The Rise of the Narcostate

Copyright © 2018 by Small Wars Foundation.

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Rev. date: 08/29/2018

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CONTENTS

Acronyms

Preface: New Wars and State Transformation

               Robert Muggah

Foreword: Crime and State-making

               Vanda Felbab-Brown

Introduction: The Rise of the Narcostate (Mafia States)

               John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 1 Assessing New Frontiers:

               Methamphetamines and the

               Emerging China-Mexico Connection

               Roger J. Chin

Chapter 2 Review of Gangster Warlords:

               Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and

               the New Politics of Latin America

               Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 3 America’s Unacknowledged Insurgency:

Addressing Street Gangs as Threats to

National Security

               Darren E. Tromblay

Chapter 4 The Challenge of the U.S.-Mexico Border

               Jay Gilhooly

Chapter 5 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #27:

Sicarios Use a Jet Ski for Beach

Front Targeted Killing in Acapulco

               Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 6 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 18:

Narcodrones on the Border and Beyond

               John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 7 Charting Out the Digital Ecosystem

of Gangs in the U.S. and Mexico

               Julian Way and Robert Muggah

Chapter 8 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #28:

Redeye MANPADS Seized from La

Linea in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua

               Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 9 Some Thoughts on the Possible

Imminent Extradition of Chapo Guzman

Molly Molloy

Chapter 10 ‘Bandas Criminales’ and a Post-accord Colombia

              Chloë Gotterson

Chapter 11 Bullets for Ballots:

A History of Demobilization,

Disarmament, and Reintegration in Colombia

              Paul Angelo

Chapter 12 International Conference On

Promoting The Rule Of Law In Mexico

              Khirin A. Bunker and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 13 Coke Zero:

FARC’s End and the Future of Colombian Cocaine

              Paul Rexton Kan

Chapter 14 The FARC’s Political Roadmap:

From Insurgency to Criminalized Political Party?

              Douglas Farah

Chapter 15 Business, Crime, or Crazy:

Toward Understanding Mexican Drug

Trafficking Organizations’ Rationality

              Timothy Clark

Chapter 16 Third Generation Gangs Strategic Note No. 1:

Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) 500 Man

Commando Unit Planned For El Salvador

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 17 Geographic Constraints of Narco-

Tunnels Along the Southwest Border

              Brenda Fiegel

Chapter 18 The FARC’s Overreach in the Peace Process

              Douglas Farah

Chapter 19 Busted: The Micropower of Prisons in Narco-States

              Paul Rexton Kan

Chapter 20 Book Review of Narconomics:

How to Run a Drug Cartel

              Roger J. Chin

Chapter 21 Third Generation Gangs Strategic Note No. 2:

Tri-national Anti-gang Task Force

Established to Combat Maras and Gangs

in Central America’s Northern Triangle

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 22 Emerald Wars:

Colombia’s Multiple Conflicts Won’t

End With the FARC Agreement

              Douglas Farah

Chapter 23 Pangas, Trickery, Intimidation,

and Drug Trafficking in California

              Nathan P. Jones

Chapter 24 The Importance of Diplomacy in United

States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)

              Christopher Cedros

Chapter 25 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 19:

+233,143 Homicides (& Disappearances)

in Mexico 2007-2016 Molly Molloy

Chapter 26 Truth, Reconciliation and the Laws of War

in Colombia

              Thomas E. Ayres

Chapter 27 Stability in Latin America:

A Theater Army Approach

              Mark Lavin II

Chapter 28 Mapping the Pursuit of a ‘Combination of All

Forms of Struggle’:

How Colombia’s Peace Agreement

Complements the FARC’s Political Strategy

              Alexandra Phelan

Chapter 29 Illicit Structures of Power:

What is Done and What Should be Done?

              Magdalena Defort

Chapter 30 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #29:

Vehicular Ramps Used to Bypass Border Fencing

              Robert J. Bunker and Marisa Mendoza

Chapter 31 Developing Military Forces to Counter

Hybrid Threats: Mexico’s Marines

              Stephen Webber

Chapter 32 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #30:

Marijuana Kettlebells and Catapult

and Air Cannon Projectiles

              Robert J. Bunker and Marisa Mendoza

Chapter 33 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #31:

Use of Burreros to Scale and Lift Up Border Fencing

              Marisa Mendoza and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 34 Dragon on the Border:

Mexican and Chinese Transnational Criminal

Networks and Implications for the United States

              Peter Kouretsos

Chapter 35 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #32:

Ultralight Aircraft and Border Drug Smuggling

              Marisa Mendoza and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 36 Rio de Janeiro:

A War by Any Other Name

              Robert Muggah

Chapter 37 Criminal Networks:

A Gateway for Terrorists

              Devin M. Henry

Chapter 38 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #33:

Terrorist TTP Firebreak Crossed—

Criminal Group Utilizes Women and

Children as Human Shields in Palmarito, Puebla

              Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

Chapter 39 Third Generation Gangs Strategic Note No. 3:

Brazilian Gangs and Colombian BACRIM

Recruit Demobilized FARC Commandos

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 40 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 20:

Mexican Newspaper (El Norte, Juárez)

Closes Doors in Response to Cartel

Targeting/Violence Against Journalists

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 41 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 21:

Quantifying Conflict in Mexico— Armed

Conflict, Hyper-Violent Criminality or Both?

