Rolling the Dice Across the Strait of Gibraltar
How hashish smugglers illuminate the speculative logics shaping contemporary economic life
Across the narrow waters separating northern Morocco from southern Spain, hashish smugglers operate in a world defined by risk, improvisation and ambiguity.
Yet their everyday decision-making reveals something far larger than the illicit economy alone. As a recent paper argues, the lives of these speedboat pilots offer a refracted view of how speculation, chance and the management of uncertainty have come to shape contemporary capitalism itself.
Central to this story is Paco, a retired Spanish police officer who spent decades confronting the trade firsthand. After years of observing both law enforcement tactics and the evolution of smuggling practices, Paco arrived at a striking conclusion. In spite of expertise, technology and training, trafficking across the Strait remained, at heart, a gamble.
The rapid speeds of modern semi-rigid vessels and the impossibility of fully predicting conditions meant that both police and pilots were constantly contending with what Paco described as a roll of the dice.
This sense of radical uncertainty permeates the experiences of the traffickers Martínez met, including Alberto and Adnan, two pilots whose biographies illuminate shifting economic landscapes around the Western Mediterranean.
For Alberto, who grew up in La Línea de la Concepción, cross-border smuggling was woven into local life long before hashish became profitable. Faced with limited employment options and few prospects of social mobility, he embraced the world of speedboats and high-stakes logistics as a means of grasping opportunities otherwise closed off.
His reflections reveal pragmatic calculations rather than romanticised risk-taking. Decisions about routes, pricing and timing always involved wagering imperfect information against volatile conditions.
Adnan’s experiences further highlight the embodied pressures of such work. Operating state-of-the-art vessels capable of travelling at more than 60 knots, he describes the need to navigate treacherous waters, evade police and maintain composure despite constant danger. His income dwarfs that of others on board, but so does the responsibility. Success depends on skills that cannot be reduced to algorithms or forecasts. Calmness, intuition and the ability to react swiftly to the unknown are fundamental.
This research situates these accounts within wider debates about capitalism and speculation. Economic thinkers from Frank Knight to Hyman Minsky highlighted the limits of positive knowledge and the ways in which economic life depends not on calculable risks but on uncertainty that cannot be tamed.
Contemporary anthropology likewise shows how value, investment and action hinge on imagined futures rather than predictable outcomes. Traffickers thus exemplify a broader truth: under contemporary capitalism, everyone is a gambler.
This perspective challenges common portrayals of illicit actors as reckless thrill-seekers. Instead, the paper argues that their practices mirror those found in financial districts, corporate offices and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The difference lies not in orientation to uncertainty but in access to tools that stabilise futures, from legal contracts to credit infrastructures.
Whereas hedge fund managers deploy complex instruments to manage chance, speedboat pilots rely on personal skill, informal knowledge and the hope that circumstances remain favourable long enough to complete a single journey.
By attending to these forms of labour, this work illuminates how speculation permeates everyday economic life. The traffickers navigating the Strait of Gibraltar do not oppose capitalist systems of value. Rather, they seek alternative routes into them, contesting exclusion through risky but potentially lucrative endeavours.
Their engagements with uncertainty remind us that calculability is never complete and that the promises of rational planning often conceal profound fragility.
In the end, as Paco remarks, traffickers resemble everyone else: they make a wager, cross their fingers and hope for the best.
Martínez, J. C. (2026). Rolling the dice: Capitalism, trafficking and speculation across the Western Mediterranean. Economy and Society, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2026.2644024
Dr José Ciro Martínez is Lecturer in Politics at King’s College London in the Department of International Development. His research explores political economy, mobility and illicit markets across the Mediterranean region.