Conscription or constriction: Military policing of urban youth

Participation of the military in domestic plural policing

Studying order-making practices imposed by military forces expands our understanding of state policing which is not limited to the work of the constabulary forces. In fact, the concept of “plural policing” (Jones and Newburn, 2006; Loader, 2000), which has grown in popularity since the 1990s, denotes the variety of actors, arrangements, and technologies that converge in the establishment of order-making practices in our societies. The expansion of surveillance mechanisms such as CCTV, drone patrolling, and big data analytics means that much of daily urban life is monitored, measured, and used for detecting crime and security threats. Increasingly, nonpolice actors are involved in fighting crime or administering order, including private security companies, community policing structures, migration and revenue specialized forces, and military policing units (Kyed and Albrecht, 2015). Not only has the array of policing actors widened, but also cooperative arrangements between police and nonpolice actors are more common, particularly in regard to security threats that pose challenges to governments, including terrorism and organized crime. At the same time, an array of state and nonstate actors exert de facto territorial control and establish conflict resolution mechanisms which may operate in conjunction or in competition with formal policing practices.

The growing participation of military forces in domestic policing is paradigmatic of plural policing but it is also connected to a broader process of militarization of policing. Newburn (2008: 835) points out that this trend is tangible in three interconnected processes: first, the increased adoption of military mindsets, technologies, and equipment by the police; second, the participation of military forces in domestic policing; and third, the blurring of the boundaries between police and military. The rise and expansion of paramilitary police units such as SWAT teams and the normalization of their role in urban policing, as well as the adoption of military weaponry and technology by police units, including automatic and semiautomatic weapons and combat outfits, have been the object of academic research over the last two decades (Kappeler and Kraska, 2015; Kraska, 2007; Kraska and Kappeler, 1997). However, the functions performed by military forces in domestic policing around the globe still deserve further exploration. This is especially relevant in Latin America, where research is inconclusive about the benefits and costs of the substantial military involvement in domestic policing. Pion-Berlin’s (2005: 8) argument at the beginning of the 2000s that the participation of military forces in domestic operations can be conducted “without risk to democracy” may seem tenuous as extrajudicial killings by the armed forces mushroomed in Colombia, the military participated in the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, and the imbrication of military forces in the Venezuelan government has led to numerous cases of abuse of authority.

A key element of the debate is whether the militarization of policing is a growing trend or a fluctuating process present since the origins of police forces. Graham (2009: 384) describes the “new urban militarism” as a set of ideas, practices, norms, techniques, and cultural arenas “through which the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures of cities—along with their civilian populations—are now rendered as the main targets and threats within a limitless “battlespace”.” He argues that warfare has been progressively transferred to everyday urban life, taking shape in policy debates, urban landscapes, surveillance technologies, physical infrastructure, and urban popular culture. Situating the battleground in the city means characterizing the urban space as a site of subversion, dissent, protest, and resistance, but above all problematizing it as a breeding ground for challenges to national security. The progression of the new military urbanism leads to the normalization of the military presence—its values, personnel, infrastructure, operations—in the city, its blending with civilian life, and the legitimation of the use of force to tackle disorder and uprisings against authority.

However, military forces in many parts of the world have traditionally played a crucial role in domestic policing, either by official designation or ad hoc intervention. Lucia Zedner (2006) points out that new ways of policing mark a discontinuity with the modern criminal justice system, but keep affinities with ancient, premodern, policing styles. Her historical analysis conceives of the police—the constabulary state agency—as a recent and possibly transitory institution of policing which more broadly entails the activity of preventing and controlling crime and imposing public order. In a similar way, Leichtman (2008) offers a nuanced view of police militarization in the United States, describing how the military model has long coexisted with the professional model of police, and “recent” changes are rather rooted in original police reform proposals, including the hierarchical organization, the warlike rhetoric, the uniforms, and the drill methods. The War on Terror and the War on Drugs have not brought about a new phenomenon, but rather have revived core military principles anchored in the origins of police work.

