Illicit Commerce Research Articles

Insights into Population Status and Habitat Patches of Conservation Concern for the Endangered Indian Pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) in Nowshera District, Northwestern Pakistan.

The Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) stands out among the four surviving species of Asian pangolins, being the sole species present in Pakistan and listed as endangered owing to trafficking and illicit commerce. In the present study, we explored the population status of the Indian pangolin and the existing suitable habitats in Nowshera district, Pakistan. We employed the line transect method to confirm the species presence and subsequent population estimation. In a survey effort of 156 km2, a total of 56 signs of Indian pangolin were recorded within the research area. Amongst the 56 signs, 46 were burrows (living burrows (53.57%) and feeding burrows (28.57%)). Digging was observed nine (16.07%) times, along with one direct sighting (1.7%). Our results revealed a population estimate of only 29 pangolins in the Nowshera district, with a population density of 0.013 individuals/km2. Later, MaxEnt was applied to the species' presence points, along with climatic and topographical variables. The MaxEnt model accuracy was good (AUC = 0.811). Of the total area studied, 210 km2 (12.01%) were highly suitable and 238 km2 (13.61%) were moderately suitable habitat for the Indian pangolin. To safeguard the fragile population and habitat of the Indian pangolin, we highly suggest strengthening watch and ward and law enforcement in the study area. By adopting a comprehensive approach that addresses both the direct threats to Indian pangolins and the underlying factors driving their decline, we can effectively protect this endangered species and ensure the preservation of its essential habitats for robust conservation.

Robert J. Walker: The History and Archaeology of a U.S. Coast Survey Steamship

Robert J. Walker: The History and Archaeology of a U.S. Coast Survey Steamship

Gray Markets in the Great Leap: Prosecuting “Profiteering” in Liangshan County, Shandong, 1958–1960

This article uses legal archives from Liangshan 梁山 county, Shandong, to explore the ambiguous position of rural markets in China during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962). These testimonies, though sparse, show that negotiations at a local, indeed personal, level underpinned the symbiosis between the “second economy” of illicit trade and the party-state’s putatively socialist political economy. Liangshan’s gray market bridged the gap between the party-state’s Sputnik promises and catastrophic realities, contributing twofold to the party-state’s political survival. First, illicit commerce helped famine survivors, including local cadres, obtain desperately needed sustenance; these cadres’ support of trading villagers despite top-down restrictions on such transactions likely helped them retain local moral authority after the Leap. Second, the intermittent formal prosecution of “profiteers” in the ritualized space of the county courtroom projected justice, stability, and coercive power, which also contributed to the party’s continuing hold on authority.

Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of the Enlightenment

Forty-two years after the first of many monographs on the eighteenth-century book, Robert Darnton offered the companion volume to his penultimate study of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution based on the firm’s correspondence with its representative in France, Jean-François Favarger. The title under review, however, moves the focus from French booksellers to European publishers, mainly in the ‘fertile crescent’ from Amsterdam to Avignon, a region proximate to the continent’s largest reading public. These devious entrepreneurs printed copies of successful nouveautés (recent publications) whenever their sale in France could be undercut by cheaper editions. In a period without enforceable, universal copyright, this bootleg custom was widespread—and risky. Bankruptcies loomed large, including the STN’s own soon after 1783 when French authorities virtually sealed the country’s borders to these pirates and closed down the provincial booksellers who depended upon them. Illicit commerce in the Enlightenment’s livres philosophiques, also subject to censorship, had always been ruthless. ‘On the whole’, Darnton writes, ‘the foreign publishers operated under few constraints other than the marketplace’ in a distinctive form of swashbuckling capitalism.

Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 by Juan José Ponce Vásquez

Operating within the established traditions and broad parameters of social history and historical sociology, Ponce Vázquez’s original and deeply archival work will be relevant to anyone whose interests extend to economic anthropology, political economy, the operation of power in racially and ethnically complex societies, and state-society relations in early modern imperial settings.How did a thriving contraband trade come to define society and shape political culture in seventeenth-century Hispaniola (today, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and how did the island’s elites gain control over governing institutions designed to advance imperial interests? This innovative sociopolitical history details islanders’ resistance to Spain’s mercantile system and the reason for their turn to smuggling to survive. In response to royal neglect and indifference, elites increasingly turned governing institutions into vehicles to advance their self-interests. The rapid decline of its sugar economy and the re-routing of the imperial fleet turned Hispaniola into a periphery; islanders responded by engaging in trade with Spain’s enemies and rivals.Ponce Vázquez brings the understudied period of this colonial periphery to life, using a rich array of sources housed in Spain’s Archivo General de las Indias. He uses the framework of moral economy to explore how islanders rationalized their defiance of imperial authority, and he expands the concept to account for the behavior of Hispaniola’s elites and its racially mixed popular classes. Taken together, the range of responses by locals, though rarely undertaken in concert, turned the island into a relatively vibrant hub for contraband trade. Ponce Vázquez analyzes more than a century’s worth of correspondence sent to Spain’s Council of Indies from a broad cross-section of Hispaniola’s population in order to reconstruct islanders’ social and political responses to imperial policy. He supplements these fragmentary materials with documents generated by royal officials, including cases brought before the regional court (Audiencia) that survived only because they were sent to Seville on appeal, and records of official inspections and judicial proceedings (visitas and juicios de residencias).The creative discipline that Ponce Vázquez brings to his analysis of these challenging sources allows him to reconstruct the social worlds of the island’s diverse and fractious inhabitants. He concludes that the enduring patronage networks that took shape in this period subverted imperial rule throughout the Caribbean; that alliances across conventional boundaries of faith, status, race and “national” loyalties were common (if unstable); and that residents’ involvement in contraband trade provided the basis for the island’s economic growth.Smuggling shaped governance and determined the limits of Spanish imperial authority; Hispaniola’s residents survived by engaging in contraband trade with Spain’s rivals and enemies. Lightly inhabited regions and remote ports became thriving centers of illicit commerce. Slavery and a racialized social hierarchy did not prevent Afro-descended peoples—free or enslaved—from contributing to a political economy based on contraband trade and creating elaborate social networks that included agents of other European powers. These networks may well have outlasted the people who created them. Ironically, this widespread defiance of imperial law and policy, typically covert rather than openly confrontational, structured the island’s precarious stability and defined the contours of its politics and its economy within a broader, trans-imperial setting. The actions of residents operating outside the law, by continuously challenging imperial authority in ingenious ways, turned an imperial periphery into a trans-imperial center in the broader context of the Atlantic world. Hispaniola became a hub for a contraband trade that provided its poorer residents with a livelihood, its elites with increased authority, and members of both groups with greater access to European and regional markets.This rich and detailed portrayal of social relationships and economic encounters that transcended distinctions in doctrine, status, and race deserves a broad audience. It reinforces the value of bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives and analytical techniques to archival research. It illustrates that even though the challenges of the archive should never be underestimated, recalcitrant documentation can be made to reveal the complex lives of both the elites and the marginalized subjects of empire. Relevant to scholars with interests outside colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, this book’s significance extends to global history, comparative politics, and the historical sociology of colonial societies.

Trafficking as settler colonialism in eastern Panama: Linking the Americas via illicit commerce, clientelism, and land cover change

Rural spaces are garnering new attention in illicit economies. At the confluence of the American continents, illicit commodities are being moved through rural Panama’s communities and iconic Darién forests. Over the last decade, the international media have focused on the uptick in human “migration” while the Panamanian press has chronicled dramatic illegal logging. Less acknowledged is the surge in drug smuggling and arms trafficking. Using media reports and mapping over the last twenty years, we ask how multi-commodity trafficking and human exploitation are remaking rural space. We provide the first synthetic and spatial overview of eastern Panama’s multiple trafficking, showing how it is altering social and environmental relationships. Media reports, many based on government seizures, indicate trafficking routes throughout the region, implying the involvement of much of the local population and resulting in new clientelistic social relationships between traffickers, residents, and the state. Increasingly, trafficking is driving land cover change, diminishing forest cover in private lands, protected areas, and indigenous lands and connecting them via a growing road network. Indigenous peoples’ conservation of forests hampers surveillance and makes their lands ideal for trafficking. This also means that they are the only ethnicity frequently named in the media, threatening indigenous sovereignty and land legalization efforts. We conclude that trafficking is a form of settler colonialism, continuing processes of taking that began in this area of the American mainland centuries ago. Rather than incidentally holding indigenous residents culpable, maligning them in trafficking’s transit area is fundamental to capitalist expansion, integrating it with the country’s dollarized economy, highly developed banking sector, and the canal’s global commerce. The continued transit of people and illegal commodities in eastern Panama is quickly transforming conservation, indigenous sovereignty, and sustainable development.