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 42 Third Generation Gangs Strategic Note No. 4:

Brigands, Bank Robbery, and Brazilian Gang

Evolution at Ciudad del Este and the Triple Frontier

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 43 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 22:

Spiritual Appropriation of San Judas Tadeo

and Santo Niño de Atocha—Criminal

Petitions and Santo Niño Huachicolero

              Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

Chapter 44 Narco-Drones:

A New Way to Transport Drugs

              Brenda Fiegel

Chapter 45 Transborder Crime, Corruption, and

Sustaining Illegal Armed Groups in Latin America

              Luz E. Nagle

Chapter 46 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 23:

Prison Riot and Massacre in Acapulco, Guerrero;

Attack Allegedly During Santa Muerte Ritual

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 47 The Mexican Cartel Conundrum:

Policy Reform is More Effective Than Waging War

              Jacob J. Kim

Chapter 48 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #34:

Recent .50 Cal Sniper Rifle Seizures

              Robert J. Bunker and Marisa Mendoza

Chapter 49 Gangs in El Salvador:

A New Type of Insurgency?

              Juan Ricardo Gómez Hecht

Chapter 50 The Vertical Integration of Organised

Crime Linked to Political Corruption

              Edgardo Buscaglia

Chapter 51 Illicit Confluences:

The Intersection of Cocaine and

Illicit Timber in the Amazon

              Casey W. Wilander

Chapter 52 Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 24:

Cartel and Gang Provision of Post-

Earthquake Humanitarian Aid

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Chapter 53 Mexican Cartel Tactical Note #35:

Weaponized Drone/UAV/UAS Seized

in Valtierrilla, Guanajuato with Remote

Detonation IED (‘Papa Bomba’) Payload

              Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

Chapter 54 Third Generation Gangs Strategic Note No. 5:

Brazilian Military Stability and Support

Operations (SASO) in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

              John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Postscript Crime, Drugs, Terror and Money:

Time for Hybrids

              Alain Bauer

Afterword: The Rise of the Oligarchs

              Robert Killebrew

Appendix I: Las Pandillas en El Salvador:

¿Un Nuevo Tipo de Insurgencia?

              Juan Ricardo Gómez Hecht

Appendix II: The Shining Path of Peru:

An Analysis of Insurgency and

Counterinsurgency Tactics

              Sara Blake

Appendix III: The Circum-Caribbean (Bolivarian-

Grenadine) War— Early 2017 Review

              Geoffrey Demarest

Notes

Notes on Contributors

ABOUT SMALL WARS

JOURNAL AND FOUNDATION

Small Wars Journal facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field. We hope this, in turn, advances the practice and effectiveness of those forces prosecuting Small Wars in the interest of self-determination, freedom, and prosperity for the population in the area of operations.

We believe that Small Wars are an enduring feature of modern politics. We do not believe that true effectiveness in Small Wars is a ‘lesser included capability’ of a force tailored for major theater war. And we never believed that ‘bypass built-up areas’ was a tenable position warranting the doctrinal primacy it has held for too long—this site is an evolution of the MOUT Homepage, Urban Operations Journal, and urbanoperations.com, all formerly run by the Small Wars Journal’s Editor-in-Chief.

The characteristics of Small Wars have evolved since the Banana Wars and Gunboat Diplomacy. War is never purely military, but today’s Small Wars are even less pure with the greater inter-connectedness of the 21st century. Their conduct typically involves the projection and employment of the full spectrum of national and coalition power by a broad community of practitioners. The military is still generally the biggest part of the pack, but there a lot of other wolves. The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

The Small Wars Journal’s founders come from the Marine Corps. Like Marines deserve to be, we are very proud of this; we are also conscious and cautious of it. This site seeks to transcend any viewpoint that is single service, and any that is purely military or naively U.S.-centric. We pursue a comprehensive approach to Small Wars, integrating the full joint, allied, and coalition military with their governments’ federal or national agencies, non-governmental agencies, and private organizations. Small Wars are big undertakings, demanding a coordinated effort from a huge community of interest.

We thank our contributors for sharing their knowledge and experience, and hope you will continue to join us as we build a resource for our community of interest to engage in a professional dialog on this painfully relevant topic. Share your thoughts, ideas, successes, and mistakes; make us all stronger.

…I know it when I see it.

Small Wars is an imperfect term used to describe a broad spectrum of spirited continuation of politics by other means, falling somewhere in the middle bit of the continuum between feisty diplomatic words and global thermonuclear war. The Small Wars Journal embraces that imperfection.

Just as friendly fire isn’t, there isn’t necessarily anything small about a Small War.

The term Small War either encompasses or overlaps with a number of familiar terms such as counterinsurgency, foreign internal defense, support and stability operations, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and many flavors of intervention. Operations such as noncombatant evacuation, disaster relief, and humanitarian assistance will often either be a part of a Small War, or have a Small Wars feel to them. Small Wars involve a wide spectrum of specialized tactical, technical, social, and cultural skills and expertise, requiring great ingenuity from their practitioners. The Small Wars Manual (a wonderful resource, unfortunately more ofte referred to than read) notes that:

Small Wars demand the highest type of leadership directed by intelligence, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. Small Wars are conceived in uncertainty, are conducted often with precarious responsibility and doubtful authority, under indeterminate orders lacking specific instructions.

The three block war construct employed by General Krulak is exceptionally useful in describing the tactical and operational challenges of a Small War and of many urban operations. Its only shortcoming is that is so useful that it is often mistaken as a definition or as a type of operation.

We’d like to deploy a primer on Small Wars that provides more depth than this brief section. Your suggestions and contributions of content are welcome.

Who Are Those Guys?

