Creating Financial Enclosures: The Confluence of Displacement, Aid, and Narcoparamilitary Credit in Colombia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between aid programmes and the expansion of credit and debt in the lives of displaced people who have relocated to Cartagena, Colombia over the last three decades. The article argues that state and NGO-organized aid programmes have contributed to the emergence of urban spaces for financial exploitation in which narcoparamilitary creditors extract interest to profit from displaced populations, spaces I define as ‘financial enclosures.’ In them, faulty aid programmes purportedly created to provide economic stability to displaced people have instead further entrenched their dependency on credit. Financial enclosures are geographic and socioeconomic spaces where people continue to experience the repercussions of displacement as subjects of aid and as indebted precarious workers. The case of Colombia offers important insight into how aid programmes for displaced people contribute to the creation of fertile ground for new forms of financial exploitation of precarious populations. In doing so, it sheds light on how capitalism expands and reproduces to extract profit from people who struggle to subsist in contexts of long-term displacement.