BOOK REVIEW: Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA, by Patrick Winn

The nature of crime and conflict has changed and continues to evolve. The now and future war is and will be influenced by irregular combatants – non-state soldiers – that utilize technology and networked doctrine to spread their influence across traditional geographic boundaries. This era shift in political and social organization, fueled by rapid developments of technology and exploitation of network organizational forms, blurs the distinctions between crime, terrorism and warfare. The resulting transitional period – a Dark Renaissance – benefits a range of non-state actors: drugs cartels, street gangs, terrorists, and warlords. Criminal organizations appear among the first to adapt to the new operational context resulting from this shift. This paper examines the journey of street gangs, one type of transnational criminal organization – the drug cartel – and warlords through this evolution. Respectively, these entities provide direct and indirect challenges to the solvency of nation-state institutions, potentially emerging as new war-making entities.

Objetivos: evaluar las estrategias y resultados de la guerra contra las drogas en Colombia y México, por medio de iniciativas como el Plan Colombia y la Iniciativa Mérida.Metodología: se recurre al método cualitativo con el fin de analizar los programas de cooperación anti-narcóticos en las Américas, en especial entre Estados Unidos, Colombia y México. El análisis se concentra en la producción y tráfico de drogas; organizaciones criminales o cárteles del narcotráfico y los niveles de violencia. Además, se recurre al método comparativo para contrastar el contexto político-institucional e histórico en México y Colombia, así como los esquemas de cooperación bilateral y multilateral.Resultados: las estrategias aplicadas en la guerra contra las drogas han fracasado en sus principales objetivos, como son: erradicar la producción y tráfico de drogas y aniquilar a las organizaciones criminales o cárteles del narcotráfico. El Plan Colombia y la Iniciativa Mérida han sido un fracaso considerando la consecución de sus objetivos primordiales.Conclusiones: México no asimiló las lecciones del Plan Colombia, ya que gran parte de la estrategia que se adoptó para combatir a los cárteles del narcotráfico fue la militarización del país, una medida contraproducente y fallida como lo demuestra el caso de Colombia.

The Internal Revenue Service recently overturned 90 years of United States foreign and tax policy by finalizing and codifying its efforts to report interest income earned at domestic banks for accounts held by nonresident aliens. While the IRS felt its need to collect the data and revenue outweighs concerns raised against the proposal, the rule change has broad ramifications in the areas of tax, commerce, international policy and law, and the war against transnational criminal organizations and terrorism. This article argues that the rule change has the potential to wreak havoc on a fragile economic recovery by leading to a steep loss of foreign bank deposits within the United States. The rule change will also foreseeably lead to the targeting and kidnapping of nonresident aliens by criminal gangs and drug cartels, who are likely to obtain financial information which could be utilized to target individuals for the purposes of kidnapping, extortion, ransom, and quite possibly, torture. Far from assisting the war on criminal gangs and drug cartels, the rule change will undermine it and likely subject the government of the United States to litigation in domestic courts through the Federal Tort Claims Act and Alien Tort Claims Act. Moreover, the rule change weakens the foreign policy commitment of the United States against torture, deteriorates the United States’ general commitment in the fight against terrorism and drug cartels in the Mexican drug war, and generally weakens international law. For many economic, legal, and moral reasons, the article contends IRS’ rule change is the wrong policy choice.

: Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in December 2006, more than 35,000 Mexicans have died due to narco-violence. This monograph examines whether the various Mexican drug trafficking organizations are insurgents or organized criminal elements. Mexican narco-violence and its affiliated gang violence have spread across Mexico's southern border into Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Additionally, the narco-violence is already responsible for the deaths of American citizens on both sides of the United States -- Mexico border, and the potential for increased spillover violence is a major concern. This monograph argues that the Mexican drug cartels are transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that pose a national security threat to the regional state actors; however, they are not an insurgency for four reasons. First, none of the cartels have the political aim or capability to overthrow the Mexican government. Second, the various TCOs are competing criminal organizations with approximately 90 percent of the violence being cartel on cartel. For example, the violence in the city of Juarez is largely the result of the fighting between the local Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel for control of one of the primary smuggling routes into the United States. Third, the cartels' use of violence and coercion has turned popular support against them thus denying them legitimacy. Fourth, although the cartels do control zones of impunity within their areas of influence, the Mexican government has captured, killed, and extradited kingpins from every major TCO. The monograph also examines the violence that has taken place in Colombia as a case study comparison for the current narco-violence in Mexico. The Colombian government battled and defeated both the Medelllin and Cali drug cartels in the 1990s. It also has made significant progress

The COVID‐19 crisis provides a window of opportunity for organised crime organisations in Colombia and Mexico to exert social control in local communities through actions of solidarity and care rather than traditional violent coercion. This new dynamic is increasing the legitimacy, power and social capital of gangs and drug cartels, helping them to co‐opt civil society and the state to support their criminal operations. The pandemic also shows how poverty and inequality remain fundamental in shaping the building of the nation‐state in both countries, where criminals act as a de facto state even without the virus and, in many areas, effectively replace the state. The coronavirus is making visible the ways in which organised crime groups cultivate civil society's support in delivering the provision of governance, order and public health in a time of lockdown and quarantine, making local ‘narco‐gang’ governance profitable economically and politically.

PurposeWar journalists confront many dangers, leaving them at risk for mental health problems. They are, however, able to take breaks from the hazards of frontline work by periodically leaving conflict zones for the safety of home. This respite is not afforded local journalists who cover conflict situations. An example of this may be found in Mexico where journalists reporting on the drug cartels may under threat. This inability to seek temporary respite from grave danger may theoretically increase levels of psychological distress. The purpose of this paper is to examine this possibility.Design/methodology/approachThe study sample comprised 104 Mexican journalists and a control group of 104 war journalists (non‐Mexican, demographically matched). Outcome measures included indices of posttraumatic stress disorder (Impact of Event Scale‐Revised)(IES‐R), depression (Beck Depression Inventory‐Revised (BDI‐II) and psychological distress (General Health Questionnaire‐28 (GHQ‐28).FindingsMexican journalists had higher scores on the avoidance (p=0.01), arousal (p=0.0001), but not intrusion (p=0.29) scales of the IES‐R. They had higher scores on the BDI‐II (p=0.0001) and anxiety (p=0.0001), somatic (p=0.0001) and social dysfunction (p=0.01) subscales of the GHQ‐28.Practical implicationsMexican journalists targeted by drug cartels have more psychopathology than journalists who cover war. News organisations that employ journalists in this line of work therefore need to be aware of this and have a mechanism in place to provide treatment, when needed.Originality/valueThis is the first study to directly explore the psychological effects of violence on local journalists who do not cover war, but nevertheless live and work in areas of grave danger.

By the end of 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began to see a steady rise in the number of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) from Central America, particularly from the Northern Triangle countries— El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—arriving to the US-Mexico border. The number of children entering the United States from these countries more than doubled during fiscal year (FY) 2012 and continued to grow through FY 2014. In FY 2013, CBP apprehended over 35,000 children. That number almost doubled to 66,127 in FY 2014, with Central American children outnumbering their Mexican counterparts for the first time. Research has identified high levels of violence perpetrated by gangs and drug cartels in the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico as a primary reason for this surge. Under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) passed with bi-partisan support in 2008, children from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing. In contrast, unless there are indicia of trafficking, Mexican children are returned immediately to their country. Advocates have expressed concern that expedited removal of Mexican children places children with valid humanitarian claims at risk of being returned to harm, including forcible recruitment into drug cartels and trafficking rings. After the spike in arrivals in FY 2014, several members of Congress called for a change in the TVPRA, urging that Central American children be treated like Mexican children and undergo expedited procedures for their removal. Many of their constituents supported such measures. The Obama administration requested additional funds to strengthen border security, speed up deportation procedures and implement measures to address the humanitarian crisis in Central America. Groups and individuals across the country came together to provide shelter, medical and psychological care, and legal representation to many of these children. Despite these efforts, much needs to be done to ensure that their rights are protected. This paper provides an overview of the violence perpetrated by gangs and other criminal organizations which compels many children to flee their communities. It describes the US government's obligations to protect UAC upon arrival, and good practices of other governments relating to the protection of child migrants and refugees. It also discusses Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, gang-related asylum case law, and the difficulty of prevailing in asylum claims based on persecution by gangs. It concludes with recommendations to the administration and policymakers to ensure compliance with US obligations under national and international laws.

Shades of the Borderland Narconovela from Pastel to SanguineOrfa Alarcón’s Perra brava as Anti-Novela Amanda L. Matousek (bio) The stereotypical image of the Latino gangster or criminal persists in all imaginable types of media. From portrayals in Hollywood films like Traffic to the enshrining of past criminals, real or fictional, such as Pablo Escobar or Tony Montana, in contemporary hip-hop lyrics, Latinos have long been mediated through these pop-culturally created illicit identities. By and large Latino men are characterized as machista and are “categorized as beings who are aggressive, oppressive, narcissistic, insecure, loud-mouthed, womanizers, massive drinkers, [and] persons who have an uncontrollable sexual prowess. “1 As a result of the surge in violence caused by the Mexican drug war beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, combined with the infamous and abominable feminicides in Ciudad Juárez dating back at least to the early 1990s, the representation of the Latino/Mexican drug trafficker and otherwise violent perpetrator has experienced a fresh articulation in audiovisual and textual forms alike on both sides of the border and beyond.2 The drug cartels’ turf wars, the Calderón administration’s anti-drug-trafficking offensive, and official corruption have contributed to a rich thematic that writers and producers from an array of artistic mediums draw from to add captivating drama and criminal intrigue to their works. In many cases this new wave of cultural production inspired by drug trafficking and its associated evils is capitalizing on the allure of the female protagonist. Recent television programs like Weeds and La reina del sur, based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel of the same name, are prime examples of the portrayal of women in charge of their own drug-trafficking operations. It is also becoming clear that this advanced criminal network closely linked to the unlawful trafficking of illegal substances and a host of other illicit activities is commanding greater attention in a number of academic disciplines due to its seeming omnipresence and influence on popular culture. While creative and analytical depictions of drug-related violence and crime are nothing new, [End Page 118] their reinvention and expression through the context of the current situation based in Mexico deserve a renewed and thorough examination. In this essay I will engage these violent and drug-related themes through the exploration of Mexican narcoliterature as a subgenre, as well as through the analysis of a particular novel that inverts the image of the macho male trafficker in a narrative driven by a female protagonist immersed in northern Mexico’s drug world. Through this brief introduction and textual analysis I will demonstrate how the subgenre of narcoliterature can be viewed as a positive category within Mexican letters to the extent that it unites a diverse and complex corpus through drug-related themes including—but of course not limited to—the emerging prominence of women in and affected by the drug trade. Before investigating the concept of narcoliterature, it is essential to consider the drug war and the US-Mexico border more generally. First, in its Winter 2011 issue of Emisférica, New York University’s Hemispheric Institute exemplifies academic concerns over drug trafficking and its collateral damage by examining what its editors call the “narco-machine.” Coined by Rossana Reguillo, the term refers to “all of the processes by which the boundaries between the licit/illicit and legitimate/illegitimate are established and sustained” and “encompasses the relations between the state, traffic in illicit substances, and the border (geographical, ideological, social) created and disturbed by their deadly embrace.”3 For Reguillo the narco-machine is a “ubiquitous, elusive, and phantasmagoric” system occupying a “de-localized” space. It is always everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, exerting its pervasive influence on society.4 Given this emphasis on the intangible, here it is also imperative to acknowledge that although the narco-machine is indeed in many ways an abstract entity, the collateral damage left in its wake is concrete and occupies a real geopolitical space, which in this particular case is the US-Mexico border. In order to conceptualize the borderlands as both a physical and a cultural space, it is pertinent to...