Small Wars Journal is NOT a government, official, or big corporate site. It is run by Small Wars Foundation, a non-profit corporation, for the benefit of the Small Wars community of interest. The site principals are Dave Dilegge (Editor-in-Chief) and Bill Nagle (Publisher), and it would not be possible without the support of myriad volunteers as well as authors who care about this field and contribute their original works to the community. We do this in our spare time, because we want to. McDonald’s pays more. But we’d rather work to advance our noble profession than watch TV, try to super-size your order, or interest you in a delicious hot apple pie. If and when you’re not flipping burgers, please join us.

ABOUT SMALL WARS

JOURNAL—EL CENTRO

El Centro is SWJ’s focus on small wars in Latin America. The elephant in the hemispheric room is clearly the epidemic criminal, cartel and gang threat, fueled by a drug and migration economy, rising to the level of local and national criminal insurgencies and a significant U.S. national security risk. El Centro explores those and other issues across the U.S. Southern Border Zone, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America to develop a better understanding of the national and regional challenges underlying past, present, and future small wars.

The El Centro Main section presents relevant Small Wars Journal articles and SWJ Blog posts. Other sections have a reading list and research links of relevant external works. We do link to some Spanish language resources and occasionally put up an article in both Spanish and English, but we are pretty much mainly operating in English. We look forward to being able to roll out El Centro, en Español, dentro de poco.

The El Centro Fellows are a group of professionals with expertise in and commitment to the region who support SWJ’s approach to advancing our field and have generously agreed to join us in our El Centro endeavor. With their help and with continued development on our site’s news and library sections, we look forward to providing more El Centro-relevant SWJ original material and more useful access to other important works and resources in the future.

El Centro Fellows

The El Centro Fellows have expertise in and commitment to Latin America, support SWJ’s particular focus on the small wars in the region, and agree with SWJ’s general approach to advancing discussion and awareness in the field through community dialog and publishing.

El Centro Associates are actively engaged in research or practice in the region and in transnational organized crime or insurgency. The Fellows have already made significant and distinguished contributions to the field through the course of their career. The Senior Fellows are Fellows that are central to producing SWJ El Centro and are very active in managing our work in this focus area.

Senior Fellows

Robert J. Bunker

John P. Sullivan

Fellows

José de Arimatéia da Cruz

Luis Astorga

Edgardo Buscaglia

Steven S. Dudley

Douglas Farah

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca

Ioan Grillo

Gary J. Hale

Nathan Jones

Paul Rexton Kan

Robert Killebrew

Sylvia Longmire

Molly Molloy

Luz E. Nagle

Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

Robert H. Scales

Associates

Pamela Ligouri Bunker

Roger J. Chin

Irina Chindea

Alma Keshavarz

Byron Ramirez

Interns

Marisa Mendoza

Past Fellows

George W. Grayson

Graham H. Turbiville, Jr.

The views expressed in this anthology are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or the U.S. Government, or any other U.S. armed service, intelligence or law enforcement agency, or local or state government.

Acronyms

Preface

New Wars and State Transformation

Robert Muggah

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

July 2018

Wars are transforming in the twenty first century. On the one hand, the incidence and severity of interstate conflicts—international wars—plummeted since the 1950s.[1] Meanwhile, internal conflicts—or civil wars—peaked in the late 1980s before sharply declining to historic lows in the early 2000s.[2] These downward trends were short-lived, however, as the number of internal conflicts climbed once more after 2010. Over the past few decades, these civil wars have registered a complex fusion of conflict, criminal and extremist motives.[3]

The threat of new kinds of international armed conflict is preoccupying generals, diplomats and humanitarians alike. So-called irregular or hybrid wars that combine conventional and irregular war-fighting together with cyber-war and other methods ranging from fake news to electoral manipulation are gaining attention.[4] Russia’s use of hybrid tactics from Ukraine to the US is under scrutiny by defence experts and journalists alike, not least because of their potential to rapidly escalate.

Contemporary civil wars—described more recently as new wars—are also changing.[5] For one, they are waged by a bewildering array of armed groups motivated as much by profit as ideology. These new wars are also often transnational, sustained by rebels expert in tapping global supply chains and harnessing digital connectivity. Across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, new wars are sustained by whoever has access to illicit rents. For these and other reasons, they are more protracted and less amenable to resolution than ever before.

Alongside hybrid and new wars are situations characterized by extreme levels of organized criminal violence yet falling below standards of armed conflict. These settings have earned the sobriquet of crime wars[6] and criminal insurgencies.[7] As in the case of new wars, they are constituted by a wide array of armed groups including cartels, gangs, militia and paramilitaries. Their sources of income are diverse, ranging from international narcotics trafficking and human smuggling to localized predation. Their strategies alternate between collusion, cooptation and competition with states.

A small but determined group of scholar-practitioners have carefully studied the dynamics of several eponymous crime wars and criminal insurgencies. The architects of these constructs—Sullivan and Bunker—set their gaze close to home, notably Mexico. Their first stab at the topic included an edited volume—Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (2012) and an anthology—Mexican Cartel Essays and Notes (2013).[8] Assembling scholars from across North America, they revealed much about the underlying causes and consequences of this unlikely form of warfare.

