Introduction

One of the most significant aspects of the studies on international borders in Latin America is the proliferation of analyses on those cross-border relations referred to as para-diplomacy ─as defined early on by ^{Soldatos (1993})¹─ and which this study calls cross-border agreements.² Thus, in recent years at least a dozen books dedicated exclusively or predominantly to the subject have appeared in Latin America (^{Barajas et al., 2015}; ^{González et al., 2016}; ^{Molano, 2016}; ^{Moya, 2012}; ^{Oddone & Ramos, 2018a}; ^{Oddone et al., 2016}; ^{Rhi-Sausi & Oddone, 2013}; ^{Soto & Ramírez, 2014}; among others). Furthermore, both specialized journals and academic meetings have created discussion spaces regarding how and for what purpose border actors agree to create new management spaces.

All this constitutes a contribution to border and territorial studies in Latin America. In addition, these studies have managed to go beyond the traditional aspects of geopolitics that had usually prevailed in the subject and incorporate into their analysis the actions of a greater variety of actors and situations than those offered by previous studies anchored in centralist visions. This provides border studies with an infinite number of case studies susceptible to more intense comparative analysis and contributes to forming a theory of their own on the subject. In any case, it encourages a debate of which this article aspires to be a part.

The achievements made, however, do not omit a major heuristic difficulty. A considerable part of these studies ─which could be considered the mainstream─ has been strongly influenced by the two world paradigms in border studies, the European Union and the border shared by Mexico and the United States. Latin American specialists had direct influence from the former from 2007 to 2012 with the Open Borders Program (^{Rhi-Sausi & Conato, 2009}) of the Centro Studi Politica Internazionale (Cespi). Its purpose was to disseminate the European experience as a “theoretical frame of reference”, with funding available for research, training, publications, and consultancy for projects in Central and South America. In North America, studies on cross-border cooperation have had a solid network of academic institutions on both sides of the border that have produced interesting intellectual work. Some still share the euphoria of convergence and hybridization that marked the 1990s.

This is not a problem per se. Symbiotic relationships with pre-existing fields and schools of thought are constitutive of scientific research; therefore, the existence of these influences is not surprising. On the other hand, it is convenient to establish these relationships with these two academic currents that have achieved notable theoretical and methodological advances in studies on the subject. The heuristic drawback lies in the fact that sometimes this relationship is based on an uncritical adoption to the detriment of the accumulated intellectual production of the continent. A conceptual apparatus has been generated from here, which, without ignoring its merits mentioned above, frequently relies on metaphors of little heuristic value. Consequently, the emergence of a “consensual and relatively homogeneous voice” that ^{Oddone and Ramos (2018b, p. 279)} perceived as a prelude to an epistemic community³ is not fundamentally the result of a theoretical critique of the concrete reality and the accumulated cognitive stock, but rather the anteposition to a reality of canons and theoretical paradigms consecrated in other regions.

Just to illustrate the above statement, it is worth studying a document issued by the Economic Commission for Latn America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) ─although not assumed as an official position─ and signed by four prestigious Latin American academics (^{Oddone et al., 2016}). Under the suggestive title of “Territorial pacts in the construction of cross-border regions: for greater integration at multiple levels”, it defines borders as “interstate spaces” whose relations are constituted “(…) depending on the degree of permeability of their boundaries, the level of autonomy of subnational governments and ongoing decentralization processes, the weight of national policy and inter-jurisdictional agreements, regional initiatives that promote integration, or the rigidity of the international security agenda” (p. 19). It also recognizes the existence of informal spaces but recommends that they be “(…) formalized and denaturalized” (p. 12). The “common good” would be achieved through states which are “(…) guarantors of progressive rights” (p. 12) and integration projects, supported by greater physical connectivity that generates “(…) the necessary conditions to attract investment and reduce asymmetries, moving toward greater equality” (p. 16).

