Hipótesis

While the above sections have highlighted the key regulatory institutions that structure informal cross-border trade across three borders in North Africa, it would be misleading to suggest that these institutions regulate all smuggling activities across these borders. To quote a Moroccan official in a local development agency: “The

118 doors, they were made for control. But there were other things going on” (M80).

While the institutions described here have regulated the smuggling of the majority of goods, they do not account for most illicit goods, which, as has been discussed above, cannot be traded through these institutionalised procedures. This applies in particular to drugs – cannabis, cocaine and synthetic psychotropics – for which there are large smuggling routes running through North Africa, but also arms or ammunition.⁴⁵ In addition, some well-connected traders may also seek to trade licit goods outside of the impersonal systems described above, if they believe they can generate opportunities to trade on better terms outside of them. On the Tunisia-Libya border, these goods are typically transported on 4x4s across the border south of the Ras Jedir crossing, through rugged terrain that requires experienced drivers, locally dubbed the ‘contra route’.

Similarly, on the border between Algeria and Morocco, smugglers try their luck outside the informally arranged border crossings – many of them moving cannabis-based products grown in Morocco.

As the focus of this project is on licit goods, the vast majority of which are exclusively regulated through the institutions listed above, they are also the focus of this chapter.

However, through providing one regulatory environment for one set of goods, these institutions still affect the opportunities, geographies and risk profiles for trade outside of their ‘jurisdiction’, while not directly regulating them. For example, by providing structures that incentivise traders in particular goods and quantities – small amounts of licit goods for example – to trade through points of entry, they shape the expectations that soldiers outside of points of entries have of the traders they encounter there. Microwaves, carpets or children’s clothes would not usually be traded illegally outside of the more normalised nodes, which would offer a vastly superior cost-risk trade-off, especially for small-scale smugglers.

However, some of the observations made in this project give good reason to question whether even the trade outside of these more institutionalised channels is conducted in a fashion that is entirely unregulated, or “under the radar of the state”. Two dimensions of this are worth highlighting here.

45 See Chapter 3. In addition, some goods with particularly high profit margins, such as mobile phones, are also reported to be traded outside of these nodes.

119 First, Traders, security forces and politicians across the two large border case studies (Tunisia-Libya; Morocco-Algeria) report the existence of ‘security arrangements’ in which smugglers, even as they are trying to evade security forces as they are crossing the border, will still report suspicious activities along the border, and the presence of unknown individuals, back to the security forces (M110, M111, FG4, T9). While some of these agreements seem to have developed out of clientelist relationships with security forces, others seem to have grown historically out of similar agreements with pastoral communities in the borderlands (T111). Here, farmers watching livestock out in the borderlands had maintained arrangements with security forces, informing them of unknown individuals operating on the border. It is worth noting that there is an incentive for smugglers to engage in these activities: increased perception by security forces that the part of the border that they operate in is unmonitored and used by dangerous individuals might lead to higher security force presence there, increasing the cost of smuggling.

And second, even though there did not seem to be clearly institutionalised rules on smuggling across the ‘contra routes’, there do appear to be at times certain regularities and predictabilities in the interactions between smugglers and security forces in these areas. These perhaps more resemble ‘border games’ (Andreas 2009), which through their own rules institute a certain regularity, and an observable and predictable outcome. An example may serve to illustrate:

In March of 2017, I was sitting in a roadside café in Southern Tunisia – it was the only café in a small village near the border, south of Ben Guerdane. I was talking to the only two other customers: a friend of mine that was working nearby, and a local smuggling boss, who has around ten young men work for him. On most nights, they drive across the desert to Libya and return with a variety of goods, some licit, such as tea and cigarettes, and some illicit. Recently, with the closures at Ras Jedir, more people had started working in this territory. The installation of a ditch and surveillance equipment to improve border security in recent years has not done much to change this trade: they either put boards over the ditch and drive across it, or simply throw the goods across. Most of the traders do not own their own cars, they lease expensive and fast SUVs, for one principal purpose: to outrun the local customs agents who are charged with preventing illegal trade in this sector. “Our cars are much faster than theirs”, the man brags. It is easy for us to verify this from the little café: while many

120 of the smugglers' cars are parked next to the café, the customs agents’ cars are parked next to their small headquarter on the other side of the street. While smugglers and customs agents play cat and mouse at night, they are sitting right across the street from each other during the day. They know each other. “It’s like a game.” If they get caught, they negotiate a bribe. They don’t resent the customs officers for their role in this, it’s

“normal”, he tells me (T87). If they make it through uncaught, they are home free.

Once they are home, as the sun rises, their goods are no longer up for scrutiny. The likelihood of getting caught, and its price, is a part of the calculations of the smugglers.

Their expected income is subject to a repeatedly played game, a game that is well established, and that every player understands. When one of the customs agents refuses to take bribes, the smuggler recounts, they know his superior and can easily arrange for him to be transferred somewhere else. And the game continues.

As this example suggests, the absence of regulation through rules does not imply that even illicit smuggling is entirely unregulated, or that it is regulated in the absence of the state, or that it is regulated entirely through personal relationships. Even arrests of smugglers, in this context, do not necessarily need to be proof of an attempt by state security forces to eliminate smuggling. I was speaking to a human trafficker in Morocco about the time he was arrested, and which led to him spending a significant amount of time in jail. Still, he didn’t perceive his arrest as a part of any kind of strategy by the police to stop human trafficking, which he felt was “tolerated” by the police. However, once in a while they would have to arrest someone to show that they were doing their job, he explained, and that time it hit him (M111).

One final caveat is in order here. When highlighting that, even outside the more institutionalised ‘nodes’, smuggling is not necessarily without predictable structures, it is still worth noting that these activities have also not been without violence in the past few decades. Its most extreme expression has come with the deaths of young traders, usually from the borderlands, who have died crossing the border, shot by security services or as the result of car crashes after nightly chases through difficult and dangerous terrain. Along the Morocco-Algeria border, traders have reported that this phenomenon has decreased since the 80s, especially under the regime of Bouteflika (1999-2019), but did not entirely stop (FG4, M111). The last few years have also seen multiple deaths along the Tunisia-Libya frontier. Deaths have also not been limited to the rural borderlands – as discussed above, the vast numbers of traders

121 seeking to move through the small spaces of the Melilla border crossings have caused altercations, stampedes and injuries, and resulted in multiple deaths in recent years.

5.6 Informal Institutions and the Regulation of Smuggling in North