The initial focus on mestasizing crime wars in Mexico was justified. The national homicide rate there more than doubled over the previous decade from 9.5 per 100,000 in 2005 to 22.6 per 100,000 by 2012.[9] Hundreds of thousands have been killed and disappeared since the launch of the drug war. Organized violence was unevenly distributed, with murder rates soaring to over 229 per 100,000 in Ciudad Juárez by 2013.[10] These variations were due to disputes between constellations of cartels, militia, and state forces. A shared characteristics however, is that drug trafficking groups alternately co-opted and contested state power, particularly at the municipal and state levels. They also spilled across borders to the north and south.

Criminal insurgencies are distinguished from conventional crime not just by virtue of the intensity of violence, but also the relative organization of the armed groups involved. They are made more likely in states where states fail to exert a monoplogy on the use of legitimate force. Crime wars also escalate in situations where states are unable to control and regulate physical and digital territory, including their borders. They are turbo-charged by prohibition, particularly of high-rent goods such as narcotics (but also gambling, prositution and even, historically, alcohol). And political volatility and power vacuums, whether generated by regime change or economic shocks, can heighten their risk.

These themes are explored in Crime Wars and Narco Terrorism (2014), Bunker and Sullivan’s third edited volume.[11] Together with more than thirty contributors, they explore the dynamics of criminal insurgencies during former Mexican President Peña Nieto’s first year in office. They also examine the spectacular levels of violence perpetrated by transnational gangs such as the MS-13 and Barrio 18 in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The fourth installment of the series, Criminal Insurgents in México and Latin America, (2015), was published shortly after the mass kidnapping and killing of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero. The focus is squarely on the corrupting and corrosive effects of crime wars on public institutions, from politicians to prosecutors and prison guards.[12]

At the center of criminal insurgencies are vast transnational drug cartels spanning Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. In Drug Trafficking, Corruption and States (2015), Garay-Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán explore how the aspirations of cartels shifted from strictly economic to more political activities. The authors deploy social network analysis to illustrate how groups ranging from La Familia Michoacana to the Zetas penetrated municipal and state institutions, deepening their hold on power and facilitating the drugs trade and laundering of profits. The factions driving crime wars have likewise evolved, with business interests spanning drug trafficking to smuggling of people, minerals and other contraband. They have become expert at exploiting global supply chains, with operations spanning the globe.[13]

In Marco-Criminalidad (2016), Salcedo-Albarán and Garay-Salamanca explore the decentralized crime networks that fuel both conventional and criminal warfare. These networks do not operate autonomously from state authorities: to the contrary, they require complicit politicians and civil servants in order to thive. Whether procuring weapons from abroad or transhiping narcotics, a level of government acquiesance and participation is necessary. A classic example is the diversion of some 10,000 assault rifles to the FARC by former President Fujimori’s security secretary, Montesinos.[14]

In 2016, Bunker and Sullivan developed the parallel concept of narcoterrorism, the instrumental use of terrorist acts to expand narco-trafficking opportunities. Their edited volume—Narcoterrorism and Impunity in the Americas—explains the rationality behind egregious violence perpetrated by groups such as Mexico’s Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación and the Zetas. Performative acts of violence—including high profile assassinations, vídeo-taped torture and disappearances—can help enforce contracts. Bunker and Sullivan also contend that they are a symptom of severely compromised state institutions and chronic impunity since the perpetrators have virtually no fear of arrest or prosecution, much less any sustained incarceration.[15]

The crime war and criminal insurgency provoke a new way of thinking about armed conflict. They collapse the neat distinctions between conventional armed conflicts, as set out in international humanitarian law, and organized crime. Leaving aside the discussion of their legal definition, these concepts underline the ways in which today’s conflicts are shaped by interconnected political and economic motives. They are not a contest over political power or rentable goods— but about strategies of collusion, cooptation and competition to secure both. Nor are criminal insurgencies confined to Latin America and the Caribbean, but can occur within the borders of North America as well.

In this their sixth installment—The Rise of the Narcostate—Sullivan and Bunker have assembled an impressive collection of specialists to interrogate the rise of shadow powers and alternate configurations of criminal authority, including gangster warlords. In the process, researchers such as Magdalena Defort, Alain Bauer, Juan Ricardo Gómez Hecht, Chloe Gotterson and Darren Tromblay show how some organized crime groups—including gangs—are forming private armies and criminal insurgents. They are not just contesting state power, but appropriating a growing range of core functions of state power and placing national sovereignty at stake.

The scope of this latest analysis is vast—covering topics ranging from Brazil’s Red Command and bandas criminales in Colombia to jet-skiing Sicarios and MANPAD-brandishing narcos in Mexico. Researchers such as Dough Farah, Paul Rexton Kan, Luz Nagle, and Edgardo Buscaglia show how these types of criminal groups exert micro-power both in and outside prison walls. Indeed, prisons are not so much emblematic of state control as powerful symbols of the way in which government authority is being undermined. The authors show how crime groups are increasingly technologically empowered, both online (through social media) and off (including through the deployment of narco-drones).

The Rise of the Narcostate underlines the importance of taking a measured approach to engaging with the transnational criminal organizations that fuel crime wars and criminal insurgencies. The contributors identify a vast array of lessons, most of them cautionary, for armed forces, police and penal authorities to contain and neutralize transnational threat networks across the Americas, and as far away as East Asia. In the process, they draw attention to some of the trade-offs and dilemmas involved, the challenges of disrupting illicit structures of power, and the shifting boundaries of armed conflict itself.

