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 have resettled in urban peripheries – spaces largely controlled by criminal gangs and inhabited by the most disadvantaged sectors of the Colombian population. This two-year project (2023–2025), funded by the SNSF, seeks to ethnographically explore the experiences of these migrants, and specifically their relationships with the criminal groups operating in the areas where they settle.

 

Following an initial round of fieldwork, the project focused on young migrants’ access to informal housing. Based on several months of immersive ethnography conducted by Dr Butti in one of Latin America’s largest informal settlements, on the outskirts of Medellín, the project highlights the growing role played by criminal gangs in the illegal land and housing market that has emerged within these settlements. As part of a broader strategy to diversify their income streams, criminal gangs in Medellín have begun to take a more active role in this illegal housing market, essentially commercializing what used to be an organic occupation process, and illegally selling land plots – or renting out informal shelters – to migrant or internally displaced families, thereby 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), the results of this project show that gang-controlled informal housing markets represent both the neoliberal capture of decades of popular self-organization and the gangs’ own way of profiting from the migration crisis.

 

From a theoretical perspective, this project contributes to the ongoing debate on the "crimmigration" nexus by challenging criminalizing portrayals of migrants in Latin America and beyond. It shows that Venezuelan migrants in Colombia are not perpetrators of crime but rather exploited and instrumentalized by criminal networks for their own gain. From a policy perspective, it underscores the importance of providing decent and formal housing options – alongside work permits – to prevent migrants from channeling their scarce resources into enriching organized criminal networks.

 

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 at www.elenabutti.com.