Illegal economies are economies based around less-than-legal income streams, however many of the people involved in these economies are day-to-day workers, not criminals.
That’s one finding of Gloria Perez-Rivera, an assistant professor of anthropology at Mount Royal University, who has done a lot of research on illegal economies.
“What I would like people to understand is that half of the world lives from these things we call illegal economies,” said Perez-Rivera. “When we talk about the ‘criminal,’ the criminal, most of the time, is not a criminal by choice.”
Her research involved a one-year ethnographic study, a form of research in which the researcher embeds themselves within the community.
Perez-Rivera spent her year in a very low-income community in Cartagena, Colombia— where she observed an illegal economy at work.
“My work was to follow the money,” said Perez-Rivera.
She learned about a cycle that occurs within lower-income communities in Colombia, a system called drop by drop, in which money lenders, often funded by narcotraffickers, provide long-term loans that are slowly paid off daily.
Perez-Rivera said that people take on these loans to purchase supplies and equipment to work and buy food from local corner stores.
“I figured out that in Cartagena, and in most places in Colombia, narco paramilitaries are the owners of the corner stores,” said Perez-Rivera. “They have forced people to sell their stores so they can take over the economy.”
Perez-Rivera is still working on learning more about cultural economies and displacement in Colombia — shining a light on these things through her published work.