4/8/2024 - politics-and-society

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF DRUG TRAFFICKING: FROM THE CLASSIC ¨ CARTEL ¨ TO NARCO-STATES

By Jose Daniel Salinardi

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF DRUG TRAFFICKING: FROM THE CLASSIC ¨ CARTEL ¨ TO NARCO-STATES

HUGO ACHA. CENTER FOR A FREE SECURE SOCIETY (WASHINGTON D.C.)

Stories, real or fictional, about criminals have always been good business for the Hollywood film industry. There are police or action movies whose main characters have generated such empathy in movie lovers that they have become true icons of the genre.

What is striking about the above is that many of them do not belong precisely to the "good guys' side". The brilliant characterization of Al Capone by Robert De Niro in Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables" (1987); John Dillinger, the romantic bank robber played by Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" directed by Michael Mann (2009); Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) plays in ¨ American Made ¨ (2017) the corrupt commercial airline pilot hired by the CIA for a covert mission that concluded with the rise of the Medellín Cartel led by Pablo Escobar Gavíria; are some examples of what we say. A little further back in time, in 1967, the acting couple formed by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty gave life to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, respectively, the leaders of a gang of thieves who garnered as many followers in the movies as in real life. They all have one thing in common: they really existed.

But if there is one within this category of film productions that has become a kind of cult is ¨ Scarface ¨ (Caracortada). The story of a Cuban exile in the United States who ends up becoming the biggest cocaine trafficker in the state of Florida. The film, masterfully starring Al Pacino as ¨Tony Montana,¨ written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, portrays the violent competition between drug gangs operating in the United States during the 1980s, which were mainly supplied with cocaine from countries such as Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

The drug cartels had made the city of Miami their main center of operations, and there they battled each other yard by yard for territory and business. One activity grew exponentially as a consequence of the large sums of cash that the drug business moved: dozens of small local banks appeared whose main objective, obviously undeclared, was the "laundering" or "laundering" of the millionaire profits from drug trafficking. Drugs brought the banks, and the banks converted dirty money into investments, mainly in real estate, which brought the city back to life. It was the era of "Art Deco", of the boom of Ocean Drive in South Beach and of corporations based in Florida but whose headquarters were located in the mailbox of a bank located on some island in the Caribbean Sea, making it impossible to know who the real owners were. A post office box that must have been the size of a building because in some cases it was shared by dozens of companies ¨ de pape l¨.

Cocaine, money laundering, millionaire investments, and the development of a sophisticated financial engineering that allowed to evade the controls of the anti-drug agencies of any country. But that changed, it was for the worse, and not only because of the damage that drug trafficking represents for people's health and national economies.

Hugo Acha is an outstanding international specialist in transnational crime, narcoterrorism and money laundering based in Washington D.C., expert researcher of the ¨ CENTER FOR A FREE SECURE SOCIETY ¨ and Director of ¨ HUMAN RIGHTS FOR CUBA ¨. During the first week of next April he will visit Argentina, where he has been specially invited to speak about his specialty. In a conversation that we have recently had with him, he has advanced some conclusions that help us to understand how the actions of drug gangs have mutated worldwide, and which actors have been added as ¨partners ¨ of the criminals. Drug violence in Rosario and the use of the armed forces in the fight against drug traffickers, two topics that were present in our meeting with a very interesting vision of Hugo Acha on the success or failure of the strategy that the government of Javier Milei intends to carry out in this regard. The following are the most relevant excerpts.

How could one summarize the process by which drug gangs have gone from an organization in ¨ cartels ¨ to the formation of true narco-states?

Hugo Acha: ¨ Transnational organized crime has gone beyond the stage in which it was content to coexist alongside the State, interacting with it through bribes, financing political parties or actions that allowed money laundering. The West's adversaries are the ones who have best understood this process, and collaborate so that drug traffickers become "the state per se". China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Cuba, for example, collaborate with these gangs that seek to form true corporations of criminals, to help them control the political party structures and institutions until they become part of the State itself. The associations between drug traffickers, human traffickers, arms smugglers, terrorists and money launderers acquire an importance that transcends borders and is today the real challenge that the West must face, not only from the perspective of bribery and corruption, but mainly from the traditional perspective of security agencies and the judiciary ¨¨.