Foreword

Crime and State-making

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Washington, DC

July 2018

John Sullivan’s and Robert Bunker’s expansive and detailed volume Narcostates comprehensively explores and crucially problematizes two key buzzwords and concepts of the past decade: narcostates and mafiastates. Although often applied haphazardly and without definitional clarity to countries such as Afghanistan, North Korea, Venezuela, or Guinea-Bissau, the terms have had the useful function of alerting publics and policymakers that the simplistic prevalent assumption that organized crime and illicit economies always threaten the state and international order is flawed and incomplete. In exploring the dynamics between states and organized crime in the Western Hemisphere, John and Robert, two pioneers of the evolution of security threats in the 21st century, bring together an impressive group of authors to explore the complexity of the relationships.

Such a comprehensive examination is overdue, for there indeed have been many—too many—examples of states collaborating with organized crime, exploiting illicit economies, and appropriating criminal groups and networks for the prosecution of military conflict or for outsourcing rule of territories they do not want to or do not have the capacity to govern. Instead of criminal elites always existing in a fully antagonistic relationship with the state, criminal organizations and the governing elites thus often develop a mutually beneficial accommodation. Crime can be both a convenient excuse for elites to maintain exclusionary control over political and economic access as well as a means of accomplishing both. Thus be under some circumstances—and hardly rare ones—crime can be a method of governance, sanctioned or tolerated by official political elites.

Going well beyond merely acquiescing to the illicit economy, some states have long outright co-opted illicit economies and organized crime to assure the government’s survival and strengthen their rule. In Myanmar, the junta first allowed ethno-nationalist insurgencies to obtain their resources from drug, jade, and other contraband trafficking as a payoff for ceasefires. And later, it was funded for years by former insurgents and drug traffickers the military had previously fought. The Burmese state is hardly alone in co-opting illicit economies and using criminal groups for its purposes. Many states have adopted similar practices, and such states are hardly solely weak or violently contested. Governments embrace criminal groups in order to suppress internal opposition groups, such as in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s and where the ruling party for years maintained a similar corporatist relationship with drug trafficking groups as with the rest of society. States delegate authority to criminal groups over areas on which the government and elites do not want to expend resources or in which they do not have the capacity to govern, such as the slums in Brazil, Jamaica, and Bangladesh. Far beyond Myanmar, states, political elites, and power brokers co-opt illicit economies and organized crime to generate resources, such as financial contributions, electoral votes, patronage support, and hard currency. Examples include not only pariah states like North Korea, but also states like India and Nepal. For decades in places such as Indonesia, Nepal, and India, ruling local or national elites have used criminal gangs for ruling and administering localities, intimidating and eliminating political opponents, and extracting votes and rents.

And states use organized crime to augment their military and external power–whether for aggression or for desirable international public goods. Russia has used de facto militias hired from among organized criminal groups to conduct its aggression in Crimea and support insurgents in Eastern Ukraine. For example, the leather-clad biker gang Night Wolves helped Russian special operations forces annex Crimea in 2014 and other criminal gang volunteers directed by Russian intelligence agents played a crucial role in Eastern Ukraine.

The use of organized criminal actors by states for prosecuting conflict or for political control is, of course, nothing new. The U.S. military forces invading Sicily relied on the Sicilian mafia for intelligence provision as well as post-invasion stability operations. Chiang-Kai Shek depended on Du Yuesheng’s criminal group, the Green Gang, to fight the Japanese during War World II and even made Du, the world’s most accomplished drug trafficker, his minister of counternarcotics.

Such an accommodation between the state and elites and criminal groups is not optimal from the perspective of the society and certainly undermines rule of law and democracy. But it may well result in a sustainable internal modus operandi, at least to the extent that external actors do not threaten such an accommodation by insisting on the destruction of the illicit economy or anti-corruption measures. Yet such outside policy measures, while disruptive, often have only cosmetic effects for such hybrid governance may well deeply entrenched and highly organic to local institutional and cultural settings and impossible to root out unless the outside intervener sets out to fundamentally redesign basic political arrangements and has the time, resources, and wherewithal to see such state-remaking project through.

Nor is there always a strong social opprobrium toward the penetration of crime into politics or the appropriate of crime for state purposes: Sometimes, society mobilizes against such linkages, such as in Colombia when the parapolitics scandal broke out in the middle of the 2000 decade, revealing that at least a third of the Colombian congress was connected to the vicious paramilitaries and that many municipal governments were extorted or under their thumb. Yet other times, having a criminal record can give one a political advantage: Not only are politicians with known serious criminal records regularly elected in substantial numbers into India’s Congress. In 2014, 34% of elected MPs of the lower chamber of India’s Congress, the Lok Sabha, disclosed indictments for murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, provoking communal disharmony, or crimes against women, up from 30% in 2009.[1] But they also tend to perform much better than politicians with a clean record, perhaps because they are seen as better capable of getting things done and having better access to patronage resources by voters than politicians without criminal indictments: A candidate with a criminal record had a 13% chance of winning in the 2014 elections whereas a MP aspirant without a criminal record had only a 5% chance of winning.[2]

Indeed, despite the profound effects intense organized crime and large-scale illicit economies can have on the state and society, it is a common misconception to assume that when the drug trade or other organized-crime rackets arrive to a new place they encounter innocent virgin land with no experience in illegality or rent extraction. Sometimes that may be the case, such as when illegal loggers for the first time encounter indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon that have had no previous exposure to civilization. But in all other cases, both the state and the society have preexisting susceptibility, proclivity, and resilience to particular criminal rackets, crime-state political arrangements, and their local perturbations. The local institutional and cultural context matters a great deal in how organized crime will be able to penetrate and threaten state and society and what shape it will take.

