Conflict, Crime, and Cross-Border Migration: The Effects of Restrictive Border Regimes on People-Centred and National Security in Latin America

This paper examines how restrictive border regimes influence security in Latin American borderlands characterised by high levels of conflict, crime, and mass migration. We argue that restrictive border regimes (understood as policies, procedures, and practices that seek to limit undesired cross-border mobility of people) in contested borderlands have detrimental effects on both people-centred and national security. This, we argue, is the case in particular in their extreme form, blanket border closures. We explain this by the unintended empowerment of actors that challenge state authority such as violent non-state groups (people smugglers, organised criminals, insurgents) and corrupt state officials eroding the state from within its institutions. The paper draws on empirical data collected during fieldwork between 2012 and 2020. The Colombia-Venezuela border is the priority case of this paper. Complementing the in-depth analysis of this case, we conduct a plausibility probe in order to gather insights that allow us to test the generalizability of our argument and advance theory building: Analysing the case of the Guatemala-Mexico border as a shadow case, the paper identifies converging and diverging patterns in a context with comparable patterns of mass migration, crime, and conflict, as well as restrictive border governance.