Military forces have traditionally, not exceptionally, been involved in policing tasks during the greater part of Colombia’s history. Vargas-Velásquez (2008) points out that in contrast with European armies that developed in response to external threats to national security, the Colombian army was born and developed from the notion of internal “public order.” Therefore, its defined enemies have but with rare exceptions been domestic. Nineteenth-century civil wars were sparked by partisan fights or regional–national struggles, while twentieth-century military objectives included social protests, liberal peasant guerrillas and, more recently, insurgent armed groups of left-wing guerrillas and neoconservative paramilitaries. This has brought the military closer to a domestic policing role, while the police have been progressively militarized. The internal armed conflict, the lack of confidence in the police, given corruption scandals and inefficiencies, and the “war on drugs” have served as justifications for blurring the boundaries between military and police in the maintenance of public order.

Additionally, the United States has played a key role in fostering the participation of the military forces in domestic policing activities in Latin America. The Plan Colombia and other military cooperation programs provided substantial resources for the fight against illicit drugs and illegal armed groups, while reinforcing the reductionist view of the armed conflict as a mafia problem by mixing counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics approaches. These plans have produced two worrisome outcomes. First, they have deepened the militarization of the state as they entail a commitment from the Colombian Government to invest large proportions of its budget in expanding the military sector. Second, aid programs foster the participation of military forces in domestic policing work and increase their autonomy from civilian authority, especially when it comes to the war on drugs and the protection of mining and agro-industrial investments in conflict-affected regions. As Bowman (2000) and Cassman (2002) affirm, direct participation of the military in domestic policing activities is simultaneously forbidden in the US by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and promoted in Latin America in an attempt to protect geopolitical and economic interests.

Defining informal military policing

For analytical purposes, I adopt Brodeur’s (2010) definition of policing as the use of nonnegotiated force with limited intensity, but unlimited scope, to maintain a certain social order. This concept enables differentiating the essential action of policing from the work of the police: much but not all of the work of the police is actual policing, and the police are a major but not the only actor involved in policing. In addition, I distinguish between official and informal forms of policing. Official policing refers to activities that are publicly acknowledged and explicitly outlined in law or executive orders. For instance, official military policing entails activities such as counter-narcotic operations or the “recuperation” of slums from local criminal organizations, as their mandate is explicit, legal, and public, despite their eventual degradation into extra-legal use of force. In turn, informal policing is neither legal nor publicly acknowledged. Informal policing might be intensive, inflicting lethal harm to the point of killing or torturing, such as kneecapping or extrajudicial executions, or extensive, inflicting limited violence across a wider population spectrum with a predominantly preventive objective. Military policing is not restricted to crime prevention and law enforcement; it also includes an often nationalistic and conservative notion of public order.

Whereas intensive military policing focuses on counter-insurgency, the “war on drugs,” or the “war on terrorism,” extensive informal military policing focuses on disorderly attitudes, subversive thoughts, and unpatriotic feelings. These foci of concern are well encapsulated in the “youth problem,” an expression used by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2004) to describe the challenge of turning disenfranchised youth into responsible citizens in the context of postapartheid South Africa. The youth embody the contradiction of a system that portrays a discourse of inclusiveness in the market economy, an appeal to identity representations, and a promise of endless possibilities, while simultaneously failing to provide opportunities for studying and working without going into crippling debt or settle for miserable wages. The youth has been created as a political—rather than a chronological—category of future aspirations but present threats.

Departing from the conventional wisdom that state violence is a sign of failure for democratic regimes, Arias and Goldstein (2010) collect a series of cases to argue that violence is an integral part of the operation of institutions and governance in Latin America. Moreover, they suggest that there is a “violent pluralism” where state and nonstate actors operate through competition, negotiation, or collaboration to maintain social control. In fact, informal policing in Colombia is not only performed by police and military forces but also by illegal actors such as left-wing guerrillas, the successors of right-wing paramilitaries, and organized groups connected to illegal economies. Taussig (2005) has produced rich ethnographic work on how paramilitary groups control youth through a range of actions, from soft threats to limpieza social (mass murdering of “undesirable people”). Less known, however, is how the military forces discipline youth through unofficial methods. As I will show next, boundaries between correctional boot camps and military service in Colombia are blurred, much like the boundaries between zero-tolerance policing and military raids. The “juvenilization of illegality appearances” (Salcedo, 2014: 137) provides the discursive backbone for extra-legal disciplinary actions toward young people and its normalization within society.

