Nico Tassi

Nico Tassi is Professor and Director of the Postgraduate Center of Development Studies (CIDES) at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia. He has dedicated much of his research to urban indigenous groups in Bolivia, focusing on their relationship with modernity, the state, and the market. He is the author of several books and articles on topics such as religion and material culture, politics, and popular economies.

My field setting

My research focuses on Bolivian popular economies, which over the last two decades have been unprecedentedly booming. Not only have they expanded their radius of operation establishing markets and productive clusters throughout the country and in some major cities in South America but they have also developed a strong connection with Chinese factories and entrepreneurs. Although these popular economies have developed deep-rooted normative frameworks and mechanisms of conflict resolution, their unexpected boom has been envisaged as a consequence of not informal but illegal and criminal activities.

My key research questions

What are the ideas, practices and conceptions of extortion among the guilds of popular economies in Bolivia? What is the relation between popular economies and the state / judicial system? Does it involve a relation of protection or one of violence? How is the word extortion used to refer to them? How have these popular economies been associated to crime? What are the effects of such association?

My research findings

When I looked for the concept of extortion among kinship-based popular guilds historically associated with informal and opaque economic practices under the radar of the law, I found that they place the main threats of extortion in external groups and actors 'protected' by the law. The popularisation and vernacularisation of the discourse of extortion appears to have also engendered a potent drive for regulation and enforcement specifically directed towards groups such as the ones I am studying. Large and formal enterprises, whose control of the market has been challenged by these opaque economies, have fueled a process of political lobbying and the criminalization of popular economies. This has resulted in the militarization of popular markets and verbal and physical attacks on the economic competition posed by these informal and 'criminal' actors. In other words, I found extortion in the form of economic regulation and enforcement and in the protection of certain economic actors. This process has led to a war over the defense of legal markets and an increasing criminalization of popular economic practices that were once considered legal or legitimate.

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