Although the excellent intentions of the document should be recognized, if the authors had paid more attention to the concrete reality they intended to study and to the accumulated knowledge on the subject, they would have discovered that the processes of creating borders in the specific case (although not exclusively) of Latin America have not been characterized by equitable negotiated arrangements, but by unequal relations, high levels of informality, and militarized, undemocratic, and corrupt border political regimes. They would also have learned that there are notable discrepancies in Latin America between states, societies, and identities the the former are not entities with institutionalized operations subject to public scrutiny that requires transparent management of the “common good”. No less important, they would have been forced to admit that supranational integration projects have sometimes induced ─by action or omission─ more exclusionary and discriminatory border processes, as argued by ^{Jaquett (2008}) and ^{Giménez (2010}) regarding Mercosur. They would then conclude that border processes in Latin America ─their economic correlates, their social organization, and their historical and cultural roots, among other vital aspects to understand these cross-border spatial-temporal assemblages─ are, starkly, “(…) relational systems sustained by conflict” (^{Grimson, 2000}, p. 18).

In this argumentative presentation, the present authors intend to contribute to the debate on the issue of cross-border consultations in Latin America, understood as any process of regular negotiation that occurs between cross-border actions and whose agential value lies in the adoption of agreements to manage regular processes of exchanges that shape these territories, and the nature of the processes of establishing borders that take place. First, the article discusses the borderization processes conceptually in neoliberal capitalism. Second, it discusses how these processes have incubated forms of border agreements in the two regions that have most influenced Latin American academic thought, the European Union and the Mexico-United States border. Finally, the authors advance some ideas on Latin America, its borders and the real experiences of cross-border cooperation, proposing a preliminary typology of cooperation experiences for complete operational purposes based on their origins.

This article consists of a deductive methodology, supported by analyzing existing academic production and empirical information available to the authors from their work in various continental border situations. However, as readers will note, the ideas are presented in an essayistic manner and have a polemical tone. This pursues a vital objective for the intellectual exercise, that is, to motivate discussion as an epistemological procedure, inseparable from what ^{Morín (2000}) called “the right to reflection as opposed to the blind confrontation of facts or the stubborn verification of futile hypotheses” (p. 59).

The processes of establishing borders in neoliberal capitalism

One way of perceiving the history of capitalism is as a complex process of counterpoint and complementarity between what ^{Tilly (1990}) called the logic of capital and coercion. In each of these moments, territorial re-formations have redefined interstate borders, both in terms of their spatial-temporal deployments and their systemic uses. These are the so-called processes of establishing borders, considered here (according to ^{Van Houtum & Van Naerssen, 2005}, p. 127) as those continuous processes of territorial power restructuring that occur in international border areas and that determine the dynamics that people, capital, goods, information, and discourses sustain in relation to them.

Historically, border territories have constituted “overlapping territorialities” (^{Agnew & Oslander, 2010}) affected by the confluence of different political sovereignties and cultural fabrics, always contradictory and sometimes contending. However, during the phase of internalist market capitalism, dominant in the 20th century ─with “a protectionism so defensive it bordered on autarky” according to ^{Hobsbawn (2015, p. 142)}─, and of the regulatory apogee of nation-states, borders turned out to be liminal places, “confines of the homeland” obliged to look toward “the vital cores” of nations. They aimed their institutional forces at managing contact and separation regarding others. They could be clearly defined from their instrumental nature (as Raffestin claimed: see the compilation of ^{Cerrarols et al., 2018}) expressed in five protectionist functions: legal, fiscal, control, military, and ideological. Borders were a subject of classical geopolitics and, consequently, the establishment of borders accounted, first and foremost, for an enabling of boundaries that ^{Prescott (2015}) explained as a sequence of actions ─location, delimitation, demarcation, and administration─ consistent with “(…) state functions applied to boundaries” (p. 63). The notion of cross-border was then liminal and residual.

The advent of neoliberal capitalism ─whose decisive feature for this article is the acquisition by capital of unprecedented mobility resources far beyond the containment capacities of both national states and communities─ led to the conversion of borders into economic resources (^{Sohn, 2014}) based on the exploitation of differential profits and the consequent localization of unequal exchange. For ^{Soja (2005}, p. 33), this implied a particular complexity of the “ontological choreographies” of border processes, full of “binary paradoxes”⁴ constructed from a re-functionalization that does not renounce former uses of controls but rather incorporates and redefines them. This turned, for example, old central dilemmas, such as the contrast between contact and separation, into a phenomenological result that, while retaining its political significance, is of less heuristic value.