The segregated urban backdrop for the spatial analysis of batidas

The occurrence of military raids is not uniform in space and time, and it seems to be connected to the segregated urban landscape of Bogota. To understand those patterns, it is first necessary to point out a few historical aspects of the urbanization process in the city. The colonial organization imposed during the Spanish occupation was based on a differential arrangement: indigenous populations were forced to establish villages organized in draughts (pueblos de indios), while cities were reserved for Spanish populations and creoles (ciudades and villas). Although arrangements varied across provinces, cities generally had an internal organization that represented a divine order as the central plaza was dominated by the Church and the Town Hall, with the social position of residents reflected in their proximity to said plaza (Bäbr and Borsdorf, 2005). In Santa Fe, Bogota’s city center today, the structure was mainly a single agglomeration surrounded by indigenous villages that were formerly part of Bacata, the Muisca indigenous area.

After independence in 1819 and with the demographic growth of the 19th century, the boundaries of the city, nearby parishes, and surrounding indigenous villages dissolved, consolidating a “dual city” structure (Robledo-Gómez and Rodríguez-Santana, 2008). From the 1920s, with the push for industrialization through the policy of import substitution, new workers’ neighborhoods were created around the central business district, while affluent classes moved to the northeast of the city. From the 1940s, suburbanization extended into the south and west peripheral areas of Bogota. Rural–urban migration rose, driven by economic opportunities in the cities and forced displacement from rural areas caused by the internal armed conflict. This trend continues, consolidating a fragmented urban landscape in Bogota with strongly differentiated socio-spatial divisions.

Spatial differentiation is reinforced by the institutionalized socio-economic stratification of land plots (estratos) introduced in the 1980s as a local planning tool for cross-subsidies in utilities’ tariffs. Although originally aimed at reducing social inequalities, estratos do not accurately indicate wealth and have rather become an endogenous social segregation instrument (Uribe-Mallarino, 2008). In fact, estratos, which range from 0, the lowest, to 6, highest, are popularly used as socio-demographic categories in Bogota. Residential segregation is further reinforced by thriving semi-private spaces such as gated communities, shopping malls, and country clubs, where a large part of socialization takes place. Accounts of the “city walls” in Caldeira’s (2000) study in Sao Paulo are applicable to the fragmented urban structure of Bogota, where physical barriers are reinforced by the talk of crime and stigmatization of the impoverished peripheral settlements of the city.

Batidas at the margins of working-class neighborhoods

As revealed in Figure 1, batidas were concentrated in low-income areas in the South and West of the city, especially in the vicinities of stations and terminals of the mass transportation system TransMilenio. A significant number of raids were conducted in stations at major intersections such as Jimenez and Ricaurte, and end-of-line stations that connect with “feeder” buses serving peripheral neighborhoods in Portal Sur, Portal Américas, Portal Veinte de Julio, and Portal Usme. Military forces tended to carry out batidas early in the morning and at night when the youth are going to or returning from work or school. Among the victims I met during fieldwork, one was caught in station Jimenez and taken to the truck that was parked around the corner at Caracas street at 8 am; another was stopped in Portal Sur and transported within the system to Military Cantonment No. 2 (Veinte de Julio); and a third one was detained when he was walking with his younger brother in the vicinity of Molinos station and then escorted by foot to Military Cantonment No. 52 (Artillery Battalion).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Batidas militares in Bogota (2015).

Although formally universal, compulsory military service is in practice fulfilled by the poor: 98% of conscripts belong to low or medium-low socio-economic groups (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2014). Likewise, victims of batidas militares are almost exclusively working-class males of conscription age. I argue that the selective targeting of young boys in low-income neighborhoods is not the result of class-based individual decisions by soldiers. Instead, this is a case of institutional discrimination (McCrudden, 1982), where individual soldiers do not necessarily exercise rational discriminatory choices because the rules and procedures of an organization or the wider social system deliver a prestructured choice.

