36 See note 34, above, 5.
37 See note 34, above, 15.
38 Guy, D., “‘White Slavery,’ Citizenship and Nationality in Argentina”, in Parker, A. (ed.), Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 201–15; Soderlund, G., “Covering Urban Vice: The New York Times, ‘White Slavery,’ and the Construction of Journalistic Knowledge” (2002) 19(4) Critical Studies in Media Communication 438–60.
39 da Silva, A.P., Blanchette, T.G., and Bento, A.R., “Cinderella Deceived: Analyzing a Brazilian Myth Regarding Trafficking in Persons” (2013) 10(2) Vibrant, Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 377–419.
40 Agustín, L., “The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex” (2006) 32(1) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29–47.
41 Dozema, J., “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women” (December 1999) 18(1) Gender Issues 23–50.
42 Kempadoo, K., “Victims and Agents of Crime: The New Crusade Against Trafficking”, in Sudbury, J. (ed.), Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 35.
43 Pickering, S. and Weber, L., “Policing Transversal Borders”, in Franko, K.F. and Bosworth, M. (eds.), The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship and Social Exclusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 106.
44 Bernstein, E., “Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The ‘Traffic in Women’ and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights” (2012) 41(3) Theory and Society 233–259.
45 Chuang, J., “Rescuing Trafficking From Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and Anti-Trafficking Law and Policy” (2010) 158 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 169.
46 Kapur, R., “The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the ‘Native’ Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics” (2002) 15 The Harvard Human Rights Journal 1.
47 Danailova-Trainor, G. and Belser, P., Globalization and the Illicit Market for Human Trafficking: An Empirical Analysis of Supply and Demand (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2006); Bettio, F. and Kanti Nandi, T., “Evidence on Women Trafficked for Sexual Exploitation. A Rights Based Approach” (2010) 29(1) European Journal of Law and Economics 15–42.
48 See note 18, above, 3.
49 Mills, M.B., Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Chu, J.Y., Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Cheng, see note 9, above.
50 See note 10, above; Cheng, S., “The Paradox of Vernacularization: Women’s Human Rights and the Gendering of Nationhood” (2011) 84(2) Anthropological Quarterly 475–506.
51 See note 18, above.
52 See note 39, above.
53 Bernstein, E., Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
40
Of coyotes and caporali
How anti-trafficking discourses of criminality depoliticise mobility and exploitation
Neil Howard
Introduction
Whether it be the coyote sneaking his ‘victims’ across the border, or the caporale coercing his gang labourers, dominant anti-trafficking discourses serve to depoliticise labour mobility and exploitation by locating causality ‘inside’ an individual criminal figure, and thus ‘outside’ of the systemic, structural forces that condition them. This chapter seeks to challenge this depoliticising tendency, drawing on qualitative field research conducted with apparent ‘victims of trafficking’ in Benin, Nigeria, and Italy, and with the ‘traffickers’ who apparently exploit them. The chapter begins by examining examples of the dominant discourses drawn from media accounts or political texts depicting the trafficker and the trafficked. It then introduces the research and the context in which it was carried out. Next, it draws an anthropological picture of the experience of, and motivation behind, (exploitative) labour mobility in the artisanal gravel quarries of Abeokuta, Nigeria, and the tomato fields of Foggia, Italy. This section underlines that, far from coerced, the vast majority of apparent ‘trafficking victims’ in these two contexts are in fact willing labour migrants who move mainly for the money. Those who enable their work and movement are thus better understood as facilitators rather than as abusers. The chapter concludes with reflections on the hidden political economic back-story structuring these migrants’ experiences – a story hidden by the discourses that construct their mobility and labour as forced.
The dominant framing –‘coyotes’ and ‘caporali’
A coyote is a wolf-like animal native to North America. It has long been metaphorically associated with trickery, and has now become synonymous with human traffickers or smugglers deceiving migrants across borders and into exploitation. A caporale is a historical personage from feudal southern Italy. He was critical to the organisation of agricultural labour, and was long associated with coercion and exploitation. His name has now come to denote the archetypal labour trafficker, and he is synonymous with the extraction of forced labour – in English, the term means ‘gang-master’. Both of these figures are common to dominant anti-trafficking discourses. Each represents what Weitzer calls the ‘folk devil’: a lynchpin figure in the narrative that explains labour mobility and exploitation as the un-willed consequence of individual criminals preying on poverty and desperation.1 Though these folk devils populate anti-trafficking narratives worldwide, this chapter focuses on two classic examples: the ‘trafficker’ coyote working across the Benin-Nigeria border; and the ‘gangmaster’ caporale operating in southern Italy. For reasons of space, a discursive example is used for each figure – which will subsequently be contrasted with empirical data.
