecution, and displacement of rural populations. Astorga reveals the mechanisms that, throughout the 20th century in Mexico, led to the criminalization of formerly legal substances, the role of pharmaceutical companies, drug regulatory agencies, and the influence of the United States until the arrival of the "war on drugs" as dogma.

In the 1990s, interest in reforming police education took hold, along with the understanding that some of the institutional violence perpetrated by the police themselves was rooted in the paradigms that historically underpinned the police training model. The prevailing discourse is linked to security proposals that promote—or even mandate—organizational changes focused on territorial control and repression. These proposals employ community policing, despite its often conflictive relationships with local communities, and emphasize robbery—the crimes of the poor—illegal drug markets, and the acquisition of weapons and technologies to strengthen their own control and repression efforts. This approach takes precedence over the possibility of transforming the violent practices of the state, the justice system, and the police.

Finally, we understand that, in our region, the expansion of certain xenophobic and neo-fascist narratives, combined with libertarian ones, is based on a description of social reality marked by the "failure of the State," the "corruption of the political class," and a whole series of certainties that also tend toward clandestinity and informality as a resource.

Added to this is a highly conservative neoliberal narrative surrounding the category of "entrepreneurship." This narrative—based on themes of freedom, property, family, and religion—establishes a world of the licit, masking the illicit activities that accompany it—such as paramilitary groups and militias (as in the case of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), or the allocation of public funds to political circles. Furthermore, expressions of racism are multiplying, as observed both in the incarceration of young Black and mixed-race people and in the concentration of homicides within this population. This entire racist rationale fuels necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018). This conservative and racist narrative can be perceived in social media, literature, and popular music, acting as a mirror that both conceals and expresses an exclusionary social order.