Institutional arrangements and legal dispositions about military service play a substantial role in the result of batidas exclusively affecting the poor. The legal framework for recruitment defines population groups exempted from service, e.g. victims of the armed conflict, only children, indigenous peoples, people with permanent disabilities. In principle, this follows protective principles for especially vulnerable and often low-income populations. However, the Recruitment Act also exempts the middle class as a whole: students in higher education are granted a postponement of service and ultimately are given the option to pay a compensation fee to avoid serving entirely. Given that a large proportion of working-class youth are not able to access higher education, this results in a legally biased selection of potential conscripts. As an activist confirms,

Look, in estratos 5 and 6 there are no batidas. That is for a simple reason, not because the army is evil and wants to go where the poor are, but because the law, in practice, makes boys from high estratos free from military service. Why? Because they are the ones who go to college. And the law admits that those who attend college can avoid military service. So why would a soldier go catch some random boys when he needs conscripts? He may go into those areas [high socio-economic strata] if he is instructed to do so, but he will just bring kids who will be released because they are not required to do military service. (Hugo, personal interview, 30 July 2015)

The enforcement of institutional discrimination is not abstract; it is materialized in urban spaces through the enactment of borders between the youth who are free to move and those who are targeted for forced conscription. Military trucks are often stationed in “bottleneck roads” that are the only entrance and exit paths connecting the city center with populous deprived neighborhoods in the peripheral city hills. These streets are prime locations to stop and detain young boys who must pass through in order to go to work or study, or to return home at night. Examples include the Avenida Ciudad de Cali in Patio Bonito (Kennedy), the Autopista Sur–Carrera 7 in Bosa and Soacha, and Avenida Boyacá Sur in Ciudad Bolívar. This operational logic explains why most batidas do not occur inside the most deprived areas (Estratos 0 and 1, in the peripheral and hilly zones), but at the margins of Estratos 2 or 3 on bottleneck paths. Usually, soldiers stop pedestrians passing by to request their military ID and initiate the conscription process. In the past, soldiers used to intercept transiting buses and detain passengers without military ID—three victims I interviewed were detained in that manner. However, with the expansion of TransMilenio to peripheral neighborhoods, soldiers now use end-of-line portal stations and high transit stations located in bottleneck paths to conduct recruitment operations.

The management of mobilities and flows, as argued by Christensen and Albrecht in the “Introduction” section of this Special Issue, is the central aspect of batidas militares as an order-making practice. The “spatial–temporal rhythms” or “temporal topographies” of urban life (Nielsen, 2017) influence bordering work. The physical and social structure of the city is not a mere canvas for policing; on the contrary, it guides policing operations according to the concentration of potential threats and objects of control in time and space. In the next section, I analyze the connection between the spatial–temporal and victimhood patterns of batidas with the meaning that policing actors attribute to them.

Punitive containment of the dangerous classes

Based on the study of urban marginality in Brazil, Wacquant (2008) proposes the concept of “punitive containment” to refer to a contemporary state strategy to manage dispossessed and impoverished urban populations. He argues that the withdrawal of the state from socio-economic domains as a result of neoliberalization and de-regulation is compensated with a greater state security apparatus and criminal justice system. Expanding the penal state is meant to contain the urban malaise and disorder generated by substandard labor conditions, the dismantling of social welfare, and the weakened supply of public goods such as education, healthcare, and housing. The change in state–society relationships, from social treatment to punitive containment of the working class, entails a recasting of would-be-felons as enemies of the nation, aggressive and violent policing, and, if necessary, circumventing the law to enforce order instead of law enforcement. Such an approach builds upon intersected stereotypes of class and race, as well as on the categorization of working-class neighborhoods as dangerous zones. Applying this analytical framework to the rise of the penal state during the democratization process in Mexico, (Müller, 2013) finds that the punitive democracy’s exclusionary tendencies are reinforced on the urban margins by informal practices of law enforcement agencies.