International borders still separate and contact according to convenience. However, above all, they classify subjects and discipline them according to the economic and political processes that shape the cross-border.⁵ Workers become aliens without rights, more profitable as providers of labor, and without the additional cost of reproducing the family life they leave behind (^{Kearney, 2008}). Customary goods and commodities, which constitute vital resources for the survival of communities, become contraband, and the cultures of others become innocuous products rendered folkloric. Furthermore, by dint of contacts, the others themselves become sorts of acquiescent, intimate others, benefiting from quotas of tolerance constitutive of a cosmopolitan order with which neoliberalism coexists.

These general considerations do not omit the existence of different types of border processes based on empirical realities, which are vital for analyzing the agreements. Ultimately, a territory is a multidimensional product. Its multidimensionality refers to factors such as the historical, cultural, and environmental setting in which it exists; to the “structural coherence” of its political economy (^{Harvey, 2014}), which is built both from social survival practices and accumulation strategies; and, finally, to the nature of its political regime, the balance of its topocratic and adhocratic practices (^{Leresche & Saez, 2002}) and its geopolitical contexts.

Christopher ^{Sohn (2014}) offers a taxonomic exercise based on the configuration of two ideal types of what he calls “cross-border integration”, and from them, diverse situational crossings. In the first instance, Sohn describes what he calls a “geo-economic model”, which would correspond to the type of relationships that gives life to the vast majority of contemporary cross-border regions. Its main reason for functioning is the exploitation of differential gains; thus, it coexists with great territorial disparities magnified by the functioning of the model. It implies the perpetuation of the border as a source of gains, so that “(…) this type of cross-border regime goes hand in hand with a strong division of social and functional space, which conditions any political will in favor of territorial convergence” (^{Sohn, 2014, p. 597}). Although it may contain cooperation that reduces uncertainties and increases revenues, this is often optional and marginal to the decisive processes for the functioning of the model. At the other extreme, there is a second model called “territorial” that contains an integration process based on a logic of “cross-cultural hybridization and mobilization of the border as an object of territorial and symbolic recognition” (p. 598). The intention is to go beyond a simple territorial marketing operation to give rise to a form of integration that transcends and blurs the boundary. Here, cooperation is a fundamental element of cohesion and may eventually produce totally or partially merged political regimes.

It is a question of two ideal types that Sohn united in gradations and combinations that are omitted in this consideration. This article emphasizes that the territorial model ─clearly located in a post-nationalist perspective that generates borderization aimed at the negation of the border─ has only been present in European integration and consequently has only affected the internal borders of that space. This is to the same extent that the European Union has been endowed with a post-nationalist ambition (within the European confines) of reconstruction of the border communities from substantive legal adaptation ─the starting point of which was the European Charter of 1981─ and a notable allocation of billions of euros in funds from the well-known Interreg programs. In contrast, the geo-economic model has been the rule for the functioning of active international borders and has had its typical application on the Mexico-U.S. border. Both experiences, due to the great number of studies and the influence of the entities involved, have become paradigmatic cases from which Latin American academia has been unable to escape. Therefore, it is impossible, for reasons of space, to exhaustively discuss what has been produced theoretically on the subject ─a rich, extensive, and growing bibliography. The authors examine some studies that have tried to explain the nature and scope of the agreement processes in each context and which indicate considerable shortcomings even in the most optimistic projections.

