Illicit Behavior: Smuggling and Society in Seventeenth-Century Buenos Aires ABSTRACTIn this work we look into the origins of illegal commerce to analyze how contraband was conducted in the port of Buenos Aires in the early seventeenth-century. To do this, we will analyze the political and economic context in which contraband arose and gained importance in order to reflect whether this economic practice -conducted by government officials, vecinos (official residents) and settlers of the port of Buenos Aires- can be considered corrupt in the context of the period studied. We will situate the behavior of these social actors within an intertwined complex of political beliefs and ideologies, and conjunctures, to explain how a practice like colonial-era contraband has multiple, tightly related causes.