This chapter explores the tension between the American (and global) interest in deterring drug-related crimes, and the moral duty of the United States to defer to the wishes of foreign societies that have been suffering from staggering drug-related violence triggered (to a significant extent) by the United States’ own ‘War on Drugs’. More specifically, the chapter explores this tension by inquiring into the ways in which the United States might use its own jurisdiction to either protect (via asylum) or attack (via criminal prosecution) foreign officials who have collaborated with drug cartels—some, culpably, others, under duress. The relational priority principle helps us to see which of these jurisdictional decisions are justified, which are not, and why.

No Silver Bullet in Sight: The Paths and Pitfalls of Police Reform in Mexico Matthias Jäger (bio) Daniel M Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2012. 296 p. When Mexico’s president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, assumes office on December 1, 2012, he will take on a difficult legacy. As America’s neighbor to the south, Mexico was the Latin American country most affected by the international financial and economic crisis1 and, not least due to its strong ties to the U.S. economy, remains in a difficult condition. Politically, the country is perhaps more polarized than ever; many discussions about Mexico’s future center on whether the country should be considered a “failing state,” and whether the conflict between the government and the drug cartels should be classified as a “war” rather than democratic transition. With the number of casualties hitting almost 60,000 in recent years, violence has reached a level hard to imagine for an OECD member state with the potential of Mexico. Expectations are high for Enrique Peña Nieto, since the departing president, Felipe Calderón, has not managed to control the violence during his ending six-year term. In fact, he stirred up a hornet’s nest when, troubled by internal conflicts regarding the legitimacy of his election victory in 2006, he made the decision to pit the Mexican army against the drug cartels when the army was ill-prepared for internal security tasks. Far from offering a solution, this controversial decision increased the brutality of the conflict, transforming it into one that is settled in broad daylight on the streets of many Mexican towns rather than in the desert of Northwest Mexico, and has led to serious human rights violations committed by members of the armed forces against civilians. Of course, public security—or the lack thereof—is not the only issue observers of the country’s democratic development should worry about these days. However, security is the issue which affects all others—from the state’s imperfect monopoly on the use of force and rampant corruption, a new political [End Page 221] pluralism that is at stake, to a high concentration of mass media in the hands of the elite, to name only a few of the challenges. Accordingly, there is probably no issue higher on the policy agenda in Mexico now than police reform, and it is therefore welcome that a new book recently published by Daniel M. Sabet focuses precisely on the obstacles to professionalizing Mexico’s police forces. Not surprisingly, Sabet’s research has already received considerable attention in the policy community. In fact, there is rarely a new study by a young scholar as acclaimed as Sabet’s: The Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter refers to the book as “a superb, rigorous, careful study,”2 and Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, calls it nothing less than “one of the best books on Mexico written in English in recent years.”3 Daniel M. Sabet is a specialist in governance, policy analysis, and public sector reform research who earned his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University-Bloomington. He currently serves as the director of the Center for Enterprise and Society at the University of Liberal Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh and is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, which funded his study. Sabet’s research agenda emerged from his earlier work coordinating rule-of-law educational programs for police throughout Latin America as part of the National Strategic Information Center’s “Culture of Lawfulness” project. Some of the findings presented in his most recent book have been previously published as working papers, articles, or book chapters that are already heavily drawn upon in academic discussion.4 Police reform has been high on the Mexican policy agenda since the mid-1990s. Sabet seeks to answer why a decade and a half of reform efforts have failed to produce a more honest and effective police force protective of human rights. Although on other occasions the author has also worked on reform of the...