West Africa provides an example. It has become very much the focus of international attention because of its recent drug trade epidemic and the connections between various illicit economies and militancy and terrorism. Thus in the pundit discussion, it has become a favorite factoid to wave that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar long smuggled cigarettes and other addictive substances in West Africa and the Maghreb and became the poster boy of narco-jihadism or ascribe the collapse of the Mali military in the face of jihadi militancy and Tuareg separatism to it being hollowed out by the drug trade. And of course, the region is rife with many illicit economies: whether cars and bicycles stolen in Europe and smuggled into the region, cannabis from and cocaine via Morocco heading into Europe, Viagra pills smuggled into Egypt, weapons pouring out of Libya into Mali, Niger, Syria, and Nigeria, or something as seemingly harmless as eggs being smuggled in large quantities out of Tunisia. Many of these illicit enterprises, even potentially the smuggled eggs, do pose the very serious and multiple threats outlined above, even as few talk of egg-terrorism.

Yet to simply equate West Africa’s chronic instability and the Maghreb’s current turmoil with the recent drug trade epidemic in the area and its newly visible illicit economies fundamentally misses the deep structural roots of the problem and often leads to inadequate and even counterproductive policy recommendations. Political contestation in West Africa has long centered on taking over the state to capture rents, decades before Latin American drug traffickers started using West Africa to smuggle cocaine to Europe. Indeed, almost immediately after its independence (and often predating it), the region has been characterized by a variety of illicit economies and their deep integration into the political arrangements and frameworks of the countries in the region.

Politics in West Africa has for decades been about taking over the state in order to control the main sources of revenue—licit or illicit. In essence, the government has been seen as a means to personal wealth, not service to the people. The state would then define (or redefine) what constitutes illegal economic behavior and selectively issue exemptions from law enforcement and prosecution to families, friends, and its network of clients. Such political arrangements have been so pervasive in West Africa that some scholars have described the environment there as a mafia-like bazaar, where anyone with an official designation can pillage at will…[3] Moreover, fearing internal coups and yet facing little external aggression even in the context of very porous borders, many ruling elites in West Africa after independence systematically allowed their militaries and law enforcement institutions to deteriorate.

In sum, the state sometimes uses and manipulates crime to its advantage. A crucial question, however, is whether the state is capable of maintaining power and control over organized crime groups or whether that power relationship reverses, with power increasingly accumulating to criminal groups, perhaps even to the point that they can dominate the relationship. Originating as a pirate republic and undergoing radical institutional changes from various forms of authoritarianism to democracy, Indonesia is an example of a country where the state and political elites managed to appropriate, retain control over, and use to the state’s and elite advantage criminal groups throughout the country’s independent history. Even during the past two decades of democracy, political elites have not severed their linkages to organized crime but have managed to remain dominant in the power relationship. In Mexico, the power of the imperial presidency and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) eventually withered as a result of economic crises, societal changes, and democratization, while the power of Mexican criminal groups increased when cocaine flows shifted to Mexico in the 1980s, resulting in the collapse of state control over organized crime. Starting in the late 1980s, the state lost the capacity to shape the behavior of criminal groups, which began acting with increasing violence and impunity, often dictating terms to politicians and governing authorities, at least at the local level.

In early 1990s Russia, the state becomes almost completely hollowed out, with criminal businessmen dominating and tearing apart the states and organized crime groups running amok. The state that remobilizes, recaptures organized crime, and recreates authoritarian rule where political power and law enforcement and intelligence authorities use organized crime, sets its terms, but also fully co-mingle with it. In some ways, Vladimir Putin’s amounts to a supramafia state. There, law itself is a mechanism of expropriating private and public money for the state and elite, not merely the evasion of law and the issuing of exceptions from law enforcement to one’s clique as is common in places where the state functions as a mafia bazaar, such as in West Africa.

With extraordinary criminal violence in Latin America remaining at levels significantly surpassing any other region of the world, the systematic participation of Afghan political elites in criminality severely complicating stabilization efforts, little progress being made in reducing illicit economies and the political power of those who control them in post-junta Myanmar, misgovernance persisting in West Africa, and the increasing use of criminal groups for state purposes in subversive activities abroad, the issue of narcostates and mafiastates will stay a crucial feature of international relations for years to come. Perhaps they may even become a standard pervasive facets of a new global order and international relations. John’s and Robert’s volume is an important contribution to understanding the phenomenon and its likely trajectories in the Western Hemisphere.

Some surprising developments may lie ahead. One thing is clear, however: It is important to stop thinking about crime solely as aberrant social activity to be suppressed, but instead think of crime as a competition in state-making. And perhaps increasingly also among states.

Introduction

The Rise of the Narcostate (Mafia States)

John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker

Rowland Heights, CA and Claremont, CA

June 2018

The relationship between organized crime and states is complex and underappreciated. States and organized crime interact in many ways. In the simplest configuration, states and organized crime compete for relative power. In this classic view, organized crime restricts its activities to profit-making activities in the illicit market and avoids confrontation with the state. Profit and power within the illicit sphere is the domain of organized crime, mafias, and gangsters while political power is the domain of the state. In this configuration politics is seen as a state activity, while profit and finances are the domain of businesses, both licit and illicit. That division of the political and economic realms is arbitrary and the model does not fully explain the interaction of crime and politics. These interactions occur at multiple levels of states and among the global network of states leading to competition on the global scale. This competition is a key facet of the global political economy and has been characterized as one of ‘deviant globalization’ dominated by ‘global guerrillas,’ ‘warlord entrepreneurs,’ and ‘criminal insurgents.’[1]

