A Dinâmica da gestão de ilegalismos na fronteira entre Ponta Porã e Pedro Juan Caballero

Abstract

Border violence is associated with several types of perceptions. Through the social representations produced by the press, it is outlined as a permanent place. If you are looking at the population, it is useful for disputes over markets. Scaled by homicide rates, it may indicate a place of insecurity. That said, violence poses a problem for the region as a product of criminality. Two groups from the border propose to solve a crime problem that is resumed in robberies and thefts: “Defensores da Fronteira” and “Justiceiros da Fronteira”, who concentrate their practices around the criminal - or delinquent. The former seek an approximation with the State, for a participation in the application of security policies, while the Justiceiros show the heroes of a society that no longer support crimes (against private properties). The groups act through supplements and physical annihilation, in practices that resemble death squads and death patterns from the past, thus challenging the State’s monopoly of violence. In the first part of this research, the boundary as a sociological category is discussed. Then, the research aims to understand illegal markets from a historical line of the region and its development to understand its formation. Next, aspects of a criminal economics and its conversion to a legal capital – especially to people with no opportunities in legal markets – is the basis of a discussion of legality.The research results conclude that prohibitionist policies edited by national states as a response to the global movement of capital in the 1990s increased punitive controls, resulting in huge social costs, such as a high rate of mass incarceration. Illegal markets and crime networks are policy products, favored by the historical context of the region based on large landowning and monoculture activities that originates banditry and “coronelismo” in the region, later evolving to the formation of networks of crimes – since General Stroessner in Paraguay, in 1954, when the State joined the criminal activity. Then, we turn to the issue of criminality in its general form in the region, directing a discussion around two heads of these networks, understanding by their power as “frontier kings”: Fahd Jamil, whose member is involved in the alliances that maintained with the Paraguayan military, and Jorge Rafaat, who followed in the footsteps of the predecessor. Then, we highlight the presence of factions at the border and disputes that led to the Rafaat’s death. Finally, the research explains the use of illegality at the border based on the management of the illegal and the delinquent as subjects produced by the police/justice/prison mechanism and associated with popular, property-related illegalities. The management of organized and differentiated illegal issues, such as illegalities and criminality and violence itself are treated according to this logic by the Defensores and Justiceiros da Fronteira. The management of illegalities establishes an order at the border, through disciplines, which everyone must obey.