Reviewed by: The Politics of Cross-Border Crime in Greater China: Case Studies of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao Franklin J. Woo (bio) Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo . The Politics of Cross-Border Crime in Greater China: Case Studies of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009. xvii, 245 pp. Hardcover $72.95, ISBN 978-0-7656-1276-2. Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo is an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He formerly taught at the University of East Asia (Macao), and three institutions of higher learning in Hong Kong (Lingnan College, the University of Science and Technology, and the University of Hong Kong). His book is part of a series of thirteen volumes written by different authors between 1991 and 2004 focusing primarily on Hong Kong. Lo's The Politics of Cross-Border Crime in Greater China, however, represents a conscious move of the series to expand beyond Hong Kong to a more inclusive integrating China, showing the interactive linkages between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It is the author's claim that political science has neglected the topic of transborder crime until very recently, when focus on the subject was greatly increased after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. Most textbooks on international relations have turned a blind eye to the concepts of organized crime and transborder crime, although terrorism remain one of the crucial topics in the study of world politics. (p. 5) Though Lo focuses is primarily on crime across borders as part and parcel of economic ties in Greater China, his book is a good indication of the fact that in today's globalized world, we can no longer look at any one place or region in isolation from the larger picture. For Lo, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, "three thriving dynamos—all staunchly capitalistic, highly marketized, liberally open and vigorously freewheeling—are [End Page 242] now closely pursued in style and replicated in practice by Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other mainland Chinese metropolises" (p. xi). This coming together of an avowedly Communist state with three capitalistic enclaves has been the ongoing process since the economic reforms in the PRC that began in the late 1970s. With the centripetal forces of economic integration that are bringing this East Asia region more closely together, the emerging relationships between China, Hong Kong, and Macao are complex, "yielding almost unlimited developmental opportunities and also posing unforeseeable risks and greater challenges to mainland China's own quest for modernity, development, affluence, international recognition and national integration" (pp. xi-xii). We can read on the Internet of the 174,000 tourists from the People's Republic that visited Taiwan between the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009; we can well imagine the amount of human traffic moving to Hong Kong and Macao. Before the economic reforms in the PRC and the subsequent influx of economic and social traffic among these four places, cross-border crimes in greater China was pretty much limited to illegal border crossings, smuggling of manufactured and agricultural products, and such rare events as the hijacking of an aircraft. Increased economic integration of these four places since the 1980s, however, has also brought complex criminal activities such as illegal immigration, drug trafficking, smuggling of stolen objects of art, fraud, laundering of embezzled or other illegal money (especially between China and North Korea), cross-border gambling, kidnapping for ransom, human trafficking for prostitution, loan sharking at high interest, and other crimes—all made the more efficient through the use of electronic technology such as the cell phone and the Internet. The porous nature of the borders of these places is not unlike the border between Mexico and the United States, where the drug cartels' and drug lords' internecine killings threaten the stability of both countries. Although Hong Kong and Macao both returned to the PRC in 1997 and 1999, respectively, the one country/two system formula applicable to these two is an anathema to Taiwan, which rejects it flatly, insisting on its own integrity and autonomy, not as a province of China...

More than 13.6 million Brazilians live in large poor communities known as favelas. Historically, these territories suffer due to social rights insufficiency and violent conflicts orchestrated by the police and the drug cartels. In this context, the dismantling of the public health care system and denialism of the pandemic by the federal government increases the vulnerability within the favelas during the COVID-19 crisis. Although the federal government failed to take up measures to control the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a criminal organization that dominates the trafficking of drugs in several Brazilian favelas, known as Comando Vermelho, instead dictated those protective actions. This study aimed to discuss the ethical aspects of the relationship between primary health care professionals and the drug cartels in order to promote health care in the favelas.

