Introduction

If current studies on taxation and state capacity share anything, it is the assumption that state presence in society is the consequence of (legally) extracted revenues. They all acknowledge the fact that, over the last few centuries, capital has become the most prominent resource for supporting state capacity, and taxation the most obvious process for its extraction.

Scholars have established comprehensive knowledge of “the driving forces of the fate of nations,” as Joseph Schumpeter (Reference Schumpeter1918) referred to fiscal matters. The varied ways social sciences have dissected taxation range from accounts on the origins and modernization of tax infrastructures as a response to threats (Reference Tilly, Evans, Rueschemeyer and SkocpolTilly 1985; Reference BrewerBrewer 1990), to perspectives of revenue raising as a collective action problem (Reference LeviLevi 1988; Reference TimmonsTimmons 2005), including analysis of the role played by democratic institutions (Reference SteinmoSteinmo 1993; Reference CheibubCheibub 1998; Reference BoixBoix 2001). The relationship between states’ ability to raise taxes and their capacity to meet people’s needs, deliver security, and stimulate economic development has also been central in analyses of state-building in developing countries (Reference Brautigam, Fjeldstad and MooreBrautigam, Fjeldstad, and Moore 2008; Reference MooreMoore 2004; Reference Di JohnDi John 2010) and of the state’s infrastructural power (Reference MannMann 1984; Reference SoiferSoifer 2008). Researchers have also studied whether the threat of war, the cornerstone of state-building processes in Europe, serves equally as an explanation in other latitudes. In Latin America, Miguel Centeno (Reference Centeno1997, 28) asserts, “whether through loans or through the sale of commodity, the … state escaped the need to force itself on society,” a situation that led to the state lacking capacity. In a similar fashion, Jeffrey Herbst (Reference Herbst2000) argues that weak state institutions in Africa are explained by the lack of threats in the vein of those that fostered state consolidation in Europe. Taken together, we have solid knowledge that taxation furnishes the state with fungible resources and that these resources “make possible not just one state action, but most if not all of the state’s activities” (Reference Martin, Mehrotra and PrasadMartin, Mehrotra, and Prasad 2009, 4).

This article casts doubt on the legality bias in accounts of states’ resource extraction. With the exceptions noted herein, I contend that previous research has failed to consider the role played by informal rules aimed at the collection of resources which are reintroduced into state structures. Put differently, as the empirical evidence here will show, this article introduces a previously overlooked possibility: that ordinary state performance is also financed by resources captured both illegally and regularly. While this perspective does not deny that a portion of these resources does end up in private pockets, it emphasizes the fact that these resources are overwhelmingly channeled toward enhancing state performance.

Drawing on two ethnographic research projects, one focused on the market for stolen vehicles and spare parts in Greater Buenos Aires and the other on the market for counterfeit and irregularly produced garments in the same area, this article shows that monies systematically extracted from illegal markets by state agents end up financing welfare programs, political campaigns, and everyday police activity. Thus by paying attention to “less official state actions” (Reference Auyero and JensenAuyero and Jensen 2015, 361), I provide ethnographic evidence of deep-rooted, informal money-collection structures whose workings clearly resemble taxation systems.Footnote ¹ These informal institutions, which bring politicians, brokers, police officers, business people, and criminals together, enable the extraction of resources and, paradoxically, the provision of public services or the establishing of political stability. Although this article is focused on the extraction of resources for the provision of these services, this should be seen as complementary to the flows of resources allocated with the aim of winning loyalty and strengthening patronage networks. In this way, by uncovering a phenomenon that is not divorced from events of corruption but certainly goes beyond current understandings of it (Reference Rose-AckermanRose-Ackerman 1978; Reference Della Porta and VannucciDella Porta and Vannucci 1999), this article contributes to the literature on the state and fiscal sociology. Overall, by way of empirical demonstration, this article illuminates the unexplored field of “off the books” state revenues and offers a new lens for observing ordinary state performance.

