This talk reconstructs thirteen hours at a clandestine airstrip in the Tapajós basin, where cocaine, gold and mercury circulate through shared infrastructure, personnel and security arrangements. Drawing on ethnographic research and documentary sources, it examines how intermediaries negotiate legality through selective documentation, and how transport, advances and debts connect workers to distant centers of command. The airstrip brings into view the connections between activities usually treated separately as drug trafficking, illegal mining and environmental crime. Taking this single site as a point of departure, the talk asks how extraction depends on the selective presence of the state and on arrangements that coordinate labor while limiting obligations to those who sustain these economies.

 

This event is cosponsored by the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication