The Indebted Wage: Putting Financial Products to Work in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area

Abstract

This article focuses on what I will call the “indebted wage”: the process through which wage labor is transformed into financial assets and new forms of accumulation. I begin with the observation that many Paraguayan families work in order to channel money into debt-based investments. This invites a conceptual shift: can we extend the wage relationships outward from a language of exploitation and into a language of indebtedness as well? I track the effort invested in “keeping on payment,” investments in the infamous free trade zone on Paraguay’s triple frontier with Argentina and Brazil, how money moves into economies of debt, and processes whereby the wage is restructured as an investment. I argue that while both the poor and elites of Paraguay see promise in Ciudad del Este’s de-regulated market, it is the low income and precarious labor of the working poor that bears the risks without accumulating the wealth of these transfers.