On Illegal Markets, the State and Extraction Off the Books

Ethnographic research has only recently started to “follow the money” and identify the routes connecting illegal economies, state agencies, and their capacity to provide goods and services. By tracing the flows of economic resources, a key fact has been unveiled—namely, that in some specific cases most bribe money is not used to benefit individual officials but to further collective interests, something Alan Smart (Reference Smart and Heyman1999, 114) observed some years ago. Recently, Sarah Milne (Reference Baker and Milne2015, 214) observed that construction of a Chinese-backed hydropower dam in Cambodia required vegetation to be cleared, which led to illegal timber extraction on a massive scale. Park rangers, officially appointed authorities in the 4,179 hectares of conservation area, imposed an informal tax on every rosewood truck and independent logger and channeled the collected money upward. The final destination of the majority of these economic resources was not, as may be expected, private pockets, but rather the financing of public functions: funding for the armed forces and civil servants, the construction of office buildings, and other construction projects for roads, schools, and wells, among others. A similar constellation is described by Phuc Xuan To (Reference To2015, 244) in Vietnam: monies stemming from illegal logging end up supporting various village-based groups such as farmers’ and women’s organizations, and are used to cover the costs of disseminating information about government policies on crime control, cultivation techniques, and health care. A disaggregated perspective of the state, one that takes the peripheries and the local level into account, shows how political stability and the production of social order means blurred and moving boundaries between state and society (Reference Migdal, Kohli and ShueMigdal, Kohli, and Shue 1994, 3). In addition, they show that what is usually referred to as the capacity or presence of the state can be the result of illegal economic activities whose informal taxation is not captured in formal measurements of state revenue.

Informal regimes of resource extraction are dependent on legal stipulations and on how state agents manipulate them. As Milne’s (Reference Milne2015) and To’s (Reference To2015) ethnographic studies show, it is not the absence of official regulations but their constant production alongside the invention of new criminalization schemes that make room for engineering and lead to novel formats of extraction. In general, formal prohibitions referring to the exchange of goods and services can be manipulated in order to extract regular “taxation,” that is, sources of additional off-the-books resources (Reference DeweyDewey 2012). Meanwhile, legalization—the attempt to make informal regimes of extraction transparent and accountable—is confronted with several obstacles. Boris Verbrugge (Reference Verbrugge2015, 190) reveals that “tax compliance” in the context of illegal mining camps in the Philippines hinges on a mix of coercion and, most importantly, social acceptance. Legalization would provoke a shortage of basic material resources that support networks of intermediaries and brokers, crucial actors in the management of social expectations and exchanges (Reference AuyeroAuyero 2001) and usually guarantors of political stability. Thus, due to the manifold ways illegal activities are interwoven with state institutions and power structures, and the fact that their interests depend on existing regulations, it is extremely difficult to legalize informal taxation structures.

Informal regimes of resource extraction are closely associated with what is usually referred to as corruption. In fact, both phenomena tend to coexist and are very much intertwined in real-life settings. From the perspective of the structure of exchanges, there is no significant variation between “informal taxation” and corruption, both being composed of triads.Footnote ² In addition, in both cases a “contract,” a key feature in most definitions of corruption (Reference Rose-AckermanRose-Ackerman 1978, Reference Rose-Ackerman2007; Reference Della Porta and VannucciDella Porta and Vannucci 1999; Reference Gambetta, Kotkin and SajóGambetta 2002; Reference Johnston and ElliottJohnston 1997; Reference Philp and HeywoodPhilp 2015) is broken. Corruption, and in principle also informal taxation, suggests a subversion of the structure and order of politics, a damaging of the functioning of the state, and a weakening of economic development. However, one crucial feature sets corruption and informal taxation apart: the observed final destination of the collected resources. If resources are reintroduced into state structures and made available to the wider public, as this article contends, the crucial difference is that informal taxation means renewing, or reformulating, the contract that was broken.Footnote ³ This seems to be clear when, as some studies have already shown, captured resources are used for the construction of schools or roads, or, as my evidence demonstrates, to fund welfare programs. Accordingly, this “renewal” of the social contract, which simply means meeting individuals’ expectations concerning the provision of certain services, tends to produce what corruption cannot: effects that legitimize authorities. In this regard, the phenomenon of informal taxation and the emerging legitimacy of extralegal actors seem closely connected with research on fragmented sovereignties (Reference DavisDavis 2010; Reference LeedsLeeds 1996; Reference Clunan and TrinkunasClunan and Trinkunas 2010; Reference StephensonStephenson 2016; Reference Dewey, Míguez and SainDewey, Míguez, and Sain 2017) and the role played by illegal economies, especially in postwar societies (Reference EngwichtEngwicht 2016). In these cases, extralegal actors, almost always in control of the state-society interface through corruption, establish rules and political control over economic resources and concrete sectors of society.

