Typology of bodies trafficked from south america and the caribbean to chile

Abstract

In this study, we construct a typology of trafficked bodies of clandestine migrant women in transit from South America and the Caribbean to Chile, approaching the subject based on the anthropology of the body and human mobility. We used several methods to construct this typology. We conducted collaborative ethnographic monitoring between 2018 and 2020, consisting of three elements: 1) an ethnography of migrant smuggling on the Peru-Chile and Bolivia-Chile borders, 2) in-depth interviews with the research collaborators, and 3) legal and psychosocial accompaniment. We organized an intervention involving spontaneous theatre in which the collaborators took part. Finally, we reviewed the judicial sentence of the so-called “Operation Desert,” which describes the facts involved in a case of migrant smuggling. The body definition on which this work is based was provided by philosophical, aesthetic, and feminist theories. The discussion of the results also focuses on critical analyses of the law of dominance through bodies and the racialization of migrant bodies. The main conclusions are that trafficking produces new corporalities, that the historical and social construction of bodies reveals women’s exposure to particular risks in trafficking, that clandestine transit is always forced, and that the density of transit affects bodies in their different dimensions. The originality of this research is the incorporation of interdisciplinary elements to address a complex issue, whereby we collected, on the one hand, the experiences of migration transit and destination while, on the other, the study included the active participation of the people involved. This work has been framed within the approaches of situated research and academic activism.