The de-securitisation of work and the logistic trap in Brazil's humanitarian zone

This paper examines how a particular model of repressive governance shapes the labour exploitation of Venezuelans in need of humanitarian protection in Brazil. Over the past decade, restrictive migration policies have not only increased the availability of labour within the global south but also systems of control to extract value from migrant labour. This has occurred alongside the deregulation of labour protection to reduce costs with labour and related recruitment. In Brazil, over 450.000 immigrants have been granted access to the labour market in the past decade. In particular, it has been amongst an increasing militarization of the country that 350,000 Venezuelans in need of humanitarian protection have arrived in Brazil since 2016, mainly through the Brazilian Amazon. Emerging cases of slave labour, human trafficking and other extreme forms of exploitation have disproportionally involved these new migrants. The hegemonic narratives of exceptionality and deception related to those cases remain ineffective in revealing the repressive nature of the labour regime in Brazil and its evolving features with resurgent militarism in the country. Instead, these must be based upon a nuanced conception of class relations that have a distinct geographical signature across the country. Despite significant work focusing on labour control in factory production, hyperflexible systems of control have morphed towards greater entanglements across production and reproduction processes. The militarisation of migration control in Brazil provides a distinct case of study to reveal how these have interacted with high levels of informality, unemployment, colonial legacies and suppression of citizenship rights. Drawing on four-year research with migrant workers in Brazil’s Amazon, the paper discusses of logistics of unfreedom in Brazil to show the growing imbrication between technologies of state-corporate appropriation of, and control over, internationally displaced population. Findings reveal how military-corporate partnerships have used humanitarian zones to create a relative advantage for capital and to reconfigure legal structures, institutional power and subordination of migrants to labour processes of transnational companies across the country. This has not only allowed for the retrenchment of labour protections, but the standardisation and rationalisation over processes of recruitment, securing, monitoring and distribution of commodities. Therefore, these military-corporate partnerships have created conditions for further value extraction and extreme forms of labour exploitation to flourish and evolve in the context of militarised governance of migration in Brazil’s Amazon