The two experiential points of reference: Euroregions and the Mexico-U.S. border

The territorial and cross-border coordination mechanisms par excellence of the European Union have been the Euroregions ─units with their own formal identities, institutions, and resources, different from the national states that share them─, which Markus ^{Perkmann (2002}) described early on in a detailed study that is still a point of reference. Starting from the fact that these cross-border regions were built from negotiations of formal actors, mainly state actors, the arguments Perkmann presents refer to formal cross-border cooperation. According to the author, formal cross-border cooperation predates the programs of the European Union, and its origins can be found in various “institutional undertakings” that took place in the 1950s. The European Union, since the 1990s, has added to this trend a more coherent multilevel coverage ─political and technical─ and substantial incentive funds, which increased the number of “undertakings” exponentially and made their agendas more complex and ambitious. Nevertheless, a considerable number of the cooperation projects remained “(…) technocratic entities, through which local authorities make their projects viable” (^{Perkmann, 2002, p. 121}). He emphasized that, in all cases, “(…) the participating actors are strongly oriented toward their own territorial and organization interests” (p. 109), which generated unilateral uses of the allocated funds. In a later study (^{Oliveras et al., 2010, p. 38}), however, Euroregions were granted a historical safe-conduct as “(…) a new institutional model (…) that redefines the Westphalian model”, calling for caution in optimistic predictions.

^{Sohn (2018}) calculated the existence of 130 cross-border consultation structures on the European map, 80 of which are Euroregions, formally organized as autonomous public or private entities with their own administrative and technical apparatuses and, eventually, representative bodies. In particular, he focuses on the emergence of “cross-border metropolises”, a controversial term adopted from North American border urbanism that curiously could have greater applicability here than in its place of origin. ^{Sohn (2018)} states that “these cross-border regions developed some of the most advanced forms of cooperation in urban planning, transportation, and economic development, and some even developed cross-border infrastructures” (p. 304), and thereby place themselves advantageously in the investment circuits. Nevertheless, he was pessimistic about the lack of shared identities and the proliferation of resentment among the coalition partners.

If these obstacles have been present in Europe, most of whose borders do not contain major socioeconomic inequalities, and where integration policies consider them atavistic scars of history, it is plausible that in the Mexico-U.S. border space, where the “geo-economic” uses of borders have prevailed, the processes of cross-border agreements have taken a less benevolent course.

Although the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an agreement with a strong political connotation, which was concluded between states and involved partial cessions of sovereignty, it does not aspire to be a political community. Its driving force is the market, and its leitmotif is greater profits from a political economy that exploits and intensifies inequality. Furthermore, although it has incorporated programs to control negative externalities ─either by social pressures or by adopting codes of social responsibility─ these are marginal and prioritize inequality expressed in the geopolitical and economic hegemony of one of its members, the United States.

Studies on the subject reveal a large number of projects and organizations working on agreements, which have been described by authors such as ^{Scott (2002}) and, more recently, ^{Barajas (2015}), who counted 83 “institutional actors” with diverse agendas and levels that had an impact on the subject. Some of these projects are functionally significant and cover the entire border, such as the International Boundary and Water Commission of 1944 or the more recent but significant North American Development Bank. Others are more limited in their scope of action, resources, and ability to influence public decision-making. According to ^{Mendoza and Dupeyron (2020}, p. 73), these projects were mainly aimed at “(…) promoting businesses on both sides of the border and are structured as a field of strategic actions focused on economic activity”, while the other proposals which aimed at creating areas of cooperation on cultural, environmental, and educational issues were driven by emerging actors with fewer resources and less experience.

^{Scott (2002}) warned early on that while these projects had some value in terms of breaking down psychological barriers and fostering a common risk culture ─in the case of the Arizona-Sonora area─, “the actual results achieved by these cross-border initiatives may appear meager” (p. 201). A decade later, Tony ^{Payan (2010}) reiterated the same arguments and outlined a two-pronged critique. First, he noted that the overwhelming majority did not go beyond a level of “cooperation”, identifying common objectives and issues, thus maintaining the institutional individuality⁶ of each party, and condemning cross-border interactions to a “(…) spontaneous exercise with narrow results and temporary objectives” (p. 234). Secondly, the absence of cross-border governance is supported by “(…) a system of institutional incentives, which creates, formalizes, and legitimizes mechanisms (…) to develop concrete capacities for collaboration” (p. 241).

