Crossing the border at unmarked border-crossing sites was not uncommon among Lao villagers in my research area. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, close networks of kinship and trade were maintained among many (though not all) border residents. A common language, history as well as a shared calendar of Buddhist festivities brought people from both sides of the river together on a regular basis. The regular border markets on the Thai side were particularly popular among Lao villagers, especially among those who could not afford to travel across the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge to the shopping centres in Mueang Loei. Most border markets were situated on the Thai side of customary border checkpoints so that Lao visitors mainly crossed over the respective checkpoint in order to attend a market62.
For some villagers who lived further away from the checkpoint it was easier to cross over the river at unmarked sites. During one of my trips to the border market in one of the border villages, for example, I saw a group of women with shopping bags walk towards the riverbank on the far end of the village. I approached one of the women and was allowed to accompany her group along the dirt path to their small wooden boat.
The boat belonged to the woman I had approached. She lived in the small village on the outskirts of Ban Sawan situated directly on the other side of the river. As her friends entered the boat she asked whether I wanted to come along. When explaining that I was afraid to get caught and arrested by the border guards, the entire group laughed. Another woman said: “It is easy to just cross over – everyone does it all the time!” With the customary border checkpoint located several hundred metres down the river, the women had chosen to cross the border at the unmarked border-crossing in their village for the sake of convenience. By using the boat of a local villager they were also able to avoid
62 The border market in Ban Plee had been relocated from the customary border checkpoint to the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge.
both the transportation fee and the fee for crossing the border at the checkpoint.
Familiar with the local border guards on either side of the border, they seemed so much at ease in crossing the border at their own discretion that they were able to laugh off anyone who had any fears.
Image 10: Villagers crossing the Hueang River at an unmarked border-crossing site (Source: Author)
I had a similar experience during the annual village festival (ngan bun) in another Thai border village, during which hundreds of villagers from Ken Thao district come across the river via the customary border checkpoint and unmarked border-crossing sites.
Together with their family and friends in the Thai border village, they attend the village parade, share food and drinks, and celebrate at the local temple. Walking down the main street of the village during the time of the festival, almost every home I could see was accommodating visitors with food and alcoholic beverages. Several visitors had arrived via the unmarked border-crossing at the far end of the village. I walked to the river and this time there was a young man operating a wooden boat using a large paddle (Image 10). He was just arriving with another boat full of people. This time I asked the local residents along the river whether the border guards ever patrolled this area. They
laughed and replied that this happened only very rarely when the border guards were checking the area for drug smugglers.
This not only reconfirms the mutual familiarity between the local residents and the local border guards, which gives the former a sense of security when engaging in shuttle migration. It also highlights the way the Thai Rangers interpret their duties and responsibilities. As I elaborated in Chapter 4, the Thai paramilitary was deployed to the border areas to protect (bongan) the border and the people who live along it, but not to disturb them in their everyday life. When new Rangers start working in the area, they quickly become familiar with the activities of the local population and distinguish between such activities and those they deemed to be a threat to the nation-state, such as drug and weapons smuggling as well as car and motorbike smuggling (see further Chapter 6).
In fact, cross-border livelihoods were the norm for most of the residents of a remote Lao border village along the Hueang River on the outskirts of my research area. The villagers here were more closely connected to the residents of the adjacent Thai border village than they were to other Lao villages. When visiting the small Lao village for the first time I hired the driver of a samlo (a small motorised vehicle with three wheels, similar to the Thai tuktuk) from Ban Sawan to take me there. The driver had never been to the village himself and demanded an additional fee for driving me along the muddy road into the village, which was not paved and flooded in some areas. We picked up a friend of mine at the customary border checkpoint along the way. She had agreed to introduce me to some of her friends and relatives in the small village. We had lunch in the local noodle shop and discussed the border situation with several of the villagers.
The group explained that most villagers had relatives and social relations on the Thai side, made use of the shops and medical services there more frequently than in any neighbouring Lao village, and also frequently worked as labourers on the Thai rice farms. When buying goods on the Thai side, they would simply cross the river by boat and when attending the border market at the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge on Saturdays, they would cross the river from their village to the Thai side and then ask a relative or friend in the Thai border village to drive them to the Bridge. The strategy that Malee (the middlewoman I mentioned above) used to cross the border in exceptional circumstances was apparently very common among border residents.
