Strategic Offending: Colombia’s Part-Time Child Drug Traffickers and Their Community, City and Country Lines

Abstract

Through participatory research and creative auto/biography, in particular, this article highlights how young offenders in southwestern Colombia live at home, go to school and fit in the trafficking of cannabis in their spare time. This part-time participation in criminal networks becomes part of a deliberate plan to succeed and confront positions of socio-economic hardship and emotional precarity. This strategic offending in the region of Cauca with its protracted violence and alternative social order constitutes an attempt to confront ontological insecurity and establish improved life chances. These lived experiences of drug trafficking also highlight Colombia’s community, city and country lines – three levels of trafficking route along which these young part-timers shift cannabis to local, national and international markets.