key players in microtrafficking ABC1

The first thought we associate with the word “drug trafficking” is usually an organized gang, perhaps foreign or with large seizures made by the police. Observation is carried out three researchers from the Millennium Institute for Violence and Democracy Studies (VioDemos), Renata Boado, Juan Pablo Luna in Nicholas Unwinwho conducted an academic investigation into drug trafficking in the most affluent sectors of Santiago.

He paper the corresponding one has not yet been published, but there was a preview of the work on the site The third dose, in which, under the title “Narcozorrones y microtrafficking ABC1”, they report that they used a survey on the structure of human trafficking in the ABC1 sectors to prepare the study. This was done through informal conversations with micro-traders who attended some of the best private schools in Santiago and are currently studying at university.

It explains that “this is a predominantly male sample, which differs from what happens in other micro-trading markets, which are characterized by a greater presence of women. In that sense they are items with good purchasing power who receive higher education, mostly commercial construction, and who dare to trade drugs in a significantly different way than the “pobla” drug dealers do. According to international experience, one of the usual motivations for trafficking is to finance self-consumption.”

Nevertheless, a significant part of the respondents consider micro-trading as a form raise capital to go legal enterprise. “This group is dominated by the desire to become a successful businessman and achieve a certain financial autonomy. At the same time, and in line with the evidence available for other cases of ABC1 traffickers, the activity also appears in some narratives as a way of seeking social validation from peer groups. This validation comes largely from the ability to spend and consume, sharing in many cases with your friends,” they explain.

“I put the money I made into other goods, right? He bought me concert tickets, concerts, bought my things. For a long time I had relatively little help, I don’t know if it was little, but it was just enough to cover me. You are constantly moving it, smoking it, making money and so on. And another hueá that has happened to me a lot with a lot of hueones is the idea that they are just stupid and feel great about selling and hueá” (sic), says a source cited in the report.

Narcozorrones bacon

He fox He is a child of the elite who has privilege and social status, which he strives to demonstrate in his interactions with young people from other social sectors. The text notes that “the fixation of the figure of the fox happened relatively recently, it is rarely and fragmentarily mentioned in the literature. In general, faxons are characterized as upper-middle-class and upper-class youth, with speeches emphasizing a “winner’s mentality” and the cult of physique. They are also described as students of traditional majors (engineering, law, business administration) and focused on conspicuous consumption of technology, clothing or drugs (mainly marijuana and others related to electronic music). Thus part of the fox’s social world is structured around parties attended by a socially homogeneous group of young people.’

The researchers determined Narcologist as a drug-dealing “whore.” “This transformation has two important factors that arise for the consolidation of the identity of narcozorrón in recent years: the massification of popular cultures specific to the urban outskirts (which is manifested, for example, in the success of the Chilean trap) and the strengthening of the figure of the individual entrepreneur as a stereotype of success and social status”, – they claim.

The privilege enjoyed by narcozorrones is evident in their stories of interactions (a minority of them) with law enforcement. These stories express an awareness of a certain privilege they enjoy: “When you see a guy with blond hair, blue eyes, and piercings, you say now a young university student. But when you see a dark man, meter 60 with a gradient, with a cut on his face selling, you say ah yes, flaite hueón“, says the interlocutor.

The high frequency of micro-trading in the ABC1 sectors is not something new or a novelty, but it is important to highlight the characteristics of this activity and its current configuration in order to put on the table the biases with which we publicly discuss “narco” in Chile.

Online and collaboratively

The COVID-19 pandemic has helped diversify the market. The most experienced drug dealers, for example, point out that they no longer have to supply the population with products, also indicating that this need before the pandemic has put them in an uncomfortable and ultimately dangerous situation.

“Drug busts work on the basis of closed WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal groups. Faced with the suspicion that a group has infiltrated, it quickly dissolves, and in parallel, a new group is created, in which the network of safe contacts receives an invitation to join,” the researchers say in detail.

Through this type of platform, there is also an exchange between narcozorrones and their suppliers that is structured collaboratively rather than based on competition and exclusive deals. “As an example, someone who does not have or does not want to sell a certain product offers “colleagues” who sell it. It is a “good atmosphere” market where the breadth of demand and diversity of supply create an environment of cooperation. This is also facilitated by the fact that among the individuals we spoke with, there are practically no cases of vertical or horizontal business integration. An exception to this phenomenon is a case where a drug dealer told us how he diversified his outlets by including as sellers of his products a group of private security guards who worked at a university at level 1000. Except In in this case it a fairly horizontal market, devoid of territorial claims and ambitions to grow through the use of violence in business,” the authors of the study clarify.

Impunity and low risk

Narcozarons are not a new phenomenon, nor are they specific to the Chilean context. The study confirms that the dynamics revealed should be relatively familiar to anyone who consumes drugs in Chile in the ABC1 sectors. “What is important is that we never think about this dynamic and its protagonists when we express our opinions and discuss, in many cases frivolously, ‘narco’ or organized crime in Chile. This bias leads us to directly associate drug trafficking or organized crime with violence, and especially with the murderous violence that we are so concerned about today.’

“The case of drug cartels shows two important implications: first, not all drug trafficking is organized crime (especially if we think of organized crime as a phenomenon that goes beyond the simple functioning of the illegal market, but as a a phenomenon associated with relatively complex organizations that seek to exercise territorial control and to do so resort to violence and seek to establish connections in collusion with state agents and political figures); Second, the drug trade, which is more profitable at the retail level (because prices and margins are higher in the ABC1 trade), does not generate violence (this also applies to core and extremely profitable business activities such as money laundering) by becoming invisible in social settings and for political debate. The latter does not mean that it is a socially harmless activity: for example, the risks to public health caused by the level of experimentation associated with the growing diversification of products circulating in this market are potentially high and growing,” they add.

It is also known that the coercive power of the state is a short blanket; very short, strictly speaking, in cases where institutions begin to be overwhelmed by the emergence and expansion of various criminal markets. Strictly speaking, when state coercion is aimed at curbing violence, the relaxation we observe indirectly through the sense of impunity and low risk experienced by drug lords is perfectly reasonable from a social point of view.

Finally, they explain that, despite all the differences between narcozorrones and those involved in microtrafficking in other social contexts, there are two patterns that are cross-cutting in socioeconomic terms: “On the one hand, illegality and trafficking drugs in particular are seen as an enterprise capable of quickly satisfying consumer aspirations and social status that the legal market and traditional means of upward mobility (such as the pursuit of educational attainment) have ceased to provide effectively in our society.”