Pubdate: Mon, 19 Nov 2012
Source: Kathmandu Post, The (Nepal)
Copyright: 2012 Kathmandu Post
Contact:  http://www.kathmandupost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/222
Author: Juan Carlos Garzon Vergara
Note: Juan Carlos Garzon Vergara is a researcher at the Woodrow 
Wilson Center and the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown 
University

LATIN AMERICA'S ADAPTIVE GANGSTERS

BOGOTA , NOV 18 - Many Latin American countries have made impressive 
gains in building state capacity and strengthening democracy in recent decades.

And yet criminal networks - entrenched relationships between legal 
and illegal agents engaged in organized criminal activities - 
continue to play a large role in these countries' formal and informal 
economies and political institutions, rending the social fabric and 
threatening further progress.

Criminal networks distort the most important sources of change: 
globalization, technology, open markets, regional cooperation, and 
democracy. In a context of weak institutions, persistent 
inequalities, and high levels of marginalization and exclusion, new 
growth opportunities for organized crime have emerged.

Latin America has more (formal) democracy, higher foreign-trade 
turnover, a larger middle class, and more advanced technology than it 
had 20 years ago. It also has more organized crime.

These networks bypass formal institutions to take advantage of the 
changes in recent decades, exploiting lacunae in the international 
system and the vulnerabilities of Latin American democracies. As a 
result, they have expanded into global markets, enabled by an 
extralegal system of relationships based on clientelism and 
corruption. Rather than resisting change, criminal networks have 
adapted the forces of modernization to their own advantage.

Criminal factions - whether Mexico's "cartels," Colombia's "bands," 
or Brazil's "commandos" - are only the most visible part of these 
networks. The totality is based on a series of complex relationships 
that connect legal and illegal worlds, including politicians, judges, 
and prosecutors who are willing to alter sentences for money; 
policemen and military personnel involved in illegal activities; and 
businessmen who launder money.

The strength of these criminal networks rests on people and 
organizations - present at all levels of society - that engage with 
illegal markets when convenient. They expand locally and globally to 
satisfy market demand, providing the illicit goods and services that 
societies want.

Incomes produced by these illegal markets are huge, competing in size 
with Latin America's most successful legal commodities. Consider just 
the profits from cocaine sales in North America, which, according to 
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), total roughly 
$35 billion.

Another $26 billion in sales are made in Western and Central Europe.

The vast majority of these proceeds are retained by criminal 
organizations in rich countries and laundered by banks in global 
financial centers, with just a small amount returning to Latin 
America. According to the Colombian academics Alejandro Gaviria and 
Daniel Mejia, only 2.6% of the total street value of Colombian 
cocaine returns to the country.

In Mexico, a recent report published by the magazine Nexos estimated 
organized crime's total "rent" at $8 billion per year - a small 
portion of total profits, but enough to buy off underpaid cops, bribe 
corrupt public officials, and influence local economies.

Expansion of criminal networks occurs not only across borders; 
illegal markets have grown inside countries as well. Brazil is the 
world's second-largest consumer of cocaine in absolute terms, and 
Argentina has the highest prevalence rate in the world, according to 
UNODC data. Likewise, extortion is growing in Central America, and 
illegal mining is a prosperous business in Colombia, with gold 
becoming the new cocaine - easy to market and with lower risk.

Violence is the other currency being traded in Latin America. With 
the exception of a few guerrilla groups, organized crime is the only 
strategic actor in the region that has the capacity to dispute the 
state's claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Given the near-absence of legal forms of mediation, violence is the 
language used by criminal networks to resolve disputes.

When corruption and alliances with public officials do not work, they 
confront state institutions directly.

Indeed, most Latin American countries far exceed the threshold of 10 
homicides per 100,000 inhabitants that the World Health Organization 
uses to define an "epidemic" level of violence.

Countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have the highest 
homicide rates in the world, owing to a high density of criminal 
structures. The obsession of politicians with imposing the rule of 
law through iron-fisted methods, it seems, brings about only more 
insecurity for their citizens. Breaking the distorting power of these 
criminal networks requires first confronting the distortions that 
perpetuate it:

the failed war on drugs and criminalization of consumers; the 
burgeoning privatization of security; police agencies that reproduce, 
rather than reduce, violence and crime; prisons that hone offenders' 
criminal skills; and judicial systems that re-victimize crime victims.

Ultimately, the key is to build democratic institutions that are 
strong enough to de-escalate violence and protect citizens, which in 
turn requires that political leaders try new options, and that 
societies assume more responsibility for their fate. Latin America's 
governments and citizens can recognize and address distortions in 
their own thinking, or they can remain on a path of corruption and 
violence that erodes states and citizenship alike.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom