The Global Sociology Blog

Organized crime has gone global. That is an accepted fact but it makes life for national anti-mafia services miserable. Going global has done for organized crime what it has done for transnational corporations: it has made these groups more powerful, more flexible; it has given them a greater reach into markets they did not yet have access to; it has allowed them to make connections with other "like-minded" groups whereas before, such contacts would have been limited by geographical distances and barriers.

Moreover, the liberalization of trade and capital as well as the removal of effective border controls within specific regional blocs, such as the European Union, has made circulation of illicit goods and services even easier and more lucrative. Criminality thrives in unregulated environments and failed / failing states. What’s not to love about globalization?

None of this has gone unnoticed, of course, and we are starting to see now real signs of concerns regarding the expanding activities of organized criminal networks, as illustrated by a flurry of articles all over the press across continents.

Let’s review, first, via the BBC:

"A federal police commander has been shot dead in Mexico City, the latest in a long line of law enforcement personnel murdered in recent weeks. It is likely that he was targeted by drug cartels who are battling the authorities over a clamp down on their drug smuggling operations. (…)

Mr Labastida, who headed the anti-trafficking and contraband division of the Mexican federal police force, died along with a body guard. Around 400 law enforcement officers have now been killed in Mexico so far this year. Last month gunmen shot dead the acting director of the country’s federal police force. In other cities police officers have resigned or sought asylum in the United States after receiving threats.

In all nearly 1,500 people have been murdered since January. In one city alone, Juarez, just across the border from the United States, more than 40 people have been killed since the weekend."

The Mexican cartels are on the ascendant in the world of organized crime. They have benefited from the "relative" (I mean, really "relative") weakening of the Colombian cartels (nothing has been the same since the death of Pablo Escobar, other cartels have taken over but not with the amount of power and clout he enjoyed).

Things are getting more violent in Mexico precisely because the government is trying to crack down on organized criminality in general and drug trafficking in particular. This is a civil war of intimidation and so far, the drug cartels are not blinking, via the New York Times:

"In recent weeks, drug dealers have mutilated and beheaded the bodies of some victims, leaving threatening messages with them. They have also waged a war of nerves with the police, placing banners and placards in public places warning them not to continue the offensive."

Of course, organized networks cannot thrive without some amount of corruption of public officials and local police. The PRI pretty much turned a blind eye to this for the last 30 years but President Calderon has different ideas. In addition to cracking down on drug trafficking, he is also working on reforming police department (translation: cleaning house). And the consequences have been pretty bloody, with more than 4,000 deaths since Calderon took office, 18 months ago, about 450 of these deaths being police officers, soldiers or prosecutors.

The government takes the increased violence as a sign of desperation on the part of thre cartels (next thing you know, they’ ll say that the cartels are in the last throes). And as the Independent indicates, this is not an indifferent issue for the United States since 90% of the cocaine consumed there comes from Mexico. As long as the demand for illegal substances is high in rich countries, organized criminal groups will be more than happy to provide. It remains to be seen whether Calderon’s militarized solution actually works, especially conisdering, as Liberation remarks, that the army was not prepared at all to be thrown in the middle of gang warfare, with basically carte blanche to do whatever it takes. Unsurprisingly, human rights were the first casualties of this strategy.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, even though the defeat of the Medellin cartel was a significant event, it does not mean that Colombia is no longer on the map of powerful organized criminal networks. According to the UN Office of Drugs and Crimes , Colombia is one of the places where coca cultivation is up:

""The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and shock: a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation", said the Executive Director of UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa. "But this bad news must be put in perspective". The UNODC coca survey shows that almost half of all cocaine production (288 mt) and one third of the cultivation (35,000 hectares) come from just 10 of the country’s 195 municipalities (5%). "Just like in Afghanistan, where most opium is grown in provinces with a heavy Taliban presence, in Colombia most coca is grown in areas controlled by insurgents", observed Mr. Costa.

Even with the significant increase in coca cultivation, cocaine production in Colombia (the world’s biggest producer) remained almost unchanged in 2007 (at 600 mt). Lower yields are caused by exploitation of peripheral coca plots – smaller, more dispersed, in remote locations. "In the past few years, the Colombian government destroyed large-scale coca farming by means of massive aerial eradication, which unsettled armed groups and drug traffickers alike. In the future, with the FARC in disarray, it may become easier to control coca cultivation", said Mr. Costa.