Exploring Illicit Markets, Power, Politics, and Warmaking

This volume, The Rise of the Narcostate (Mafia States), is the sixth in a series of Small Wars Journal-El Centro (SWJ-El Centro) Anthologies that explore the dimensions of criminal and state competition in Mexico and Latin America (and potentially beyond).[2] In these volumes, the violent competition for power and profit between criminal cartels and states has been explored through the lens of ‘criminal insurgency’ where cartels and gangsters exploit weaknesses in states to establish control of criminal enterprises, control turf, and set the parameters of relations with states and their internal organs.[3] Under this scenario, organized crime operates with the paradigm of states and generally seeks to avoid confrontation with state security organs. This classic formulation was describes by John Bailey and Matthew M. Taylor as one of evading the state; corrupting state officials when that fails; and confronting the state when corruption no longer ensures freedom of movement.[4]

This schema not only effectively describes the situation in Mexico (and other parts of Latin America), it aligns well with Peter Lupsha’s ‘three stages of criminal-state relations’ where criminal actors can progress through three stages: 1) Predatory (where they expand at the expense of rivals); 2) Parasitic (where they exploit state resources to expand and hold power; and 3) Symbiotic (where they create a state within a state).[5] This progression can also be expressed as state capture (StC) or co-opted state reconfiguration (CstR)[6] as mechanisms of ‘criminal insurgency.’ All of these formulations recognize the erosion of the traditional state monopoly on violence. In addition, all of these formulations recognize the complex interactions among organized crime and the state.

The interaction between organized crime and politics has a long history in Mexico and Latin America. The late Peter Lupsha discussed these links in his 1991 paper Drug lords and narco-corruption: The players change but the game continues.[7] The title remains an accurate description of the world of narcotrafficking today. For Lupsha, the factor binding relations between the capos and state was corruption. That remains the case. In the early phases of this interaction, the state—that is corrupt state actors—dominated the interaction. Over time the drug lords, cartels and gangs gained relative advantage and power. Lupsha described a five-level hierarchy of corruption arraigned according to level of political control within the state:

• Level I was the realm of national political actors with links to and political cover from the highest-level elites; their criminal counterparts were the global cartels, mafias and traffickers. El Jefe de Jefes, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the leader of the Guadalajara Cartel epitomized this level. Félix Gallardo, also known as El Padrino ("The Godfather’) was a Mexican federal judicial police agent with links to Sinaloa’s governor. At that time the main external partner was the Colombian cartels. In addition to establishing the contemporary plaza system for cartel spheres of influence he was convicted for the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique Kiki Camerena.[8]

• Level II was the realm of interstate (within Mexico) and regional traffickers that were connected to state-level and national politics and thus gained protection form federal police, customs, Military Zone commanders, and state police organs.

• Level III actors were intrastate, regional traffickers, often ex-police, with few connections to higher-level politicians that derived their protection from state and local officers, such as mayors and local federal officials.

• Level IV actors were local traffickers—i.e., the ‘narcomenudeo’ or street-level dealers—that derived protection from municipal police.

• Level V actors, like those in Level IV, were small-time ‘casual labor’ mules, transporters, user-dealers with ad hoc protection through bribes to low ranking police or support from their criminal superiors.

Like Lupsha, Silvana Patenostro termed Mexico a ‘narco-democracy’ in the mid-90s.[9] Despite this early recognition of this political dimension of narco-state interaction, more research in this area is needed to fully understand and counter the corrosive effects that accompanies the rise of the ‘narcostate.’ As we have briefly recounted, drug traffickers have a range of ‘political’ connections. These connections have profound impact on local security and can due to state weakness, corruption, and state or sub-state fragility lead to the development of ‘criminal enclaves’ where cartels and gangs exercise de facto political control.[10]

This relationship is rarely one-sided. Not only do cartels and gangs threaten, penetrate, and/or co-opt states, state actors can dominate, penetrate, and co-opt or capture criminal groups and networks. This criminal inter-penetration can occur within and across national boundaries.[11] This criminal-political interaction, as discussed by Pansters has historical precedent in the political role of Mexico’s caciques.[12] It can be viewed within Tilly’s lens of state formation/state transformation.[13] When the equilibrium between the state and organized crime breaks or is disrupted these transformative pressures exacerbate violence, threaten state legitimacy, and empower criminal bands ranging from gangs to narco-cartels.[14] These resulting violence is a form of warmaking or ‘criminal insurgency’[15]—even if not generally recognized as non-international armed conflict.[16] The armed gang violence is a form of contest for ‘competitive control’ of turf and terrain.[17] The violence is also accompanied by both implicit and explicit political aims and influence. One facet of this political dimension is the attacks one politicians at all levels of government (recall Lupsha’s levels of corruption) seen in the lead up to Mexico’s July 2018 general elections.[18] The result of these interactions, the inter-penetration of criminals and politicians, and the raw power of drug cartels results in what César Gaviria, the former president of Colombia called the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of crime.[19] In short the rise of the narcostate.