Legal architectures provide additional leeway for generating the rewards that lead legal and extralegal actors to form alliances. As Jacqui Baker and Milne (Reference Baker and Milne2015, 161) observe: “By starving the state of formal revenues and weakening fiscal institutions, rulers and regimes legitimate other means and mechanisms for generating monies.” Thus, by disregarding public tenders, weakening fiscal regulations, relaxing regulatory frameworks for controlling money laundering, creating legal gaps, or limiting official budgets, among other tactics, state actors intentionally degrade the fiscal power of the state and stimulate dependence on other kinds of revenues. In Argentina, this is the case for the Buenos Aires Province Police Force (Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires), whose budget is structured to take cajas policiales (illegal sources of money) into account (Reference SainSain 2008).

This powerful instrumentalism of regulations (Reference Baker and MilneBaker and Milne 2015), the ability to forge informal alliances, and the capacity to provide goods or services in a more or less effective way unquestionably blur the lines of what is commonly referred to as a “weak” or “absent” state. A state’s active participation in these informal regimes of extraction is closer to Béatrice Hibou’s (Reference Hibou2004) observation that privatization processes in Africa are part of “the continuous process of state formation” (see also Reference Bayart, Ellis and HibouBayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999) than to Guillermo O’Donnell’s (Reference O’Donnell1993) brown areas, in which the presence of the state is both functionally and territorially low. Additionally, as Richard Snyder (Reference Snyder2006) points out, violence is not always correlated to the extraction of “lootable wealth”—gems, illicit timber, or drugs. Political stability and social order count also as outcomes of specific modes of extracting resources set up by power holders. In the Latin American context, several scholars (Reference AriasArias 2006; Reference Arias and BarnesArias and Barnes 2016; Reference AuyeroAuyero 2007; Reference Auyero and JensenAuyero and Berti 2015) have emphatically contradicted the idea of a weak or absent state, and Marcelo Sain (Reference Sain2013) has successfully demonstrated the ability of police forces to regulate crime (see also Reference Flores PérezFlores Pérez 2013). Subsequent studies have analyzed the relationship between state and nonstate actors as the sale of protection: state agents sell the nonenforcement of the law as a commodity to entrepreneurs active in illegal economies. In this exchange, while the enforcement of the law is neutralized, the formal law is very much needed (Reference Dewey, Outhwaite and TurnerDewey 2017). In other words, without the law the sale of a temporary and de facto suspension of law enforcement is impossible. This mechanism, as I will show, makes room for informal regulation and takes the form of illegal systems of money collection.

The presence of informal fiscal arrangements that emerge under certain historical, political, and economic circumstances suggests a view of the state that escapes description in terms of weak versus strong, or absent versus present. Providing particular goods or services using ill-gotten resources shows, as Joel Migdal (Reference Migdal, Migdal, Kohli and Shue1994) notes, the transformation and changing goals of the various state institutions, especially when they come into contact with social groups and need to accommodate different moral orders. Thus, instead of a zero-sum conflict of power between state and social actors, the systematic extraction of resources by illegal means that end up supporting the state shows a mutual empowering process (Reference Migdal, Kohli and ShueMigdal, Kohli, and Shue 1994). The highly intricate forms these relationships might take has been exemplified by Elizabeth Leeds (Reference Leeds1996) in her study on the cocaine economy and politics in Brazil. As she noted, basing the analysis on Charles Tilly’s (Reference Tilly, Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol1985) notion of protection, the convergence of distrust on public authorities, the emergence of powerful armed groups, and the intervention of highly corrupt and violent police forces might lead to social formations in which extralegal groups come to fulfill state functions. Leeds’s case study indicates an extreme constellation: one of autonomized power in which extralegal, state-like organizations extract revenues and provide welfare services to a segment of the population.

Scenarios of State Extraction of Resources

The illegal markets in which the informal taxation takes place are located in the suburban area of Buenos Aires Province. Their relevance stems from the state’s intervention in both markets—for illegally produced garments and for auto parts—in order to extract resources. Although both markets have been declared illegal by the state, my descriptions below reveal stark differences in structure and how they are related to state actors. Additionally, each experiences different levels of tolerance throughout society. While garments are considered harmless, auto parts, with their potential for being products of violence, are perceived as less desirable.