In a vigorous study, Josiah ^{Heyman (2010}) situated the discussion of cross-border territories on the Mexico-U.S. border in the coexistence of two “sources of hegemony”. One derives from the power of nation-states involving forces of control and symbology. The second stems from the requirements of capitalist globalization that imply greater fluidity in the transit of economic factors. Both are, Heyman affirmed, “rival structures”. However, it is an unspoken, relative rivalry since, in the end, both hegemonies aim at reinforcing the status quo: “(…) they reinforce the accepted, the normal, the unalterable” (^{2010, p. 31}). Furthermore, both assume different cultural alignments that the author attributes mainly to the class positions of the subjects in each structure.

The proposal by Heyman contains an appreciable analytical value in studies of the Mexico-U.S. border, where there have been systematic studies that have sought to demonstrate scenarios of hybridizations, convergences, and mergers of two complex realities (^{Herzog, 1990}; ^{Martínez, 1994}; ^{Alvarez, 1995}; ^{Anzaldúa, 1999}; ^{Dear & Leclerc, 2003}), explicitly or implicitly criticized by ^{Vila (2003}), ^{Alegría (2008}), and ^{Grimson (2000}), among others. However, his vision insists on a fragmented notion of cross-border territories ─nationalist politics and the globalizing economy as “rival structures”─ making it difficult to understand the underlying systemic reality.

However, above all, for the purpose at hand here, it opens the door to the illusion that from the second “source of hegemony”, a more propitious scenario of integration can be conceived with the generation of cosmopolitanism with a strong classist stamp that constitutes “(…) the appropriate cultural framework for the conduct of globalization (^{Heyman, 2010}, p. 30)”. Therefore, if institutional adjustments were adopted in pursuit of greater “structural harmony” between the states on both sides ─as ^{Payan (2010}) and ^{Ganster and Collin (2017}) have also suggested─ the creation of true integration processes through superior collaborative policies could be assumed.

That is not to say that what the authors mentioned above is unnecessary, only that it is procedural in the face of the great tension that occurs within the processes of economic production and reproduction of these territories and that is inherent to these geo-economic border situations (^{Sohn, 2014}). It is not simply that cross-border economic interaction relies on and coexists with the exploitation of inequalities, but that in doing so, it generates a political economy based on an unequal exchange that deepens inequity, as has been demonstrated ─for the same Mexico-U.S. border─ by ^{Gerber and Anderson (2015}) and from a spatial point of view by ^{Fuentes and Peña (2010}). Moreover, politics accounts for this through structures that would only be able to negotiate secondary aspects of the cross-border relationship.

Latin American borders: informality, centralism, and authoritarianism

Few Latin American cross-border regions have been constituted based on large-scale accumulation strategies, as is the Mexico-U.S. border. Nevertheless, it is possible to find regions whose political economies are linked to the global economy, such as the case of the cross-border region located in the department of Alto Paraná in Paraguay and the states of Matto Grosso do Sur and Paraná in Brazil (^{Massi & Falabella, 2005}). Other regions are organized around international trade flows as is the case in the Corumbá-Puerto Quijarro region on the border of Brazil and Bolivia (^{Batista da Silva, 2013}), or the departments of Santander Norte (Colombia) and Táchira (Venezuela) before the crisis in the latter country (^{Valero, 2008}). However, most of these regions are what ^{Dilla et al. (2020}) call “self-contained regions”, whose economic exchanges ─even when they maintain links with other scales─ are resolved at the local level. At all scales, informal relations play a significant role in the survival of family economies and a myriad of actors operating in gray areas and whose views do not go beyond the mere existential level.⁷

None is the result of a post-nationalist political agreement in the European style. Latin American states continue to be fundamentally Westphalian, to which has been added the strong military and paramilitary presence on Latin American borders. These have historically suffered from high levels of dominance by armed institutions, with variations in their levels of specialization, leaving less room than in other regions for civilian authorities. This presence has been reinforced by the increase ─real or constructed for political purposes─ of the so-called “new threats”, such as illicit trafficking of drugs, arms, or people (with the increase of intracontinental migrant flows), and terrorist threats or epidemic transmissions. About the South Andean region, ^{Ovando et al. (2020}) noted that the latter element, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, turned borders into settings for the exercise of the crudest biopolitics. These securitization processes add to the geo-economic form of Latin American borderization new ingredients of control and disciplining others and further obstacles to cross-border cooperation. Although the continent has known different integrationist projects, ranging from developmental protectionism to neoliberal “new regionalism” as discussed by ^{Molano (2007}), not one of them has proposed a post-nationalist overcoming of international borders, and rarely have they had specific projections toward borders as territories.

