Possible Criminal Justice Solutions to Organized Crime: Drug Trafficking and Terrorism

Abstract

Among the different manifestations that constitute the concept of organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism arouse special interest because of their intense public repercussions. This is so with the phenomenon of drug trafficking for its use of terror indiscriminately as a tactical and strategic mechanism to stake out its supremacy and control, often managing to break the people's confidence in the legitimacy of the rule of law. In the face of this situation, it is important to stop perceiving the drug trafficker as a common criminal because he has always been capable of adapting himself empathetically to the different transformations that the State has undergone in the last fifty years. Until we understand the nature of criminal organizations, their strategic capacity and their insertion into society and we admit the errors committed in public policies in security and we search for a complete panorama of the phenomenon, society will continue to be held prisoner by this violence. Regarding terrorism, there are few countries where these crimes take on such relevance as in Spain, not so much for the frequency but rather for the analysis that is made of the criminal justice reaction to them. In this area, criminal law is the paradigm of a regulation at the limit of constitutional legitimacy because of the anticipation of barriers to incrimination, the infringement of the principle of legality in the writing of many categories of offenses, the exacerbation of sentences or the absence of any preventive purpose to the sentences of securing the incapacitation of the criminal as the only objective. And, nevertheless, the concern of a great part of society that the institutions of criminal persecution and criminal justice remain passive in the face of this phenomenon can be noted (Cancio, 2010). Before this discouraging panorama of both manifestations of organized crime, a brief analysis of antiterrorist and anti-drug trafficking criminal law, its application in case law and its confrontation with governmental policy will be carried out in an attempt to find some solution which may very well prove to be difficult.