The informal taxation system at La Salada

“Nobody tells me the true story. Who would? The police come and surround you,” says Cosita, the stocky ex-manager of one of the shed markets.Footnote ⁴ He explains what everyone at La Salada knows: the police, parked in strategic spots nearby, enforce the law selectively by stopping sweatshop producers and seizing bags of garments. Thus, since it impedes producers from arriving at the marketplace and renting a stall, the managers are forced to collect money to give to the police to prevent damage to their real estate business. “I know who I have to give it [the collected money] to,” asserts Cosita, listing around ten different state agencies. “Because otherwise they stop the vans [of stallholders or buyers] when they enter [La Salada]. They took the vans when they were arriving and they really fucked me up.” The result is a system of money collection imposed upon stallholders (sweatshop producers). Each shed market collects the money internally before the managers hand it to the state agencies. In doing so, they “compensate” police officers for not enforcing the law.

However, not all stallholders (producers) pay protection rackets. The managers’ criterion for who pays is simple: only those who infringe the country’s trademark law; that is, those displaying logos of famous brands. They must pay a fee, a bribe to be later illegally handed over to the police. Needless to say, the reference to trademark law is a dishonest justification; the law stipulates entirely different procedures and penalties. According to my calculations 38.5 percent of stalls across all shed markets sell counterfeit clothing branded with Adidas, Puma, Nike, and Disney, among others. Regardless of the quality of the copy, each stall displaying branded garments must pay a racket known as marca (brand). The marca racket must be paid every time branded garments are exhibited on the stall. Over time, the collection has become a complex structure with appointed collectors taking the fixed sums of money from stallholders and recording debts in dedicated books. Claudia, remembering her days as a collector, depicts the route of the money: “We went and collected inside, going through the aisles, gathering money … say, for the Crime and Fraud Agency [Delitos y Estafas], the Mitre Police Service [la Brigada de Mitre], the Anti-Narcotics Agency [Narcotráfico], District and Departmental Offices [la distrital y la departamental]. Cosita [the manager] went to have lunch with Ordaz [a police chief] every market day.”

According to several interviews with stallholders, the fees are simply accepted as the price they must pay to increase their sales. Brothers Paul and Franco, two Bolivian stallholders I worked with, manufacture “Nike” jackets and, in consequence, must pay the marca fee regularly. The money they hand over three times per week continuously actualizes the informal taxation system, a long-standing relationship between the illegal collector and the stallholder. Susi, Paul and Franco’s mother, is well aware that collectors “get a lot of money from us, from everyone,” but she also knows the benefits of paying marca. She has no doubt that a “Nike” branded garment “is what you sell best, because if you sell plain [liso, unbranded] you can’t shift anything [no se mueve nada].” Susi knows it is a risk, but selling marca is a profitable business: “Marca makes you sell more, and that’s convenient in every respect.” She clearly recognizes that she is adding value, which is why “robbers and policemen are here, it’s like the cat trying to catch the mouse.”

Susi and her sons, fully aware that they are infringing “some law” and that selling branded clothing is more profitable than “plain” pieces, readily accept the imposed payment. This lack of resistance is based not only on the considerable demand for counterfeit garments (which increases profits and thus reduces the significance of the racket) but, even more importantly, stems from the fear of the consequences of refusing to pay. Table 1 shows the total sum collected—US$772,000 each month—which is, as mentioned, distributed between at least ten state agencies at both national and provincial levels, as well as a portion going to the local municipality to fund political activities.

Table 1 Number of stalls and taxes collected by marketplace (sheds and streets) in La Salada.

Source: Author’s calculation based on an individual stall-count and interviews conducted with stallholders from each marketplace.

Where the Money Goes: Financing State Activities

A disaggregated perspective of the state, one that acknowledges regional and local bodies of state servants translating policies and producing regulations, offers a new lens for observing state-society relationships. In Buenos Aires Province, especially in regard to police forces and local politicians, this relationship is paradoxical: in a circumscribed territory they claim to represent the state while at the same time providing goods and services that originate in an extrabudgetary, illegal appropriation of resources. In what follows I indicate three final destinations of the collected money in the context of the aforementioned illegal markets: welfare programs, political campaigns, and everyday police activity.