One of the women went on to explain that in case of a major injury the residents of the small Lao village would always cross the border and go to the hospital in Mueang Loei but getting there was not as easy as travelling the Thai border village across the river.
This was due to the legal situation: “In order to go to Mueang Loei, we must cross over the customary border checkpoint, get a paper document from the soldier [the Thai Rangers are called “soldiers” in Thai], then get another paper from the district office [in Thali] and then we can go to the hospital in Mueang Loei. Some people don’t have such documents and just go. But I am not brave enough (mai ka) to go without documents.
Normally, the Thai police along the road does not check our documents, but when they do and you don’t have any, they will make you pay a fine and that’s not worth it to me.”
For the residents of the small Lao border village, the nation-state border only became relevant as soon as they had the intention of travelling outside of the confines of the Thai and Lao border villages they were familiar with. Well aware of the consequences they would face when being intercepted outside the border villages by state officials who would categorise them as “illegal immigrants”, they had to follow a formalised process that began with obtaining legal paperwork on the Lao side of the customary border checkpoint. To the villagers here, the Thai borderland and the border guards who patrolled it were part of a space of familiarity and trust. It was only when the intention of moving outside this space came into play that the legal framework of cross-border mobility became relevant.
Before I left the small Lao village, the group of people at the noodle shop asked me to meet them at the next border market across the river. They suggested that I accompany them back to their village in one of their boats and stay for a few hours. They tried to convince me that there was no risk in crossing over the river in-between the two small villages as there were never any patrols there. And even if we did encounter border guards, the villagers maintained, they would know the border guards personally and the border guards would let us continue. Indeed I was tempted but there was an element of risk that stopped me from accepting the offer. I was not personally familiar with some of the Thai border guards and none of the Lao border guards in this area. I decided not to pursue this but would later attempt to cross the border at the customary border checkpoint instead.
While I will come back to my personal experience, for now I would like to bring attention to the strategies of other Lao villagers who crossed the border for the purpose
of working in Thai border villages. Many of their experiences stand in contrast to those of undocumented migrant workers throughout Thailand who are known to face cruelty and violence by their employers and detention when intercepted by state officials (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004; Maniemai and Dusadee 2006; Pearson 2006; Pearson and Kusakabe 2012). In my research area, the Hueang River was part of many Lao workers’ daily commute to Thai farmlands. They worked there during the day and returned home in the evening. An elderly couple that lived along the Hueang River outside of Ban Sing regularly took such labourers across the river by boat for a small fee. The couple grew and sold flowers for a living and bred pigs and chicken for their own consumption. Their transport services were an opportunity to further increase their income. Not only did they take the labourers across the river by boat, they also drove them to their workplace by car or motorbike. In the evenings, they took them back across the river.
This was far from being a clandestine activity that sought to resist state power. Instead, the Thai border guards in the area were well aware of the border-crossing site at this private property. According to the elderly couple, the guards occasionally stopped by the property in the mornings or evenings as the labourers were arriving or just about to leave. The Rangers would then write down the labourers’ names and addresses and then let them continue their journey. Once again, the notion was raised that the Rangers were merely interested in finding smugglers of drugs (ya saeptit) rather than interrupting border villagers’ everyday lives. In addition to this, I argue that by allowing the labourers to commute across the river without documents and writing down their names and addresses instead, was a form of state regulation that was only possible through the regular interaction, familiarity, and trust between the border guards, the elderly couple at the flower garden, and the Lao workers. It recognised the plight of these seasonal, undocumented workers who would be better considered border commuters (Buch et al.
2009), while the sovereign subjects acknowledged the authority of the border guards and the territorial sovereignty they represent. Without the involvement of the local border guards in the process of border commuting, Lao migrant workers risked being intercepted at their workplace by an unfamiliar state official who could issue a fine of 500 baht, according to the village headman of Ban Sing. The migrant workers would then be sent back to the Lao side via the nearest checkpoint. So far it becomes clear that the Thai Rangers’ embeddedness in the local border community allowed them to
regulate cross-border flows through a variety of means and processes including the cooperation with local border residents (Walker 1999).
