Aumento
| Aumento | ||
|---|---|---|
| File:Lowland South America map.png | ||
| Location: Lowland South America | ||
| Definition: Lit. ‘to augment, something extra’, used when someone is giving or receiving something above what is considered standard practice. | ||
| Keywords: Latin America – South America – Payment – Bribe – Informal economy – Timber – Logging – Forestry – Euphemism – Favour – Rule-bending – Moral ambivalence – Community | ||
| Clusters: Creating facades – Patron-client networks – Informal entrepreneurship – Economies of favours | ||
| Author: Daniela Peluso | ||
| Affiliation: School of Anthropology & Conservation, University of Kent | ||
| Website: Author's webpage | ||
By Daniela Peluso, School of Anthropology & Conservation, University of Kent
| The term aumento refers to acceptable forms of corruption in Lowland South America. Related practices operate within the informal economy, an underbelly of the formal economy (Peluso 2018). When individuals are required to make cash payments in excess of what is formally required of them in order to get things done, it is referred to as an aumento. Though derived from aumentar, ‘to increase, augment or expand’, in its local usage the term aumento is best translated as ‘a little more’, ‘something extra’, or a ‘top up’.
Aumento designates an informal cash payment to achieve a goal or desire. Such payments are common in order to establish or maintain social relations and constitute a preferred and amicable way of interacting or ‘doing business.’ For example, in marketplaces where one can purchase fresh tropical juice, it is common for the vendor to offer ‘a little bit more’ than a standard serving. Thus, upon finishing one’s glass, the vendor will generally smile and say, ‘¿Aumento? ’ This simple gesture signals a possibility of building a mutually beneficial relationship of long-term loyalty. A little extra goes a long way, often ensuring the return of a customer. It is thus a means of building both social and financial capital. Inversely, if a vendor does not offer a ‘little bit extra’, there is an implication that he or she is not dependent upon the return of a customer. This can happen in cases where the vendor has minimal competition. |
On a bigger scale, aumento is used as a euphemism for corrupt practices in timber and logging operations in Lowland South Americans. Logging companies supply wood from their land as an aumento, a top up to their current provisions, often tied to sustainability regulations. In turn, Amazonians receive their own aumento as a cash payment for providing wood that often does not go through formal regulatory channels. The payment they receive for this is less than the open market rate, while the logging companies avoid extra costs associated with sustainable logging without jeopardising their eco-status.
To go through inspections by naval officers, the national police or the border patrol, individuals must often pay a coima, a bribe that is a fraction of the cost of the permit or management plan that is required of them as part of the formal legal logging protocols (De Vaan 2008, Bridenthal 2013, Stahl 2018). Coima is viewed as a necessary payment for bypassing complex forestry regulations, paperwork and fees that would otherwise render most small-scale logging unviable (Peluso 2018).
Indigenous Amazonians have lived in communal territories and cared for different sections of their collective land for generations, which makes them assume that the timber belongs to them. The imposed management plans and logging permits – which, in turn, require hiring forestry engineers and involve various bureaucratic procedures – push individuals onto illegal paths. Indigenous people refer to the timber that they deliver to the sawmill of a logging company as an aumento to their income. At the sawmill, buyers and sellers alike speak of timber as being ‘a little bit extra’ as it satisfies the interests of both parties. Indigenous people are aware that these companies claim to follow sustainable practices and receive certification seals for sustainable harvesting.
Despite such credentials, logging companies are eager to acquire additional wood. Indigenous Amazonians say that ‘the loggers want their aumento’ or ‘we are providing their aumento’. Like those who seek a coima, the logging companies are perceived to be helping indigenous people avoid unnecessary bureaucracy. A lower rate of payment is thus accepted for the illegal wood; it is ‘extra’ money they would otherwise not have. Thus, indigenous people pay ‘extra’ so as to provide the logging company with their ‘extra’. For the sawmill, this illegal timber is ‘extra’ to the legally sourced timber they deal in and outside of legitimate paths of commerce. This symmetry in language reflects positive social relations and exchange. The ‘extra’ compensates for what both indigenous individuals and timber workers consider to be unfair and hindering regulation and surveillance by the state. These arrangements continue an ongoing historical legacy of exploitative trade practices toward indigenous lowland South Americans. Yet individuals are confident that by circumventing the rules they can produce a net gain in what is otherwise an unlevel playing field.