Does the ideology of governments play a role in the development of this phenomenon? For example, are populist or leftist governments more prone to the infiltration of drug trafficking in their political parties and institutions?

Hugo Acha: ¨ Not from the perspective of drug trafficking itself, as an illicit activity capable of seducing a person ideologically on the left or on the right because of the possibility of obtaining significant profits. The phenomenon of state takeover from organized crime, where drug trafficking is seen as a logistical basis for obtaining and remaining in power, not as an eventual business of mere profit, where corruption is a method (remember the Odebrecht/¨ Lavajato ¨ case as a flagship of this process), YES, unfortunately the left has proven to be functional to the expansion of drug trafficking, from the condescension of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, popular organizations such as those in Argentina, the social militancy in Brazil, Argentine political parties that have been totally functional to the territorial penetration of the country or the attacks of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the press so that they do not make public their agreements with organizations linked to drug trafficking in Mexico.¨

What is your view on what is happening in the Argentine city of Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe; and the decision of President Javier Milei to involve the armed forces in the fight against drug trafficking?

Hugo Acha: ¨ We have to understand that the logic of organized crime today is no longer local, departmental or provincial; it is not even national. It is transnational. Rosario is a typical case of what we call "drug trafficking geopolitics". It is located on one of the most strategically important routes for global financial logistics. In a conversation with a senior NATO diplomat in Brussels, he told me that in the last few years, the flow of cocaine into Europe through the port of Antwerp has tripled. More than 90% came from the flow of traffic through the Paraguay/Paraná waterway. The drug supplied all of them harmful actors (narcoterrorists, mainly), making a transnational alliance between security and intelligence agencies essential. Rosario has a location of indisputable strategic importance that benefits, for example, Russia, which through its intelligence agencies, allies and "proxies" can evade sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine; it benefits Hezbollah, which financed with drug trafficking money generated in the Triple Border a recent thwarted attack in Brazil; it benefits Hamas and Iran, which financed with drug trafficking money generated in the Triple Border a recent thwarted attack in Brazil; It benefits Hamas and Iran, which no longer have to worry about obtaining financing and operating globally; it benefits Cuba, which triangulates extraordinary resources from drug trafficking combined with human trafficking and money laundering; it benefits China, since if we observe the growth curve of fentanyl trafficking in detail, we will see that in parallel there has been a constant growth in cocaine consumption in the last decade. Rosario is in a "privileged point", on the one hand. In addition, there was an appalling degree of complicity from the state in Argentina, regions were handed over to the control of individuals and organizations totally linked to the narco. Is the use of the armed forces enough to change the situation? Unfortunately not. Faced with an enemy that adopts an integral approach, the visible arms are the gangs (Tren de Aragua, Comando da Capital, Comando Vermelho) but not the enemy as a whole because behind them you have governments. So, although military deployment can be useful, it is necessary to have an integral role. It is a big challenge for the government of Javier Milei how to face the problem, but it is not possible to face a transnational phenomenon as if it were local, without a strategy that involves the security, police and intelligence agencies of the countries where the enemy acts. Rosario is not the disease, it is a symptom of a process that permeates the neighborhoods of greater Buenos Aires, permeates the national territory, permeates the relationship with a political elite that has become accustomed to allying itself with and becoming part of the problem.

Despite the wave of violence, Latin America has not promoted a common strategy to confront drug trafficking due to the political and social complexities of each country, although some governments (Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and Ecuador) have resorted to the military option, and others, as in the case of Argentina, are thinking of doing so. That alternative, experts say, is not always effective.

Do you want to validate this article?

By validating, you are certifying that the published information is correct, helping us fight against misinformation.

Validated by 0 users
Jose Daniel Salinardi

Jose Daniel Salinardi

Jose Daniel Salinardi is a Certified Public Accountant graduated from the School of Economics of the University of Buenos Aires.

TwitterLinkedinYoutubeInstagram

Total Views: 21

Comments