The first is that of the Benino-Nigerian trafficker and the exploitation to which he is central. He is featured below in an article published on France 24.2 That article focuses on the work of Beninese ‘child slaves’ toiling at the behest of their ‘trafficker’ in the gravel quarries of Abeokuta, Nigeria. These young workers are depicted as having been ‘sold’ across the border and into the brutal ‘bonded labour’ that is controlled by ‘trafficking gangs’. Their agency is denied, the possibility that their work is constructive for them is rejected, and the central figure of the criminal is clearly invoked. Notably, the depiction draws on respected UN and police sources, such as the Juvenile Protection Unit in Cotonou, to support its narrative – reflecting the way that media, State, and supra-State actors intertwine in the production of this dominant anti-trafficking discourse.3
Text Box 40.1 France 24 article
Benin’s child slaves working Nigeria’s quarries
Irenee, a skinny Beninese girl of 15, points to three mounds of earth: the graves of her friends who died of exhaustion here in the gravel quarries of Abeokuta, in south-western Nigeria.
UNICEF says about 5,000 children from neighboring Benin are labouring here, eight hours a day, six days a week.
In the sweltering heat and in the lashing rain, Irenee crushes chunks of granite rock, naked to the waist, her skin coated in a thick layer of grime. Failure to produce her quota, whatever the weather conditions, brings with it the risk of being beaten up.
In September 2003, when she was just 11, Irenee and 260 other children were freed by the Nigerian police and sent home, after a dispute between two rival trafficking gangs. But their parents sold them again to traffickers and they ended up back in Abeokuta, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Lagos.
The idea is that the child is sold into bonded labour for a fixed term – normally two or three years. At the end of the term he gets a bicycle and 100 or 200 dollars (68 to 136 euros). If he completes three terms his master may build a new hut for the child’s family.
Many of the families who sell their children into slavery are unapologetic. “How do you expect me to keep 37 children here when I have no income?” shrugg
ed Luc Gbogbohoundada, an octogenarian with eight wives. Gbogbohoundada lives in Za-Kpota, a village across the border in Benin about 150 kilometres from Abeokuta. Za-Kpota is notorious as the child-trafficking capital of the region …
Child trafficking in Benin has risen sharply in the past few years. A law cracking down on the practice was voted in January 2006 but has never been promulgated. “Clearly, as long as this law is not put into practice, some villages carry on with this trafficking without fear,” said Philippe Duhamel, the head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, in Benin … UNICEF estimates that some 7,000 children from Benin are currently working in Nigeria after being sold. Of that number, 5,000 are estimated to be in the quarries of Abeokuta.
Statistics published in June by the Juvenile Protection Police of Cotonou indicate that more than 10,000 children destined to be sold outside the country are intercepted and turned back every year at Benin’s borders.
Despite their very different social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, the dominant depiction of the gangmaster caporali in southern Italy remains strikingly similar. This can be seen in an article published in the Ecologist magazine,4 and still one of the major English-language media depictions of the gangmaster in Italian agriculture. Note the parallels with the France 24 piece: a lack of migrant worker agency, slave-like conditions of work, gangmaster violence, and official voices contributing to the elaboration of the narrative:
The lucrative trade is blighted by exploitation and abuse: workers … are forced to toil for up to 14 hours a day picking tomatoes in harsh conditions for meagre wages … under the control of a network of gangmasters who make excessive deductions … for transport, accommodation, food and other “services”.5
Whether coyote or caporale, trafficker or gangmaster, the core trends of the dominant anti-trafficking discourse apply across contexts. These ‘folk devil’ criminal figures represent the explanatory ‘container’ into which causality is often poured. Seemingly motivated by profit, and without conscience, their brutality apparently cowers these putative ‘innocents’ who would otherwise be ‘safe at home’. The folk devil thus serves to ‘flatten’ complex contextuality; it also naturalises the structural back-drop to every context. The rest of this chapter will de-naturalise that back-drop and give form to these contexts.
Research methods and context
The research underpinning this chapter was based on two simple hypotheses: 1) that such folk devil characters are generally reductive renditions of far more complicated realities; and 2) that their reductivity serves to conceal structures of political economic causality. The research itself took place in four stages, from 2007–2015.
First, the writer spent nine months (across two trips, in 2007 and 2010) in the Zou region of Southern Benin. In concert with a research assistant (an NGO worker from the locality with many years of anti-trafficking experience), four case study villages were selected from the two communes most associated with ‘trafficking’/migration to the artisanal gravel quarries of Abeokuta, Nigeria. There, current and former migrants to the quarries, individuals involved in the migrant labour network linking the region to the quarries, as well as village authorities, were purposively sampled. The principal research tools were semi-structured, open-ended interviews and focus group discussions. These were especially useful for gathering group-level data pertaining to community perceptions of migration, labour, and other socio-economic issues. The interviews were designed to develop a deeper understanding of how young migrants understand and experience their ‘life-worlds’, and to develop personal ‘migration histories’ with a number of respondents.