Using meta-barcoding tools to monitor primate meat consumption at dedicated establishments in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Guinea-Bissau (GB) is a regional stronghold for primate conservation. Ten primates occur in the country, including the Western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) and two colobus monkeys (Colobus polykomos and Piliocolobus badius temminckii). Primate meat is consumed at households and bushmeat-dedicated establishments, locally named "Abafatório". Such establishments are mentioned to be common in urban areas since the 1980s and to be specialized in serving primate meat while drinking alcoholic beverages. The meat is typically cooked in a stew and eaten with bread. However, as the trade and consumption of primate meat are illegal activities, the location of Abafatório establishments and details of the trade, namely species being consumed, are usually hidden from outsiders. Here, we characterize illicit bushmeat commerce and consumption at six Abafatórios of a small town. Our team visited the establishments every week for 15 months (2015-2017) and collected data on the type and prices of meals and gathered tissue samples taken from carcasses by establishment owners. A meta-barcoding approach (cytb and 12S mitochondrial DNA regions and Illumina MiSeq next-generation sequencing technology) was used to identify tissue samples to the species level. Two types of establishments can be distinguished – “restaurants” and “snack-bars”. Restaurants are similar to the ones found by previous works in the capital city where primate meat is sold as a dish containing few pieces of stewed meat. Snack-bars are smaller and the meat is sold inexpensively and by the piece. In the present study, 249 tissue samples were identified to be from four primates (Cercopithecus campbelli, Chlorocebus sabaeus, Papio papio, and Erythrocebus patas) and four Artiodactyla (Philantomba maxwellii, Tragelaphus scriptus, Potamochoerus porcus and Phacochoerus africanus). Primates represented approximately 92% of all species consumed across establishments, and C. campbelli was the most traded species. Our work suggests that primate meat is monetarily accessible for locals in rural areas and that the trade at Abafatórios may have extensive negative consequences to primate conservation, in particular, the reduction of primates' populations in the southern part of GB. Our work quantifies and identifies the species consumed in Abafatório establishments for the first time and highlights the need to improve regulation and law enforcement in Guinea-Bissau.

Searching for Significance among Drug Lords and Death Squads: The Covert Netherworld as Invisible Incubator for Illicit Commerce

In a search for appropriate theory, this essay inserts drug trafficking, the world’s largest illicit economic activity, within a wider analytical frame called the ‘covert netherworld.’ Through the convergence of three factors—covert operations, illicit commerce, and social milieu—such netherworlds can form at regional, national, and international levels, thereby transforming social margins of crime and illicit commerce into potent sources of political change. By deftly playing upon this netherworld’s politics and illicit commerce along the Burma-Thai borderlands, a regional ‘drug lord’ amassed sufficient local power to dominate the global heroin trade for over a decade and simultaneously sustain an ethnic revolt for nearly 15 years. In the Philippines, the illicit traffic in synthetic drugs developed a parallel power to influence the character of national politics, compromising three presidential administrations and shaping the moral economy of political life. For the past 40 years in Afghanistan, an illicit commodity, opium, has shaped the fate of military intervention by the world’s sole superpower, allowing it an initial success and later contributing to its ongoing failure. Through the sum of these cases, the essay concludes that the covert netherworld can serve as invisible incubator for a range of extralegal activities and has thereby attained sufficient autonomy to be treated as a significant factor in international politics.