Since the year 2008, Ciudad Juarez is once again, nationally and internationally, capturing attention by the extreme, atrocious, and continuous violence that its citizens experience in various degrees and forms on a daily basis. One of the most well-known expressions of this violence is homicide: 1,607 people were killed that year.1 This carnage, which left decapitated, dismembered, burned, mutilated bodies abandoned in humiliating positions, is mostly the result of the war between drug cartels that manifests itself in daily public gun battles. Other violent crimes include extortions, kidnappings, carjacking, and armed robberies, to name the most notorious. Even though the intensity of violence has been present in this city for at least two decades, inhabitants of Juarez speak about their life before and after 2008 (Turati, 2009: 8) when President Felipe Calderon declared the War against the Drug Cartels in the years 2006–2007. Within this frame, Ciudad Juarez is presented as a city that has “always been rough” and is compared with El Paso, Texas: the Mexican side is violent and the United States side is peaceful (McKinley, 2009). In this vision and I may say in the vision of many people: these two cities are two worlds apart.

Mexico's Drug War and Criminal Networks examines the effects of technology on three criminal organizations: the Sinaloa cartel, the Zetas, and the Caballeros Templarios. Using social network analysis, and analyzing the use of web platforms Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Nilda M. Garcia provides fresh insights on the organizational network, the central nodes, and the channels through which information flows in these three criminal organizations. In doing so, she demonstrates that some drug cartels in Mexico have adopted the usage of social media into their strategies, often pursuing different tactics in the search for new ways to dominate. She finds that the strategic adaptation of social media platforms has different effects on criminal organization’s survivability. When used effectively, coupled with the adoption of decentralized structures, these platforms do increase a criminal organization’s survival capacity. Nonetheless, if used haphazardly, it can have the opposite effect. Drawing on the fields of criminology, social network analysis, international relations, and organizational theory and featuring a wealth of information about the drug cartels themselves, Mexico's Drug War and Criminal Networks will be a great source for all those interested in the presence, behavior, purposes, and strategies of drug cartels in their forays into social media platforms in Mexico and beyond.

Crime and violence pose a serious challenge to Mexico. The problem appears to be growing worse, with 2011 on pace to become the most violent year on record. The rising violence in Mexico has resulted in a sharply heightened sense of fear among citizens, who now feel the presence of cartels in their every day lives. The use of extortion and kidnapping by cartels combined with a lack of trust in security forces terrorizes the population and makes them feel like they have no where to turn. Despite this fact, crime rates in Mexico remain lower than in other parts of Latin America. Venezuela, for example, has among the highest homicide rates in the world. Yet the pervasive infiltration of cartels into public life gives Mexicans a heightened sense of the severity of violent crime in their own country. Although accurate statistics are hard to come by, it is quite possible that 60,000 people have died in the last six-plus years as a result of armed conflict between the Mexican cartels and the Mexican government, amongst cartels fighting each other, and as a result of cartels targeting citizens. Mexico has been struggling with drug production and drug transit through its territory from South America to the U.S. for many decades, given the fact that it is the most important transit country for drug production originating from South America. In recent years, the escalating violence in Mexico has led to dramatic deterioration of the security situation. Recent wave of drug-war violence is associated with the beginning of the term of President Felipe Calderon in December 2006. The immediate implications of his assumption of the presidency and his hard-line policy, which he has applied against drug cartels and organized criminal groups across the country, were the deployment of Mexican army to fight cartels and the gradual weakening of the influence of local and state police at the expense of federal troops. This was done in order to combat corruption and collaboration of local law-enforcement institutions with drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). The consequence of such a policy, however, has been increased violence among rival cartels and between them and the federal police and military, resulting in a dramatic increase of the number of victims. The future of US-Mexican counter drug cooperation, as well as of the whole bilateral relation in the area of security, depends on the outcome of US presidential elections. As for Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto takes the office on December 1, 2012 that will mark a comeback of his party PRI after 12 years in opposition. As far as the security strategy of the future Mexican President is concerned, there are no significant changes to be expected. Pena Nieto seems to be aware of the current situation and its consequences as well as of the inevitability of an extremely close and dynamic mutual cooperation with the US.