Second, in 2012, the writer spent one month in Abeokuta and the quarries themselves. This allowed the writer not only to triangulate what had been heard on the Beninese side of the border, but also to engage young labour migrants at their place of work and, thus, in the midst of their apparent trafficking and exploitation at the hands of their trafficker coyotes. The research in Abeokuta involved: 1) observing the living and working conditions of those in the quarries; and 2) interviewing young migrant labourers and other key actors engaged in the quarry economy, including labour leaders, land-owners, gravel purchasers, traders, transporters, and even the apparent ‘traffickers’. Thirty youths who were, or had been, involved in the migrant labour network linking the Zou to Abeokuta were interviewed. Third, in 2014, this data was substantiated with more gathered by the research assistant – who returned to the quarries to interview a further 50 young labourers.
The fourth stage of the research was the first stage that was comparative – in Foggia, Southern Italy. The research in Benin and Nigeria had convinced the writer that what was found there regarding the problems with the ‘folk devil narrative’ would be replicated elsewhere. As part of a larger research project, therefore, the Benin-Nigeria case was compared with a similarly paradigmatic case from Europe. This was the infamous tomato season in Foggia, Italy’s primary agricultural commune. The research was conducted by the writer and an experienced Italian research assistant, over the entire period of the summer tomato harvest in 2015. The research was ethnographic in nature and involved interviews, participant observation, and unstructured conversations – primarily in the most ‘infamous’ of Italy’s Southern agricultural migrant labour ‘Ghettos’: that of Rignano Garganico, 15km outside Foggia. There the living and working conditions of those involved in the tomato harvest, and apparently subject to the caporale’s labour trafficking, were observed; interviews were also conducted with representatives of almost all the ‘classes’ engaged in the local agricultural economy, including workers, labour leaders, land-owner farmers, business associations, respected social and economic figures in the Ghetto community, and so-called caporali ‘gang masters’ themselves.
Though the research in each site was comprehensive, it should be noted that the sample was purposive and therefore not random. It is consequently hard to determine how ‘representative’ any findings may be. Additionally, given that in each case the writer was researching illegal labour and mobility practices, it is possible that certain informants may have had an incentive to be dishonest, underplaying the ‘negative side’ of their stories. Nevertheless, a number of factors mitigate against these caveats and incline the writer to believe that these accounts possess a high degree of validity. First, a very large number of people were spoken to, and a high degree of consistency across their many responses was found. Second, in each site, the perspective of differently situated individuals was canvassed, allowing the writer to triangulate much of what was reported. Third, access was facilitated at each stage by trusted ‘insiders’. Fourth, each of the research assistants and the writer possessed the ‘habitus’ necessary to ease the building of rapport with the research participants. The writer’s Beninese research assistant was from the community under investigation, while the writer has, himself, spent large periods of time working in and around that community, which is very rare for a European. The writer’s Italian research assistant has, like the writer, spent many years working in West Africa, also very rare for the Europeans that the African migrant residents of Rignano Garganico encounter. People therefore warmed to the investigators with a speed and an ease that is highly unusual in this context. Finally, as suggested below, the findings in each case are supported by the few other anthropological or sociological studies to have been conducted in these contexts.
The realities of (exploitative) labour mobility
This section of the chapter presents the empirical findings. It concentrates on Abeokuta and on Foggia. First, it draws a sociological outline of the local quarry and tomato economies. Next, it allows the interviewees to ‘speak’. What they say makes clear that, for them, and in contrast to the dominant folk devil narrative, labour migration is both a willed and a constructive experience. This is fundamentally because it allows migrants to make money; though it also offers them the chance to enjoy other social and cultural ‘goods’. This section concludes by a
sking, as many of the interviewees have done, whether it would be better to view so-called coyotes and caporali more as facilitators, rather than as abusive, trafficker-like folk devils.
Abeokuta’s quarries6
Several key actors are involved in Abeokuta’s quarry economy. First, absentee Nigerian landlords own and rent out patches of land rich in the gravel that is ideal for use in the Lagosian construction industry. Second, female Nigerian gravel dealers lease this land from those landlords, and have contracts with them that date back two or three generations. These women represent the lynchpin in this economic system. They have come together to form a gravel dealers’ union, and contract with a third group – lorry owners and drivers, who operate under their own union – to have the extracted gravel transported to a fourth group: gravel purchasers in Lagos. Prices for gravel, and for the services rendered by each of the links in this chain, are predominantly set through negotiation between the unions representing the latter three groups.
The gravel dealers contract with a fifth group: Beninese ‘bosses’ (the ‘traffickers’ in the dominant discourse) who provide the migrant labour used to extract the gravel. These bosses have previously worked six-year apprenticeships under their own bosses until being ‘liberated’. Liberation means that they are given licence by the hierarchy of the Beninese expatriate community – which provides and manages the labour-force in Abeokuta – to hire their own groups of labourers. The labourers extract the gravel according to the directions of their bosses. It is the migrant teenage youths involved in this work who are officially identified as ‘trafficked’ (Figure 40.1).
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