Like the ghetto and the concentration camp, the maquilas and the EPZs (Export Processing Zones), as the model is known in Asia, are one of the most recent iterations of the locus terribilis, places of exception where all kinds of goods are manufactured, ranging from clothing, shoes, electronics, jewelry, toys, furniture, machinery and even cars. The origin of the EPZs dates back to the free ports of the 19th century (8.4), and as the maquiladoras it takes advantage of a threshold situation to establish an economic exception in which it is possible to export finished products directly to a port without them being declared under the legislation of the country in which the zone in question is located. This situation of exception brings enormous advantages to the parties involved in terms of time, bureaucracy and, of course, money, particularly because people working in EPZs are in a genuine no-man’s-land and therefore not covered by the labor laws of any country. In a global neoliberal culture that turns consumption into a spectacle, the maquilas and EPZs have become the backstage of industrial production, an economic sector that, according to the WTO, moved between 200 and 250 billion dollars by the end of the 20th century.

In No Logo, Naomi Klein gives a good description of the Cavite Province EPZ that has absorbed the municipality of Rosario in the Philippines and is now considered a conurbation of Manila:

If Nike Town and the other superstores are the glittering new gateways to the branded dreamworlds, then the Cavite Export Processing Zone, located ninety miles south of Manila in the town of Rosario, is the branding boom closet. After a month visiting similar industrial areas in Indonesia, I arrived in Rosario in early September 1997, at the tail end of monsoon season and the beginning of the Asian economic storm. I’d come to spend a week in Cavite because it is the largest free-trade zone in the Philippines, a 682-acre walled-in industrial area housing 207 factories that produce goods strictly for the export market. Rosario’s population of 60,000 all seemed to be on the move; the town’s busy, sweltering streets were packed with army jeeps converted into minibuses and with motorcycle taxis with precarious sidecars, its sidewalks lined with stalls selling fried rice, Coke and soap. Most of its commercial activity serves the 50,000 workers who rush through Rosario on their way to and from work in the zone, whose gated entrance is located smack in the middle of town.

Coinciding with the topology of the terrible place, Cavite and the rest of the Asian EPZs are huge walled industrial parks that house hundreds of factories whose labor practices are overtly predatory. An enclosure where, like a hunting park, a large-scale economic exception has been formalized, which more than a production zone resembles a forced labor camp (7.25). The fact that these industrial hunting parks are located on the outskirts of cities, in the suburbs (0.28), evidences not only their liminal situation but also the fractal character of the paradeisos as the underlying topology of the human domus (7.11).

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1. Naomi Klein, No Logo, 202-03. ↩︎