Dimensioning the Effects of Off-the-Books Taxation

An obvious question refers to the relative importance, or the scale, of such taxation off the books. Not only are we dealing with a social space in which no records of transactions or payments exist, the lack of reliable statistics in Argentina (especially at provincial and municipality levels) further complicates potential estimations. For instance, I examined every budget allocated to the Ministry of Security from 2001 to 2013, and there is a tendency toward budget increase. Concurrently, the number of police officers skyrocketed from forty-eight thousand in 2005, to seventy-seven thousand in 2015, as well as eighteen thousand new “local” police officers.Footnote ⁶ Whether the budget increase corresponds to the actual costs of hiring more officers is impossible to verify. Not only is there no public information about budgets per police station, but according to two ex-ministers I interviewed there are also continuous new budget assignments and underused items barely recorded as such. In that sense, the question, for example, about the share of the official budget that relies on what the police collect illegally is nearly impossible to calculate only with these bare numbers.

However, I will provide some sense of the dimension of this phenomenon by alluding first to a countrywide survey of families regarding the availability of clothing and shoes, and second to the evolution of vehicle theft between 2001 and 2010.Footnote ⁷ While the clothing survey gives us an idea of the huge impact of the sweatshop economy, the tenacity of the vehicle theft business suggests the importance of the funds collected.

In order to get an idea of the penetration in Argentine society of the sweatshop economy centered on La Salada, we can observe the deficit of clothing in homes distributed according to socioeconomic strata. Figure 1 shows an overall improvement between 2004 and 2010 regarding the availability of clothing and shoes. Whereas 54.9 percent of families in the low segments of society in 2004 reported a lack of clothing, six years later only 25.5 percent stated the same.

Figure 1 Availability of clothing and shoes by social stratum and year (2004–2010).

Source: Based on Reference SalviaSalvia 2011.

Although the clothing deficit does not directly indicate the consumption of clothing produced informally, three inferences in favor of this hypothesis are possible. First, since access to clothing in low-income segments became more restricted during the same period, especially due to the introduction of new distribution channels like shopping malls and outlets (INDEC 2006; Reference KestelboimKestelboim 2009, Reference Kestelboim2012), we can infer that the demand for clothing in this segment was met by the sweatshop economy, of which the main distribution center is La Salada. Second, the demand could be met due to the aforementioned exponential increase in the number of “Saladitas”: small distribution centers throughout Argentina selling only sweatshop-produced garments. The collection of statistics about these centers started in 2014, when 522 centers were registered. Only two years later, 656 sites were counted. Third, the total number of people working as informal seamsters in the market for sweatshop-produced clothing ballooned from 42,000 in 2002 to 177,000 in 2010, a fourfold increase. Meanwhile, during the same period, the number of formal seamsters decreased from 51,000 to 29,000. In other words, whereas in 2002 59.15 percent of seamsters worked informally, in 2010 it was 77.6 percent, an increase of 18.45 percentage points (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial 2010; Reference González and CómoGonzález 2006, 6–7; Reference ChorenChoren 2012, 36).

Finally, Table 1 above provides information about the distribution of stalls by shed market and the amount of the “tax” charged, as well as the number of stalls paying it. The table demonstrates the profitability of the illegal economy: 38.5 percent of the stallholders choose to sell counterfeit items despite being forced to pay a tax to do so. However, the number of stalls that do not sell counterfeit clothing (61.5 percent) is also instructive. These stalls offer plain, unbranded pieces of clothing; that is, items whose consumption meets everyday needs. This segment of the market highlights the gap between high- and low-income sectors in terms of access to clothing: while a portion of the population acquires clothing in shopping malls, outlets, and brand stores, another significant portion is excluded from this legal distribution circuit. Additionally, it also helps to explain the rationale of tolerance to this economy, expressed in the system of informal taxation: facing a structural divide, political and state actors choose not to eliminate the economy but to informally tax it, providing benefits (access to garments, jobs, increased powers of consumption) to a sector of the population and receiving material (money) as well as immaterial (social peace, electoral support, political control) resources in exchange.

Concerning the market for stolen vehicles, besides the total number of vehicles taken, a further measure of the market is the number of victims murdered during a carjacking. For example, whereas the FBI reports forty-one homicides in 2015 for the whole of the United States, Buenos Aires Province, with a population almost twenty times smaller, alone reported twenty-five victims during the same period.Footnote ⁸ Though the number of stolen vehicles varies, the business could not be eliminated. A former undersecretary of Investigations and Criminal Intelligence commented: “Our controls were strict and constant but there was a solid number of about two thousand vehicles a month that we could not possibly reduce further.”

In sum, as these figures indirectly suggest, there are illegal market activities that provide access to resources. These enhance state performance but also allow political control and strengthen patronage networks at a local level.

