Drug trafficking and global smuggling: how illicit crime erodes states and governments
Venezuelan analyst Moisés Naím warns that globalised illicit trade is impossible without the complicity of governments, police and judges.
Illicit trade cannot exist without state complicity, Naím warns
Venezuelan historian and journalist Moisés Naím once again alerts to an uncomfortable conclusion in his book Ilícito (Taurus edition): drug trafficking, smuggling and almost all illicit activity require, as an indispensable factor for their operation, the "acquiescence and complicity" of governments, police, judges and other bodies tasked with combating them. This is reported by El Deber in a reading of the essay, noting that these globalised mafias are eroding all formal state structures thanks to their capacity to corrupt any official who stands in their way.
Naím's central thesis holds that illicit trade—in all its variants and social and economic chains—operates simultaneously globally and locally. The analyst defines it as a kind of "glocalisation": illegal businesses that apply corporate practices at a worldwide scale, but which adapt efficiently to very specific contexts, from municipalities to sub-administrative divisions of just a few hundred inhabitants. In these spaces, smugglers and drug traffickers forge alliances with local authorities and neighbourhood associations, whom they offer bribes, economic benefits or direct participation as micro-producers, distributors or transporters. The result is a deep-rooted corruption that destroys the logic of formal commerce and the idea that legal work constitutes a viable path to wellbeing.
Digital logistics without borders
From large-scale logistical networks to the use of digital currencies and virtual money for transactions at any point on the planet, organised crime appears to have closed all loopholes. Naím's reading is disturbing when concluding that, in that context, it is practically impossible for drug traffickers and smugglers to operate without the complicity of governments.
As an illustrative example, the analyst points to Ciudad del Este, in Paraguay, where prolific multi-product trafficking develops alongside high-intensity money laundering at the triple border between Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. The beneficiaries of that system, Naím notes, do not even bother to keep a low profile; they act in broad daylight, knowing that those who should be overseeing them are on the payroll of the criminal groups that proliferate in the area.
Another factor that the book highlights is the technological revolution, which has eliminated distances and vast geographies that were historically difficult to control. Previously, armed custodians were needed to move money destined for illegal payments. Now all countries are adjacent to each other, just a single click away. That instantaneous geographic reach is unprecedented in the history of global commerce.
Colonisation of public administrations
Most disturbing for Naím, according to El Deber, is that illicit trafficking does not only permeate political and regional police actors, but "colonises, enslaves, manipulates and buys" almost all public administrations, from national to subnational levels. The analyst concludes that, faced with that transversal penetration, "it is impossible for regimes not to be involved".
The first step in confronting this phenomenon would be, according to Naím, to recognise that it represents "a threat as important as or greater than terrorism itself". Any solution that does not start from that premise will prove useless, given the number of institutional gaps that traverse the struggle against organised crime.
Those gaps—which the analyst compares to black holes in the universe—have an absorptive effect: whoever comes too close is swallowed up. Traditional rules and known regulatory frameworks cease to apply, and in that corrupt ecosystem traffickers exercise the most relevant, almost hegemonic power.
The profile of the state favourable to drug trafficking
For a country to be attractive to traffickers, Naím identifies a set of conditions: weak judicial administration, corruptible armed forces, unscrupulous political leadership, a financial system sophisticated enough to absorb and transfer illicit funds, and a favourable geographic location. Venezuela, in the analyst's view, meets all those requirements and furthermore concentrates in oil a source of distortion, poverty and inequality rather than prosperity.
Bolivia does not escape the analysis. Drug trafficking was one of the major beneficiaries of the years of the Plurinational State under the MAS, the article notes, and the consequences are evident today in daily settling of accounts and in the seizure of significant drug shipments at neighbouring borders, with the consequent damage to the country's international image.
Source: El Deber