Illegal Market Routes in the Brazilian Frontier Zones and Its Impacts in the Urban Centers

The objective is to present results from an ongoing research whose object is the illegal drug market routes in the frontier zones between Brazil and South American countries, where we examine its impacts in the growth of new urban centers, as well as the social changes in previously existent and consolidated centers. Empirically, we accompany the routes from its extremities, where illegal drugs are produced and distributed, until their entries in Brazil and local markets, and final consumers.

The theoretical justification of the proposal is based in three conceptual lines: a) a critical discussion of the category “organized crime” with the proposal of identifying its explicative limits and potentials, applied to the study of multiple markets, products, localities and arrangements and disarrangements, as well as the multiple relations with the authorities, comprising the illicit national market; b) the concept of productive chain, used to monitor all the phases of the illicit drug commerce. That is, the production, circulation, distribution and consumption; and c) the concept of frontier, whose sociological significance supersedes the limits imposed by geographical and spatial demarcations. These justifications reside in the exam of specialized bibliography on criminal fluxes and networks, frontiers, illicit markets, organized crime.

The analysis plan and exposé consists of three sections: firstly, a overview of the illicit national market, including a mapping of networks and flows of this type of organized crime in national territory; secondly, the description and analysis of the group dynamics that act in specific sectors of the illicit national economy, with focus of the commerce of marijuana and cocaine paste in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, entry point of the drug distribution to the Southeast region of Brazil, the richest of the national territory; third, a brief outcome of the problems and questions brought by this theoretical-methodological approach.