"Small village/large hell": Cocaine & incarceration in Lima, Peru
Item
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Title
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"Small village/large hell": Cocaine & incarceration in Lima, Peru
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9f36ee92ae32:11918
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identifier
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12593
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Creator
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Campos, Stephanie,
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Contributor
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Leith Mullings
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | Latin American history
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Abstract
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The Establecimiento Penitenciario de Mujueres de Chorrillos (commonly referred to by its previous name, Santa Monica) in Lima, Peru was built in 1952 as a reformatory to hold 300 women but by June 2012 it held over 3,500, many of them serving sentences for drug trafficking. This is the largest female prison in this Andean nation. An intersectional analysis of prisoners' narratives collected during fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2009 demonstrates two inter-related processes. First, inequality was produced and reproduced inside this prison through the interconnections of race, gender, class and citizenship. Prisoners' daily lives and access to resources were constrained by the same inequalities that led to their incarceration. Multiple divisions among women mirrored national and globalized structural inequalities and citizenship in particular emerged as a dividing force. Santa Monica's stratification system was continuously reproduced as prisoners competed for life dependent resources.;Secondly, I show the ways in which women's labor was the linchpin between the transnational cocaine commodity chain and the prison. Santa Monica transformed into a place to "dispose of" low-level workers of the transnational cocaine commodity chain. Because the majority of these workers were women, their labor became the bond between illegal cocaine and the prison. Those who worked as drug couriers and minor retailers were laboring at the riskiest and most visible jobs to police surveillance. They were arrested when they were no longer needed or once they become a threat to the day-to-day operation of trafficking drugs while the (mostly male) middle managers above them remained in the background. Women's labor therefore created a symbiotic relationship between the prison and this chain where each side helped the other grow and expand. Once incarcerated, these women faced a hierarchy that shaped options for survival as they served their sentences.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