The Executive Director stressed the urgent need to implement comprehensive, large-scale and ecologically friendly agriculture and forestry schemes in coca growing regions."

Embedded in that quote are the number of social factors that contribute to the encroaching of the illegal economy onto the social structure: a persistent state of conflict with ebbs and flows but with continuous instability, inconsistent drug policies as well as lack of viable alternatives for the growers. And of course, for any insurgent group, production of illegal drugs is a major source of funding, which of course, increases the risk of political instability. And again, these are just factors affecting the supply, this isn’t even discussing the demand.

And, of course, Colombian cartels are not just waiting around for law enforcement agencies to figure out what to do. They adapt, for instance, by using submarines, small submarines assembled deep in the jungle, as reported in Der Spiegel.

"Small, homemade submarines have become the preferred means of transport for the Colombian drug cartels — and a completely new challenge for the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATFS), a group consisting of members of the United States Navy, Coast Guard, CIA and drug control agents from 12 other countries.

The boats, made of plastic or steel, can carry up to 10 tons of cocaine each. Because they cannot submerge completely, the correct term for the boats is semi-submersibles. They are used primarily on the drug trafficking routes between Colombia and Guatemala or Mexico. The cartels have devised a complete logistics system, with fishing boats stationed along the way to warn the crews against patrols and provide them with food and water.

The drug boats have to be piloted almost blindly. They sit low in the water, and the crews rely on a type of GPS system used by yachts for navigation. The smugglers spend up to two weeks at sea. They move slowly during the day to avoid creating the telltale wake. But under cover of darkness, they crawl northward at six knots. In 2006, the vessels are believed to have carried between 500 and 700 tons of cocaine from South America toward the United States. About two-thirds of the drugs reached the United States along a western route in the Pacific, while the rest passed through the Caribbean. The number of submersibles is on the rise."

This is no joke though. The cartels have shown great creativity when it comes to remaining one step ahead of law enforcement agencies. And as JIATFS head, Admiral Nimmich puts it in his interview with Der Spiegel,

"We have seen the dramatic globalization of the drug flow. More and more of the drugs are flowing through West Africa into Europe, and there’s also a flow towards Asia. The narco-traffickers are probably one of the largest asymmetric threats that we face today in terms of national security. With their ability to move drugs comes the ability to move money, the ability to move weapons, the ability to move terrorists, weapons of mass destruction. The drug cartels are constantly adapting — which creates things like the semi-submersibles that we are facing today."

And this story in the BBC is a good example of the globalized nature of drug trafficking and the global networking of different cartels:

"Two Nigerian convicts have been executed in Indonesia, seven years after being caught trying to smuggle heroin into the country. Samuel Okoye and Hansen Nwaolisa were executed by firing squad in the early hours of Friday, officials said.

The executions were timed to mark the UN anti-drugs day, Indonesia’s anti-narcotics agency reportedly said. Drug traffickers are often sentenced to death in Indonesia, but the penalty has not been carried out since 2004. The two men, aged 37 and 40, have been held at a high-security prison on Nusakambangan island, central Java, since their conviction for trying to smuggle some 7kg (16lb) of heroin into Indonesia."

It is a well-known fact that Nigeria has become a hub for the transit of drugs: cocaine from South America to be delivered to Europe or Heroin from Asia to be delivered to South Africa. These are the main routes but there are others, of course, including into other parts of Africa and Asia. The only difference between the Nigerian organizations and others like the Colombian or Mexican cartels is their unwillingness to engage in the bloody violence visible in South America or Asia. But Nigeria is positioned as a central point in illegal trafficking, among other illegal ventures (the most infamous being the email scams that we have all found in our email spam folders).

Fighting organized crime has never been easy. Crime families and cartels were always somewhat global in that they often involved diasporas in destination countries with roots back in their countries of origin. But the impact of globalization has taken organized crime to a whole new level of organizational and logistical sophistication not unlike the complex corporate structures of transnational giants. And as much as flows of goods and services have been liberalized, processes of law enforcement are still slow and largely nation-based. Just as the dichotomy of mobile capital versus flexible labor considerably favors capital, the dichotomy of mobile networks versus national and bureaucratic law enforcement greatly favors criminal networks.