Narco and Mafia States

Narcostates are states where drug traffickers (narcotraficantes) and criminal cartels penetrate state structures to dominate legitimate power structure, including political and economic organs. Mexico and Colombia have long been challenged by this prospect. Narcostates can comprise the entire state and national arena, or as is increasingly the case sub-state regions or enclaves ranging from entire states (sub-national states or provinces) such as Michoacán, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, or Guerrero to ‘narco-cities’ where cities or segments of cities, such as favelas in Brazil are fragile and dominated by criminal gangs.[20] Beyond that, entire nations-states could fall under the control of narcos or other criminals. Another variation of this ‘criminal state’ or ‘kleptocracy’ is the mafia state. Indeed, narcostates are one form of criminal or mafia states. Venezuela is one current example of a ‘mafia state’ state powers have been devolved to irregular and illegal actors.[21]

Moisés Naím explored the dimensions of mafia states in his 2012 Foreign Affairs article Mafia States: Organized Crime Takes Office[22] and his working paper The Drug Trade: The Politicization of Criminals and the Criminalization of Politicians.[23] For Naím drug barons and criminal are capturing states, state power, and functions; Criminals are in Power.[24] This goes beyond threats from individual gangs and mafias to encompass threat from mafia states challenging nations and state authority. Naím notes that criminal enterprises have now become governments and that some governments have taken over criminal organizations not to dismantle them but to use them for their financial, political and military advantage.[25] The criminal state forms: narcostates and mafia states are essentially kleptocracies where criminal-political elites use their power to extract resources and wealth to extend their personal and collective power. Essentially these actors leverage what Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán termed the ‘social legitimacy of corruption’[26] when reflecting on the Mexican government’s refusal to prosecute politicians for corruption in the Odebrecht case.[27]

This collection looks at the rise of the narcostate (mafia states) in Mexico and Latin America, but it has application beyond the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, it looks at developments captured on the pages of Small Wars Journal in the roughly two years from the date of the last anthology in 2016 through June 2018. The volume contains 54 chapters, and appendices, as well as front and after matter, including this introduction, a preface by Robert Muggah, a foreword by Vanda Felbab-Brown, a postscript by Alain Bauer looking at the intersection of narco/mafia states and terrorist/insurgent groups like the Islamic State as future threats; and an afterword by Robert Killebrew. Its chapters include tactical and strategic notes recounting developments in cartel and gang activity in Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil; as well as articles on cartel and gang activities. Several articles are highlighted here: Chapter 10: ‘Bandas Criminales’ and a Post-accord Colombia by Chloë Gotterson looks at BACRIM in this context; Chapter 11: Bullets for Ballots: A History of Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration in Colombia; Chapter 13: Coke Zero: FARC’s End and the Future of Colombian Cocaine by Paul Rexton Kan; and Chapter 14: The FARC’s Political Roadmap: From Insurgency to Criminalized Political Party? by Paul Rexton Kan explore the transition of the FARC from an insurgent group into a formal political actor.

Paul Rexton Kan also looks at the role of prisons in cartel and gang power structures in Chapter 19: Busted: The Micropower of Prisons in Narco-States. Robert Muggah also looks at the armed gang conflict in Rio de Janeiro in Chapter 36: Rio de Janeiro: A War by Any Other Name while Juan Ricardo Gómez Hecht looks at the similar situation in El Salvador in Chapter 49: Gangs in El Salvador: A New Type of Insurgency? (also presented in a Spanish language version in Appendix I). Finally, Luz E. Nagle and Edgardo Buscaglia look at the instrumental role of corruption in narcostates in Chapter 45: Transborder Crime, Corruption, and Sustaining Illegal Armed Groups in Latin America and Chapter 50: The Vertical Integration of Organised Crime Linked to Political Corruption respectively.

Autocratic States: The Future Evolution of Narco/Mafia States?

State transformation is a core concern of this volume. Not only are criminal enterprises engaged in armed conflict and fueling the rise of narco/mafia states, but state actors and economic elites are also driving state transformation. Plutocratic insurgency is being conducted by high net worth globalized elites allowing them to remove themselves from public spaces and obligations—including taxation—and to maximize their ability to generate profits transnationally. It utilizes ‘lawyers & lobbyists’ and corruption, rather than armed struggle—though mercenaries may be employed—to create shadow governance in pursuit of plutocratic policy objectives.[28] Plutocratic insurgency is a complement to criminal insurgency as described in Nils Gilman’s essay The Twin Insurgency where criminals from below and plutocrats from above change the nature of states in their respective, and often interconnected, quest for power and profit.[29]

The consequence of this dual criminal-plutocratic quest for power yields instability throughout the global political economy. Narcopolitcs (narcopolítica) and ‘mafiocracy’ are the immediate result. Edgardo Buscaglia has described Mexico as …a weak state, co-opted by the mafia, he added citing a report by Global Financial Integrity that it has the third largest underground economy—after China and Russia.[30] Investigative journalist José Reveles observed that about 45 percent of Mexican municipalities are controlled by organized crime, in his estimation, Narcopolitics isn’t some vague threat…It’s a reality.[31]

Authoritarian capitalism as currently practiced in China[32] blends state control with facets of warlordism and ‘unrestricted warfare’[33] together with Russian hybrid warfare and what some have called ‘Putinization’[34] reflect the ‘hybrid’ future potentials identified by Alain Bauer in his postscript to this work. Both the Chinese and Russian variants have an organized crime nexus as in the Chinese case PLA linked warlord companies[35] and in the Russian case a mafiya/oligarchic link fueling kleptocracy.[36] These potentials, like the rise of the narcostate and mafia states demand future research.[37] Until then this volume seeks to describe the role of gangsters and warlords in political-criminal networks of corruption, collusion, and impunity to better understand the role their profiteering plays in transforming states.[38]

Chapter 1

Assessing New Frontiers:

Methamphetamines