Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-24

Latin America as a necropolitical sandbox

I A telex network before the internet

In 1975 six Southern Cone governments wire their intelligence services together over an encrypted telex network hosted in the Panama Canal Zone. It is called Condor and links six countries spread over 4,000 kilometres. It shares files, photographs and the whereabouts of people between governments that share almost nothing else.

It is, twenty years early, a transnational population database. The architecture arrived before the name.

“What is rehearsed here gets installed over there with a user manual.”

II Anatomy of the rehearsal

Mbembe described necropolitics as the power to decide who may live and who must die, exercised not over citizens but over administered populations.

The word sandbox supplies what that definition lacks: the temporaldimension. A sandbox is not a place where a policy is applied. It is where it is tested before it is sold.

The sequence repeats with an uncomfortable regularity: it is rehearsed where the political cost of failing is low, it is debugged, it is exported as a finished product.

III Table of the export

Rehearsal	Where and when	Afterwards
individual capitalisation of pensions	Chile, 1981	30 countries adopt it
single biometric document	several, 1990s	global civil standard
transnational intelligence network	Southern Cone, 1975	normalised after 2001
digital legal tender	El Salvador, 2021	a manual for 40 delegations

The pattern is not that the South copies the North. It is the opposite, and it is worse: the South tests, the North buys the already validated result.

IV Antithesis: a laboratory is not a destiny

Here it is worth braking, because the figure of the laboratory has a serious flaw: it turns millions of people into test material and a whole region into a passive stage.

That is false as description and lazy as analysis. The same decades produced the forensic genealogy for identifying the disappeared, used today in Bosnia and in the Mediterranean; and the archives that allowed Condor to be prosecuted —four tonnes of paper, some 700,000 documents— turned up in 1992 in a police-station basement in Asunción, not in a European ministry.

The region was not only a sandbox: it also exported the methods for auditing the sandbox. Leaving that half out is repeating the gesture being denounced.

V Archive ritualsafe

01

Look up the year your country's identity document was created.
02

Look up which government brought it in and with what argument.
03

Write down which data it asked for then and which it asks for now.

Public reading only, none of your own data in any form. The distance between the two lists is the exact measure of how much was tested on you without anybody saying so.

VI Risks

The term necropolitics wears out fast. Applied to everything —a tariff, a queue, a piece of paperwork— it stops naming what it named and becomes indignant decoration.

Better to reserve it for where there is an explicit administration of death, and use duller, more exact words for the rest: subcontracting, deregulation, budgetary abandonment. Those three almost always explain more.