Selective conscription is consistent with punitive containment and operates as an institution for the maintenance of social order in Colombia. Since the origins of the republic, the ideal of universal military service was advocated as a means to ensure the participation of all citizens—male, given its patriarchal origin—in building the nation-state. In practice, however, indigenous, mulattos, zambos, and blacks vastly filled the conscripted ranks, and the military service became a social reproduction mechanism that legitimized and deepened social inequalities (Dotor-Robayo, 2012; Rodríguez-Hernández, 2008). After centuries of partial miscegenation that maintained class divisions, the ranks of the military are still filled by the impoverished classes. Indeed, military service can be understood as an imposed rite de passage for working-class youth into adulthood: learning to accept orders without contestation, suffering hardship, and preparing for a precarious life (Rodríguez-Hernández, 2008: 87–88). Thus, conscription is useful for the capitalist economic system. It produces indoctrinated working-class members, for whom resilience is inculcated as a virtue, including a readiness to follow orders and acquiesce to authority figures.

The punitive containment of urban marginality also has a productive function, in Foucauldian terms. Through military service, coerced labor can be exploited and its surplus appropriated by the state and public–private security assemblages. Echoing Herbert Gans’ (1972) proposition about the “positive functions of poverty,” the criminalization of poverty goes hand in hand with the creation of economic surplus for army providers (e.g. camouflaged uniforms, meal provisions, equipment, weaponry) and army clients (e.g. extractive companies that establish deals with the army to obtain dedicated protection). For example, many of the interviewees who were arbitrarily conscripted through batidas were assigned to battalions providing dedicated security services to extractive industries. Forced recruitment lowers operational costs of a heterogeneous security assemblage comprised of the military, private contractors, and multinational companies. Targeting working-class youngsters through batidas has the two-fold purpose described in this subsection: the positive functions of appropriating labor surplus to pursue the interests of security industry agents and indoctrinating the poor into servile economic relationships, as well as the negative function of containing the disenfranchised populations through coercion and preempting social disorder, delinquency, or unrest.

Forced conscription as a moral reformist project

Batidas militares obtained popular tolerance by appealing to feelings of fear and perceptions of insecurity that provide the popular support for punitive containment. Yet, more importantly, such actions were legitimized on the grounds that they serve the interests of individual draftees who would have the chance to become decent people, far away from vices and street life. The military service is, after all, the ideal boot camp for instilling discipline, respect for authority, and hard work. The sense of unpredictability and seemingly permanent crisis in urban space helps to reaffirm the public’s fears of the urban youth as potential problem generators. Depicting youth in terms of uncontained vigor and unruly behavior, in the context of a propagated perception of rising crime, fear, and sense of impunity, makes them the ideal target for disciplinary measures under the guise of preserving public order. As Giroux (2003) argues, domestic militarization is specifically targeted at young people in public spaces, who are no longer considered “at risk,” but “the risk.”

Crucially, the military forces embark on bordering practices embracing a moral reformist approach. This aspiration entails an acknowledgement of the wrongs committed during batidas, such as abuses of authority and violence, but also its justification in the name of preventing the greater evil of disorderly young people. Sykes and Matza (1957) observed that moral neutralization often involved the distinction between some social groups who can be victimized while others cannot. Moral reformism is built upon such a distinction to justify arbitrary conscription for young males who are regarded as weed smokers, street idlers, or lawbreakers. As such, soldiers adopt moralist narratives to promote the legitimacy of their work. This position follows the rationale of moral crusaders (Becker, 1963: 148) who see their function in society as a “holy mission” and adopt a self-righteous absolute ethics with humanitarian overtones. An excerpt from my fieldnotes illustrates this rationale:

Some boys were leaning their heads out from the rooftop of the terrace in the DIM [Military Cantonment] 2. They noticed that I was assisting other boys who were arbitrarily conscripted, arguing with the soldiers at the entrance gate. Five of them gave me their names, the time and place where they were caught, their personal ID number, and told me that Corporal Vega was one of the soldiers involved in the batida last night. I had already been in discussion with Cpl. Vega and Cpl. Hierro a few times now, and they have said they did not conduct batidas, but only fulfilled their legal mandate of taking remisos [avoiders] to the recruitment offices. When I asked them again about the boys who were leaning out from the rooftop terrace, Cpl. Hierro replied:

 – Where do you think we caught them? Do you think they were playing in the park at 10 p.m.? Many mums ask us to take their sons who are doing nothing the whole day, spending their time in bad habits. Here in the Army you come and learn a lot of things, you learn to obey. What are we supposed to do, leave them there?

