Further Information
Fellow during the winter term 2019/20
Project: Atlantic Migrations, Criminal Networks and Police Connections in the Ibero-American world: a global perspective
The purpose of this research project is to study the connected history of transnational crime and policing networks in the South American Atlantic region between the 1890’s and 1940’s, with a focus on currency counterfeiting. I follow the trajectories of two cross-border counterfeiters: a French photographer who emigrated to Argentina in the late nineteenth century and a Portuguese photographer who emigrated to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their trajectories are only a fragment of a wider web of criminal and police circulations in the Atlantic world. During half a century, both were persecuted by different police services in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, Portugal and the United States Secret Service. The research also analyzes the travels of South American police detectives in the prosecution of transborder forgery networks and the negotiating schemes behind the investigation of this type of criminality involving different actors: police detectives and undercover agents, reporters and press correspondents, manufacturers, dealers and "shovers" of counterfeit money. To study these two criminal trajectories, this project has relieved documentation from police, judicial and diplomatic archives of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Spain and Portugal, in addition to the records of the Secret Service in the National Archives of the United States.