In this context, it is understandable that in Latin America, the experiences of cross-border agreements are limited in their aspirations and achievements. As noted, although high-quality studies have been produced, there is no fairly exhaustive inventory of these experiences, a matter that should be resolved by future research. However, hypothetically and preliminarily, these experiences can be grouped into three types, according to their organizational origins and scales: (i) those stemming from local initiatives; (ii) those originating from within existing integration projects; and (iii) those stemming from binational border governance models.

Conclusions

The emergence of a field of studies on cross-border agreements in Latin America is a positive feature in the construction of a critical theory of Latin American borders. These studies have gone beyond traditional views of geopolitics on the subject and incorporate into their analyses the actions of a greater variety of actors and situations than previous studies anchored in centralist visions could offer. Its evolution toward an epistemic community capable of influencing public decision-making would be a particularly happy moment that should be celebrated by a profession that occasionally manages to be heard beyond specialized professional fields.

The critical attitude of the authors on the subject explained in this article lies in the fact that a significant part of the studies carried out has dispensed with the analysis of the continental reality and with a critical review of the accumulated stock of studies. This results in studies on cross-border agreements in Latin America having strong European and North American biases, which have prevented a more effective heuristic contribution to the Latin American debate on the character of neoliberal border processes in the continent. In order to advance in this theoretical construction, it is essential to dialogue with these strong and diverse intellectual points of reference. However, this should not lead to an uncritical application and to consider reality as imperfect to the extent that it diverges from the North Atlantic reality and as perfectible as it approaches it.

It could be affirmed that the forms of borderization that occur on the planetary level are, essentially, the expression of how neoliberal capitalism considers the cultural and political realities of each cross-border region and eventually parasitizes them, increasing its profits from the unequal exchange and the exploitation of differential gains. At the same time, from these territories ─from the different state levels and the communities and their social practices─ processes of resistance or accommodation to the dominance of the neoliberal economy are generated. In general terms, this produces a type of border that has fundamentally surpassed the old contact/separation dilemmas to assume more significant functions in the control, filtering, and disciplinarization of the factors that cross borders. Latin America is no exception; however ─unlike Europe with its supranational political project or North America with its powerful accumulation strategies─ a type of border marked by informality, strongly nationalist policies, and omissive integrationist pacts predominates.

Dissimilar experiences of cooperation have been generated from this reality, some of which have been reviewed here only to demonstrate that they indicate an accumulation of some achievements and many frustrations that do not even reach the levels of the cross-border relationship between Mexico and the United States. Any one of the experiences analyzed in this article demonstrates that the European post-nationalist environment, and even more so the less benevolent North American situation of massive accumulation strategies that eliminate uncertainty factors, is not similar to the Latin American reality. The studies and methodologies developed in these places are undoubtedly points of reference for comparative analysis, but it is difficult to find a common theoretical framework beyond some generalities.

Further progress in these studies requires a systematic view of the empirical experiences and the production of a flexible taxonomic order that allows them to be contrasted. This article makes a preliminary attempt at this order by identifying the institutional or scalar roots of the projects ─local, state, national, integrationist pacts─ but this taxonomy is far from being the only one, or even the most important. An analysis of the agendas of these projects, for example, would suggest new aspects of evaluation, as would an understanding of how formal agreements relate to the myriad contacts made by civil society and the social practices of the communities. In a continental context where borders are increasingly feminine, no approach would be successful if it did not consider this gender perspective. Approaches to the value of customary relations, which sometimes rely on resurgent ancestral identities, should not be any less relevant. In short, a whole range of situations awaits the patient work of the academy.