 – How about calling the police? –I asked.

 – But what do they do? –He replied. The police take them to the UPJ [temporary pre-trial detention facility]; they keep them there for a few hours, and release them. Here we do not mistreat them, the Army is not as it used to be, here they get an education, they eat well, they learn to behave.

 – But that type of recruiting is illegal. Why not giving them a registration appointment instead?

 – We give those appointment slips but nobody pays attention to them. And then, we have cases where a mum begs us to take their son away to military service but we have to release him. We had a case where the boy used to beat his mother. What happens if we don’t take him away? If we don’t take him, he goes once to the UPJ, he gets released a few hours later, and he keeps beating her when he is back home. (Fieldnotes, conversations with Cpl. Hierro and Cpl. Vega, 19 February 2015)

Civilian reformation through military training is not a new project. Since the 19th century the army and the navy functioned as an institution of punishment for vagrants: delinquents and prisoners in jail were released and conscripted straight away (Flórez-Bolívar and Solano, 2010). The military was designed as a correctional institution, based on discipline and habit formation, one that could serve as the mechanism to reintegrate undisciplined idlers and social misfits, and transform them into “useful” persons to the state and to themselves (Jurado-Jurado, 2004). The imaginary of the military as a correctional institution to produce “upstanding men” is still entrenched in the collective Colombian psyche (Rodríguez-Hernández, 2008). Using the military service as a reformatory treatment for young people is akin to the contemporary preemptive policing strategy of tackling the youth problem through correctional boot camps: custodial facilities usually hosting first offenders, designed to provide a culture of discipline and law-abidance through physical exercise and drill training (Feeley and Simon, 1992). Instead of correctional boot camps, military service operates itself as a preemptive policing practice.

Military–police cooperation: The perspective of policing actors

Batidas are an expression of informal policing enabled by the cooperative work of the military and the police. The first linkage is pragmatic: the police’s detention quotas to prove efficiency contribute to the achievement of the military’s conscription quotas. This is especially evident when batidas take place at the exit of UPJ or URI (police-managed facilities for temporary pretrial detentions), where youth released by the police are immediately detained by the military. The second layer of cooperation is strategic. Many of the youth taken to the UPJ are caught smoking weed in parks, gate-crashing into the public mass transport system, fist fighting in bars, rough sleeping in the streets, or similar vague “anti-social behavior,” for which there is no penalty of imprisonment. In these cases, however, military conscription can be applied as an extra-legal punishment. Military conscription thus complements the police task of cleaning up the streets and ensures longer, swifter, and reformatory deprivation of liberty lasting up to two years.

However, cooperation among state forces is not always seamless. Batidas may have been instrumental for zero-tolerance policing, but they increasingly received media attention and, occasionally, community opposition. Consequently, police officers were less inclined to cooperate blindly with this kind of recruitment operation. This excerpt from my notes describes an encounter with a policeman in a working-class area next to the neighborhood where I lived during fieldwork:

I arrived at 6:00 pm to the CAI Bellavista. After an engaging conversation with the policeman on call about the daily perks of his job, I inquired about the relationship between police and military in the neighborhood. He told me that in his patrolling area collaboration was limited. Sometimes it happened towards the western peripheral border, because soldiers conducted patrols in those slums, so the police sent a couple of patrolmen on motorbike to accompany the operation and take photos. Cooperation also happened, less often, around three times per year, when there was some serious incident like a bomb explosion that required the deployment of all units, including the police, the CTI [Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General], and military units. Relationships with the military used to be more frequent concerning military recruitment – he changed subject. That was no longer the case because batidas had been prohibited and they could get into trouble: “We can be sued with a tutela [writ of protection] and that is a mess!” he exclaimed. Also, he felt that batidas were tough for people, especially when detainees were taken to the UPJ [Temporary Detention Facility]. He illustrated his point: “Say we take a normal guy to the UPJ, someone who has problems with his wife and she doesn’t want to see him at home, and she calls the police. We take him, the guy spends the night at the UPJ and when he leaves he is taken up into a truck to do military service. What a pain!” Formerly the collaboration was closer because – he affirmed, in a natural tone – “we know who the thieves and the rats are over there, so we stop them in the street and ask them for their identity cards, and then soldiers take them away to do military service in an attempt to bring them to their senses”. (Fieldnotes, 9 February 2015)