However, the Rangers’ constant search for drugs along the Thai-Lao border has also confronted local residents with a devastating incident. During my trip to a range of border markets with a Thai trader family, I got to know a women in a village west of my research area who was a friend of the female trader I was travelling with. While waiting for my friend to finish showering in the woman’s house after spending the night in tents at the border market, I spoke to the woman on her porch. Her husband was a farmer and currently in the field and she was pregnant with their second child. Her first child was not alive anymore. The woman explained that her first son had been shot at the age of 15 by Thai Rangers who suspected him of smuggling drugs across the border. She did not know exactly how the incident occurred, only that her son was crossing the river after visiting family on the Lao side when he was shot. The boy’s innocence was soon established, however (I was unable to find out how this was established), the Rangers apologised to the woman but there was never any financial compensation for her loss.
This was the only incident she knew of this kind in her area; it was an exceptional case.
In other border areas such as the southern provinces of Thailand and the border to Malaysia, the paramilitary Rangers have assumed a notorious reputation for extrajudicial killings and violence (Ball 2004; ICG 2007). Having done my own background research on incidents such as this in my research area, it seems that such cases of violence inflicted on citizens were indeed exceptional along the Thai-Lao border. They do not confirm the border as a permanent state of exception, which an Agambean perspective would lead to (e.g. Salter 2008).
There are other elements of risk when crossing the river at unmarked border-crossing sites, particularly for those border-crossers who have no regular interactions or maintain social relationships with the local border guards in the place they wish to cross. When crossing the border without paperwork, the risk is dependent on the familiarity with the border guards but also on the personality and attitude of the individual border guard.
One of the Rangers in my research area, for example, always came across as rather serious and even secretive about his operations in the area. When doing some research in local online newspaper, I found out that it was this Ranger who arrested two Lao women for crossing the border without documents even though they were not engaged in any activities that could be considered a threat such as drug smuggling (Sue Issara
Loei 2012). According to a local online news article63 the Thai Ranger intercepted a 65-year old lady with her granddaughter while they were crossing the river by boat in Ban Plee (Image 11). They possessed no documents of identification. The two women came from a small border village located a few kilometres east of Ban Sawan (outside my research area). The article further states that the two women committed an offense under the Immigration Act of 2522 [1979] and that they were therefore detained and handed over to Lao authorities at the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge.
Image 11: An elderly women and her granddaughter intercepted by a Ranger from Regiment 2103 while crossing the border without docum ents, 8 December 2012. (Source: Sue Issara Loei 2012)
While I was unable to obtain any context to the newspaper article’s story, the story does highlight the fact that the border in this area was neither completely porous nor unregulated, nor a place where the residents of any border village could move across freely. Legal documents were indeed significant in particular contexts, and mainly where familiarity and social relationships were lacking, as in the case of the two
63 On the website of the local Sue Issara Loei newspaper, articles are regularly posted about crimes committed along the border in Loei province. They usually come with a photo of the state official who was responsible for intercepting the crime. The photos include drug smugglers with their products laid out in front of them, motorbikes and cars hidden in bushes, but also people who crossed the border
“illegally”.
women. The fact that the women did not originate from one of the border villages that lay directly across from the customary border checkpoint could also have played a role in his decision-making64. In this case, the arrest could be seen as a public deterrent to other villagers who seek to cross the border at unmarked sites. What underscores this is the fact that the incident was published on the local news website. Without speculating too much about the reasoning behind the arrest, the example clearly demonstrates how some undocumented border residents were able to move across the border more freely than others. As I have shown, many Lao border villagers often rely more on their ties to the local authorities rather than on paperwork in the act of traversing unmarked border-crossing sites. In the following section, I present my observations and interviews at customary border checkpoints. While there was some technocracy around legal documents here, border performances played an important role and social relationships often trumped both legal documents and border performances.
THE (IN)SIGNIFICANCE OF DOCUMENTS AT CUSTOMARY