Criminal motivation on the dark web: A categorisation model for law enforcement

Research into the nature and structure of ‘Dark Webs’ such as Tor has largely focused upon manually labelling a series of crawled sites against a series of categories, sometimes using these labels as a training corpus for subsequent automated crawls. Such an approach is adequate for establishing broad taxonomies, but is of limited value for specialised tasks within the field of law enforcement. Contrastingly, existing research into illicit behaviour online has tended to focus upon particular crime types such as terrorism. A gap exists between taxonomies capable of holistic representation and those capable of detailing criminal behaviour. The absence of such a taxonomy limits interoperability between agencies, curtailing development of standardised classification tools.We introduce the Tor-use Motivation Model (TMM), a two-dimensional classification methodology specifically designed for use within a law enforcement context. The TMM achieves greater levels of granularity by explicitly distinguishing site content from motivation, providing a richer labelling schema without introducing inefficient complexity or reliance upon overly broad categories of relevance. We demonstrate this flexibility and robustness through direct examples, showing the TMM's ability to distinguish a range of unethical and illegal behaviour without bloating the model with unnecessary detail.The authors of this paper received permission from the Australian government to conduct an unrestricted crawl of Tor for research purposes, including the gathering and analysis of illegal materials such as child pornography. The crawl gathered 232,792 pages from 7651 Tor virtual domains, resulting in the collation of a wide spectrum of materials, from illicit to downright banal. Existing conceptual models and their labelling schemas were tested against a small sample of gathered data, and were observed to be either overly prescriptive or vague for law enforcement purposes - particularly when used for prioritising sites of interest for further investigation.In this paper we deploy the TMM by manually labelling a corpus of over 4000 unique Tor pages. We found a network impacted (but not dominated) by illicit commerce and money laundering, but almost completely devoid of violence and extremism. In short, criminality on this ‘dark web’ is based more upon greed and desire, rather than any particular political motivations.

“A Sad and . . . Odious Industry”: The Problem of Child Begging in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

This article examines the perception and treatment of child beggars in Third Republic Paris. By the nineteenth century’s close, public opinion and government policy no longer cast these children as threatening. Instead, the republic passed legislation and established institutions to protect the young and destitute; however, these measures also tried to ensure that these children became industrious members of the working class. Moreover, in practice, contemporaries continued to view children engaging in illicit commerce with suspicion and worried over their current and future loss of productivity. By using discussions around child labor to study the child beggar, this article offers a new perspective for considering the origins of the victim versus threat dichotomy that characterized late nineteenth-century approaches to the juvenile delinquent.

Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground. By Michael Kwass (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 472 pp. $49.95

Not so long ago, after revisionism had discredited virtually every social interpretation of the French Revolution, commercial capitalism seemed to have had only an indirect bearing on that great event. However, in the last few years, partly because of new interest in the Revolution’s global origins, a growing number of historians have sought to reconnect the commercial and political spheres of eighteenth-century France without resorting to the Marxist models of class conflict common to most pre-revisionist interpretations of 1789. But how to do so convincingly has remained elusive, especially given the complex dynamics of state breakdown painstakingly unraveled by revisionist scholars.In this brilliant, imaginative, and well-researched book, Kwass, building upon his previous excellent work on the politics of taxation, ingeniously argues that it was not so much commercial capitalism that corroded the structures of the Old Regime as its “darker” side, namely, illicit commerce.1 To be sure, Kwass acknowledges the existence and importance of the “consumer revolution,” to which some historians have pointed as a destabilizing factor and without which his story would not make much sense. Eighteenth-century French consumers were purchasing more goods than ever and, thanks largely to colonial trade, in greater varieties. But as Kwass demonstrates in illuminating detail, this demand was frustrated significantly by the fiscal state’s efforts to regulate commerce, in some cases (for example, Indian calicoes) by banning it altogether to protect domestic textile production, and in other cases (tobacco) by imposing monopolies to fund the state’s increasingly costly operations. The result was the creation of vast networks of illicit commerce, wherein smugglers—like the folk-hero Louis Mandrin—motivated by profit, and consumers, looking for cheaper and more exotic goods, happily collaborated in cheating the state. Thus does Kwass cleverly substitute consumer/state conflict for class conflict as one motor of the Revolution. As illicit commerce grew, and the state responded by imposing increasingly more stringent laws, regulations, bureaucratic controls, and punishments to contain it, the smugglers’ many natural allies among the population came to see in their repression one conspicuous manifestation of the creeping “despotism” against which 1789 was the explosive reaction.Was the development or the repudiation of such apparently repressive mercantilism a concomitant of the modern state? As Kwass persuasively concludes, both of them were. To be sure, the revolutionaries replaced the burdensome indirect taxes and the hated, heavy-handed apparatus erected to collect them as part of their effort to end despotism and liberalize the economy. Yet, the fiscalization of consumption that had provided nearly half of the revenues received by the Old Regime was so lucrative that the Revolutionaries quickly restored it in a less oppressive form after renouncing it. It is difficult not to draw from this story Tocqueville’s conclusion that the Old Regime persisted in spite of the disruptions of the Revolution.2 Indeed, Kwass can readily be considered one of Tocqueville’s worthy successors.