What might be seen as corrupt from a normative perspective is viewed locally as an exchange of favours (Ledeneva 1998, 2014, Henig and Makovicky 2017). It has parallels in colonial and postcolonial debt systems and related patronage arrangements (Quiroz 2008). Examples of these are habilitación in Spanish and aviamiento in Portuguese. Whereas the analysis of debt peonage as exploitative is well established, there is also a growing literature that emphasises the mutually beneficial possibilities of the practice (Bauer 1979; Eisenstad and Roniger 1984; Killick 2011; Walker 2012). Extractive economies in lowland South America have rested upon local knowledge and labour, particularly during and immediately following the first rubber boom of 1879-1912. They have been built on the exchange of housing and credit for work and debt and by facilitating lenders’ access to the forest and labourers’ access to the cities. Even now, patronage continues to be important in Amazonia, especially in areas distant from urban centres.
The logging industry is one arena in which patron–client relations continue to thrive. Companies have been seen to put up a convincing façade on their international websites, proclaiming their corporate values and social responsibility mission statement. But locally, in places such as Madre de Dios, they thrive on underpaid informal labour involving various forms of contemporary patronage. The role of the patron was, and continues to be, based on advancing loans – in goods and/or cash – in exchange for the guaranteed provision of timber. The debts that local people incur often exceed what they earn.
These patron–client relationships are also intertwined with wider networks of exchange, such as compadrazgo (Gudeman 1975; Pinedo 2013: 36; Ledeneva et al 2018.). These networks are seen as a positive part of indigenous moral economies. Social relations are formed through a long-term series of exchanges that underpin economic sustainability in times of hardship (Peluso 2018). For these reasons, context is key in understanding the relationships between informality, inequality and corruption (Nel 2019). Participation in such social relations is what constitutes moral personhood in lowland South America (Londoño Sulkin 2005). It can furthermore be viewed as one of the creative forms through which corrupt practices are normalised in Latin America (Goldstein and Drybread 2018). Where bureaucracy, according to Hertzfeld, tends to dehumanise its participants, lowland South Americans use moral-economic practices to recover the humanity that bureaucracy affronts (Herzfeld 1993, Peluso 2018). Part and parcel of moral economic exchanges, aumentos help to restore individually and collectively the moral selfhood that dehumanising bureaucracies otherwise negatively impact.
References
Bauer, A.J. 1979. ‘Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression’. Hispanic American Historical Review 59:1, 34–63.
Bridenthal, R. (ed). 2013. The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
De Vaan, M. 2008. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages. Leiden: Brill.
Goldstein, D.M. and Drybread, K., 2018. The social life of corruption in Latin America. Culture, Theory and Critique, 59(4): 299-311
Gudeman, S. 1975. ‘Spiritual Relationships and Selecting a Godparent’. Man 10: 2 221-237.
Henig, D., and Makovicky, N. (eds). 2017. Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herzfeld, M., 1993. The Social Production of Indifference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Killick, E. 2011. ‘The Debts that Bind Us: A Comparison of Amazonian Debt-Peonage and US Mortgage Practices.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53: 2, 344-370.
Ledeneva, A.V. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal exchange (Vol. 102). Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Ledeneva, A.V. 2014. ‘Economies of favours or corrupt societies: Exploring the boundaries between informality and corruption’. The Baltic Worlds 1, 13-21.
Londoño Sulkin, C.D., 2005. ‘Inhuman beings: morality and perspectivism among Muinane people (Colombian Amazon)’. Ethnos 70: 1, 7-30.
Nel, P. 2019. When bribery helps the poor. Review of Social Economy, pp.1-25.
Peluso, D. 2018. Traversing the margins of corruption amidst informal economies in Amazonia. Culture, Theory and Critique, 59(4): 400-418.
Pinedo, D., 2013. ‘Bonding or Bridging Ties? Social Relations and Indigenous Activism in Peruvian Amazonia’. Grassroots Development Journal 34, 34-39.
Quiroz, A.W. 2008. Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Stahl, C. ‘Coima’ in Ledeneva, A., A. Bailey, S. Barron, C. Curro and E. Teague, 2018. The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality pp. 174-176. London: UCL Press. http://www.in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Coima_(Argentina)
Walker, H. 2012. ‘Demonic Trade: Debt, Materiality, and Agency in Amazonia’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 1, 140–59.
Further reading
Eisenstadt, S.N. and Roniger, L. 1984. Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.