Organised crime in Latin America: Bolivia, the weakest link in the drug-trafficking network
Drug trafficking is expanding across the region with inherited networks, institutional protectors and chains of anonymous actors. Bolivia faces an unprecedented judicial purge.
Bolivia at the epicentre of a criminal network with no borders
According to El Deber, organised crime in Latin America is not a local phenomenon: it is a regional epidemic that no government has managed to eradicate. Drug trafficking operates today with greater force than ever, with cartels that diversify businesses, accumulate firepower and penetrate corrupt institutions or those weakened by lack of resources to confront them.
Drug trafficking has generated the largest criminal machinery in history. Dozens of criminal groups compete under a market logic—supply and demand—in which everyone seeks their share of the business.
Bolivia: the purge that reveals an iceberg
In a single week, the attorney general of the state fell, along with approximately twenty departmental Bolivian judges and prosecutors. El Deber describes it as "an unprecedented earthquake", and warns that this is merely the tip of an iceberg that was common knowledge. The purge, the analysis notes, is the prelude to a much deeper one.
When a criminal organisation collapses, the one that takes its place does not start from scratch: it inherits routes, contacts, markets and officials willing to negotiate. It also inherits the payroll of protectors—prosecutors, judges, lawyers and politicians. What the general public knows is merely a couple of buoys floating in a sea of complicity.
A network of unknowns sustained by its own anonymity
The analysis details how these structures function: the men who operate the base cocaine or crystallised cocaine laboratories—located in the Amazon, in forestry reserve parks or in areas controlled by coca-grower unions of the Chapare—do not know the pilot of the small aircraft that removes the product. That pilot does not know the intermediary who receives the shipment. The intermediary, in turn, is unaware of the final buyer: a "businessman" who traffics his quota without knowing the end user.
That chain of anonymous actors is, paradoxically, the guarantee that the network does not collapse. Each link ignores the others: it is an economy that connects jungles and provincial towns with global markets in Latin America, Europe, the United States and Asia.
Carlos Lehder, known as the first Colombian extradited to the United States on orders of Pablo Escobar—not by the Colombian government of the time—describes this mechanism in his autobiography Vida y Muerte del Cártel de Medellín (Editorial Debate). Lehder outlines two rules of the business: first, all members of the network will attempt to steal the drugs, the money or both, at all times. Second, they will attempt to seize the illegal routes and the contacts. From day one, any drug trafficker is in the sights of others, large or small, who will seek to take down their business.
The spiral of violence that never closes
In this spiral develop the recurring gun battles, the red zones and the trail of violence left in Bolivia by Uruguayan drug trafficker Marset. Armed groups born in the heat of drug trafficking seek new businesses and feed an immense informal market that transits throughout Bolivian territory.
The question of when it ends seems to arrive already distorted: it is supposed that there should be an end point when the "big fish" is captured or the correct operation is executed. Reality disproves that narrative.
No country has eliminated organised crime. The United States did not eliminate the mafia in over a hundred years. Italy did not liquidate the Ndrangheta. Mexico has been waging a fierce struggle since the first drug traffickers—Chinese selling opium to soldiers returning from the Second World War and Vietnam. At best, States have managed to limit the radius of action of these organisations, to halt the total capture of their institutions, to prevent them from controlling entire territories and to limit the violence with which they impose their rules. Beyond that, nothing.
The last mass police execution in Rio de Janeiro illustrates the structure with clarity: a network of drug traffickers and operatives made up of children, young people, wives, sons and parents where everyone says they know each other and at the same time are mutually unaware of one another.
The conclusion is as simple as it is troubling: it is no longer possible to distinguish with certainty who is part of the business and who is not.
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Javier Medrano is a journalist and political scientist.
Source: El Deber