Frontera como negocio en Bogotá: renta y violencia (1990–2021)

This article examines the formal/informal frontier not as a condition to be overcome but as an active rent extraction device in Bogotá’s periphery. The central argument holds that illegal land markets, informal rents, and rent extraction mechanisms are not anomalies of semi-peripheral urban capitalism: they constitute its functional infrastructure. Through the concept of frontier urbanism, the article analyses the extraction chain linking popular self-construction, armed violence, selective state tolerance, and instrumental legalisation into an integrated accumulation regime. The research combines historical documentary analysis, 47 in-depth interviews, and multi-sited ethnographic observation (2022–2025). Three interrelated processes are reconstructed: the operation of tierreros (informal land brokers) as agents of the illegal land market (1990–2005); paramilitary territorial control as a frontier stabiliser and rent capture device; and neighbourhood legalisation as a mechanism for transferring value from popular self-construction to formal real estate capital. The Bogotá case suggests that a definancialisation policy that does not intervene in the formal/informal frontier tends to reproduce the regime it seeks to correct.