An additional side effect of the informal extraction of resources is the political control over the population that comes from the fact that authorities, by not enforcing the law, ensure a certain level of income by creating jobs, even though these jobs lack stability and are in conflict with official regulations. Furthermore, political stability is achieved by promoting consumption and ensuring access to low-cost garments. Future research should determine if the results of political elections in constituencies close to La Salada correlate with the marketplace’s activity: in nearby Lomas de Zamora and in the south of the City of Buenos Aires, political candidates from the ruling party have won every election without exception. Patronage networks are further strengthened, for instance, through the implementation of welfare programs such as Clothes for All. Additionally, La Salada marketplace’s activity also indirectly assists with the administration of the municipal government. In fact, as pointed out by Richard, formerly a high-ranking broker in a shed market and currently the advisor to the mayor, the shed markets pay a monthly sum of 4 million pesos in formal taxes (for property taxes, garbage collection, street lighting, and other public services), a sum the local government budget desperately needs. In other words, the performance of local government is strongly influenced by an economy that, despite running informally and illegally, makes a legal—and significant—contribution to the government’s budget.

Conclusion

When dissecting the ways in which state apparatuses are economically supported, social sciences have paid great attention to formal, state-sanctioned channels of revenue extraction. Analysis of state performance, therefore, has followed a similar pattern. Weak (legal) extraction capacity has usually meant a state less capable of delivering basic services, and this remains true even when the importance of informal institutions is acknowledged (Reference Helmke and LevitskyHelmke and Levitsky 2006; Reference SoiferSoifer 2008, 234). However, understanding the opportunities available to state structures to extract resources from society off the books, especially in the context of underserviced and marginalized urban areas, is a field that demands much more research.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two well-functioning illegal economies located in Buenos Aires Province, this article showed deep-rooted informal taxation systems. Here, informal taxation means an off-the-books extraction of resources, which is imposed on a portion of the population and used not only as a form of corruption but as a way of financing formal state performance. By illuminating such informal means of capturing resources and how these resources are used, this article points out the paradoxes of the state’s transformative power. In alliance with extralegal actors, the state invigorates its performance in society, strengthens political power, and manufactures social consensus. Both the market for stolen cars and auto parts and the market for illegally produced garments are illegally regulated and taxed by the state and provide resources whose final destination, according to empirical evidence, is a welfare program and the funding of everyday political and police activity. In both cases, I showed that the “deeply imbricated triad of state practices, informal institutions, and clandestine connections” (Reference Auyero and JensenAuyero and Jensen 2015, 362) produces specific forms of state presence in society.

An expanded understanding of state revenues is undoubtedly linked to an analysis that connects the state to informal institutions and illegal exchanges in a renewed form. The perspective acknowledging illegal economies as potential sources of state funding must consider informal social arrangements that, if resources are extracted, should be seen as part of a fiscal social contract. However, this magnified view of state revenues should not be seen only as an attempt to illuminate another form of capturing monies. In fact, if the extracted resources are at least partially reintroduced into state structures, considerable resistance to transformation can be expected. The evidence provided by the two markets in Buenos Aires shows this clearly. Over the years, informal forms of extracting resources have shaped deep-rooted expectations and economic interests that condition the workings of formal institutions. Several attempts to reform the Buenos Aires Province police and to formalize La Salada marketplace not only failed but also reinforced prior patterns of behavior. In this way, the relevance of studying the informal extraction of resources lies in observing how informal institutions may block, distort, or support the process of state formation. How should we understand the state formation processes when at least part of the resources supporting the process are illegally produced?

My attempt to shed light on these informal forms of state financing should not be understood as a way of devaluing the social order created by the legal exercise of control and implementation of policies, or as celebrating corrupt practices. Fine-grained ethnographic accounts of “the continuous formation of the state” (Reference HibouHibou 2004) in urban landscapes raise awareness of dynamics that might produce “decivilizatory” effects, such as those described by Javier Auyero and María Fernanda Berti (Reference Auyero and Berti2015, 123), but also other effects that converge with those produced by the formal state. Far from appearing as a coherent entity, the state can be observed as a heterogeneous palette of organizations constantly dealing with a variety of social groups. Considering this complexity of state structures and the variety of illegalized economies, ethnographic work appears to be a promising way to capture these connections and advance our understanding of the complex nature of the state’s participation in illegal markets.