Sometimes, additional informal incentives helped to smooth out coordination among state agents, as recounted by a former regular soldier:

They [police officers] find boys in the streets, take them to the UPJ and when they wake up next day, the truck is in front. And they start like “jump in, jump in!” The policeman asks for your ID card and it boils down to this [mimicking with his hands, passing on the card one hand to the other]. And then soldiers repay the policeman; they give him something. (Alfonso, personal interview, 17 February 2015)

Cooperation is thus not only instrumental for carrying out batidas militares per se as the police have competences that military forces lack to carry out stop-and-frisks and detentions, but also for discouraging the reporting of abuse of authority, thus suppressing the accumulation of evidence of state abuse. If necessary, the police use their discretionary powers to threaten and intimidate those who denounce or oppose batidas. This finding is consistent with Waddington and Wright (2008) in that “police owe primary loyalty to the state that they are duty-bound to protect and when that state is threatened they defend it with all means necessary” (476). In other words, the police have an interest in persecuting criminal transgressions unless the state itself is the perpetrator.

Batidas militares as bordering work

The hunt for conscripts in working-class neighborhoods and public transport nodes becomes a policing function that enacts territoriality, restricting access and movement. As set out in Christensen and Albrecht’s “Introduction” section of this Special Issue, practices of bordering are relational: On the one hand, they are enacted when soldiers define a conscription location informed by the city structure and choose who should be stopped and who should be let go depending on their tacit knowledge of dangerousness and their affective orientations. On the other hand, bordering comes to existence when community members perceive military operations and assign them a meaning. For working-class young people, some borders are enacted according to the location of military checkpoints that denote temporary no-go areas characterized by the presence of soldiers and military trucks. Importantly, bordering practices operate differently for different racial and socio-economic groups, and as such produce differentiated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

While I have concentrated so far on the rationale adopted by policing actors, in this section I address how that logic combines with the perspective of those being policed to effectively create borders. To do so, it is first useful to understand the links between a social action, i.e. informal military policing, and the production of urban space. Lefebvre (1991) proposed a dialectics of social space, arguing that space is a social product created by social action in a historical moment which simultaneously influences societal practices because it is a “means of production.” The city, with its particular urban morphology and spatial differentiation, operates as a backdrop for batidas militares: the centrality of the mass transport network, the social segregation reinforced by estratos, and the routine flows of people accordingly inform the decision-making of batidas by policing actors. At the same time, informal policing creates the city: batidas militares transform certain urban spaces into no-go places for working-class youth and create borders materialized in checkpoints and military trucks. The physical and social structure of Bogota is a productive force for the uneven spatial distribution of batidas, while informal military policing reinforces its socially segregated structure.

While “bordering” may seem to be an exclusively spatial term, in reality it combines space and time. Drawing from Hägerstrand time–space geography (see Pred, 1977), Fyfe (1992) has shown the importance of understanding the spatial and temporal sequences and settings of police work. Bordering is no exception. Batidas typically take place during rush hour when there is a high flux of young workers and students, and they are common only during a select number of weeks in a year, especially a few days before and after the quarterly conscription days for regular soldiers. A young boy I interviewed told me that he learned to recognize when the “batidas season” started, because it happened with some regularity during the year. The use of that term also denotes the normality many working-class people assign to such informal recruitment practices, and its association with natural hazards, reading them almost as inexorable well-known threats that people wish to avoid.

