Project description
In recent years, the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has led to a massive inflow of Venezuelan
migrants into neighbouring Colombia. In the absence of proper reception facilities, the vast
majority of these migrants resettle in urban peripheries – spaces largely controlled by criminal
gangs, where the most disadvantaged sectors of the Colombian population live. This two-year
project (2023–2025), funded by the SNSF, seeks to ethnographically explore the experiences of
these migrants, and specifically their relationship with the criminal groups that operate in the
areas where they settle.
Following an initial round of fieldwork, the project is focusing more specifically on these
migrants’ access to informal housing. Based on several months of immersive ethnography
conducted by Dr Butti on the outskirts of Medellín, in one of Latin America’s largest informal
settlements, the project highlights the growing role played by criminal gangs in the illegal land
and housing market that has emerged within these settlements. Initial findings reveal that, as
part of a broader strategy to diversify their income streams, criminal gangs in Medellín have
started to take a more active role in this illegal housing market, essentially commercialising what
used to be an organic occupation process. The occupation, plotting, and construction on private
land in the city’s outskirts – previously a collective process spontaneously performed by
occupying residents – has been increasingly co-opted by criminal gangs, who now play a
central role in managing and profiting from this informal housing market. Venezuelan migrants
are among the most frequent customers of this market, contributing to the rapid expansion of
the city’s informal margins.
Using Gago and Mezzadra’s (2017) notion of ‘urban extractivism’ (see also García Jerez, 2019),
this project shows that gang-controlled informal housing markets represent both the neoliberal
capture of decades of popular self-organisation and the gangs’ own way of benefitting from the
migration crisis.
The project is hosted at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding of the IHEID, in
collaboration with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Associated projects can be found on www.elenabutti.com