The symbolic and material borders created through informal military policing inform the decision-making of working-class young people who, in turn, design their avoidance or adaptation strategies. Understanding and learning to recognize patterns of policing through batidas became a survival strategy to cope with the ever-present risk of being stopped, frisked, detained, and irregularly conscripted. In the words of Ruben, a resident of a hilly peripheral neighborhood:

I live very close to Meissen and there are many batidas there. There is the main road [he points to Avenida Boyacá] where many buses go in and out, basically there’s only that access. They always recruited down the road because that’s where buses come down packed from the hills. That is where they catch the lads; I knew it was a recruitment spot. So since I turned eighteen, I always watched from the hill: are they recruiting? No. OK, then I can grab my bus to go to work or do my things. (Ruben, personal interview, 25 February 2015)

Performing batidas: Profiling, patrolling, capturing, and locking up

Batidas create invisible but perceivable borders that shape the experience of young people in the city. The most salient materialization of this bordering practice is the military truck in the street. It functions as a floating signifier in the way Lévi-Strauss proposed: “it is a symbol in its pure state, apt to be charged with any symbolic content” (Mehlman, 1972: 23). Floating signifiers enable contradictory meanings, as the signified emerges from people’s diverse life experiences. Military trucks in public space are not uncommon in Bogota, given the presence of several military facilities in the city. Truly remarkable, however, is the contradictory meaning they have for people sharing the same city at the same moment in history. For nonpotential victims such as middle- and upper-class families living in wealthy neighborhoods, the military truck is part of the state security apparatus, a symbol of the state’s protective function. For the young boys who have undergone arbitrary conscription or experienced it in nearby social circles, it is a threat to personal safety and freedom. One youngster in Bosa told me “you are afraid; you go out and spot a truck, whether military or not, and you are already hiding, like ‘Goddamnit, a truck!’.” For the majority of working-class people, military trucks and recruitment operations are part of the urban landscape. The military truck operates not only as a vehicle but also as a mobile sign, carrying different signifiers as it travels from North to South, from the center to the popular neighborhoods in the hills.

The imagery of batidas with the checkpoints, military trucks, soldiers, and frisk operations endow them with a security allure that normalize them as instruments to ensure public order. Batidas thus function as a social institution for disciplining populations in peripheral neighborhoods, proactively “weeding” streets from youth in poverty, preempting their engagement with disorderly behavior. The association of youth in poverty with potential security threats sets the stage for the moral project of converting them into responsible citizens, even if that entails the use of force. Batidas gained tolerance as they built upon stereotypes and fears, conveying to the community the potential benefit of getting rid of its “bad apples.” As Krasmann (2007: 306) argues, the “search for prospective offenders using risk categories based on supposedly suspicious attributes” is not a search for concrete persons, but for certain types of people deemed more likely to be potential offenders according to actuarial calculations.

Distinctive policing themes emerge from a victim’s story about his detention on the evening of 10 March 2015, in the working-class neighborhood of San Fernando:

I was walking along 72 St. where there is a church and also the school I was attending. And there is the bayou El Salitre too. The truck was right there, very close. Seeing those trucks and soldiers gave me the creeps because obviously I had been chased before. I started cutting through the avenue, in the middle of the cars. Then I began to run and a dragoneante (higher-status private) started chasing me, but I had a head start on him because I’m fit, I do exercise. But then a bigger soldier came after me too, he was tall, like 1.90m, and he was yelling at me from behind “stop you rat!” It seemed I was a thief but I was not stealing anything, I was stealing nobody. I have a normal appearance. I used to be a barrista (football ultra), wearing trainers and a cap, but I’m not a ñero (gangsta)! I don’t hang around with ñeros. But well, they looked at me like that. I was running and a couple passing by tripped me up, the dude put his foot across to make me stumble knowing that the army was after me. I should’ve said “take that guy, ask him for his military card”. I tried to run again but the other guy, the tall one, caught me. That animal! That guy was a beast. He grabbed my neck and was strangling me, that dude was big and very strong. I asked him to let me go, and he said, “I don’t care, cry then”. But no way would I cry. He brought me closer to the truck and those trucks are very high, higher than a normal load truck. He told me “get up there” and pushed me. Two seconds later I was up, three guys from inside pulled me up… I thought that they only asked for the documents and took you up into the truck, not that they would thump you inside. (Johan, personal interview, 12 May 2015)