The Illicit Trade & Conflict Connection: Insights from U.S. History

A great deal of scholarly and policy attention has been given in recent years to the relationship between illicit trade and armed conflict. Much of the focus has been on how violent non-state actors have exploited illicit commerce to fund and sustain rebellion. It is commonly asserted that this is a distinctly post-Cold War phenomenon — even a defining characteristic of so-called “new wars.” In this brief paper I attempt to “bring history back in” to contemporary debates about illicit trade and conflict by critically examining the early American experience, arguing that illicit commerce and its connection to armed conflict played an essential role in the very making of the nation, and that the distinction between a patriot and profiteer was often a blurry one. I focus on three cases: the American War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War. In all three cases, illicit trade profoundly shaped the nature, duration, and outcome of the conflict. In the case of the War of Independence, illicit trade successfully supplied the rebellion but also complicated postwar reconstruction. In the case of the War of 1812, illicit trade in the form of “trading with the enemy” extended the conflict, helped to turn it into a stalemate, and subverted U.S. efforts to annex Canada. In the case of the Civil War, illicit cotton exports via blockade running helped to prolong the conflict, allowing the Confederacy to persist far longer than would otherwise have been the case.

The Evolution of Financial Sanctions on North Korea

IntroductionIn recent years, financial sanctions have become an increasingly important tool of U.S. foreign policy, playing a central role in efforts to prevent or counter nuclear proliferation and other illicit international activities such as money laundering or terrorist financing. In the case of North Korea, the imposition of financial sanctions has been a key part of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations' strategies for pressuring the country to abandon its development of weapons of mass destruction and adhere to international norms. By impeding North Korea's access to the international financial system, these sanctions have had a disruptive effect on its international commercial activities, both legitimate and illicit. Should North Korea's proliferation activities stay on their current trajectory, the further implementation of such sanctions will likely continue to be a major part of efforts to degrade North Korea's WMD programs and pressure it to return to the bargaining table on terms acceptable to the United States.Financial sanctions, which aim to deny targeted entities such as proliferationlinked banks or enterprises access to the international financial system, are a fairly novel tool, relying on the risk calculus of private financial institutions as much as on direct actions by governments. Because of the importance of the dollar in the international financial system, U.S. policymakers have been able to pressure third-country banks doing business with actors such as North Korea into applying greater scrutiny in their transactions, or cutting offtheir relations altogether. This dynamic has allowed the U.S. to apply economic pressure even when direct trade or financial ties with the target of sanctions are minimal.1To many global financial institutions, the risks of bad publicity, increased regulatory costs or fines, or the possibility of losing access to the U.S. financial system outweigh the potential profits to be made from doing business with an entity that may be linked to proliferation, terrorism, or other illicit activities. Some financial institutions may go beyond avoiding entities specifically linked to such activities and avoid business with a country such as North Korea altogether if the risk of facilitating illicit transactions, or the cost of implementing a due diligence framework to ensure that all transactions are legitimate, outweighs the potential profit to be made. While a third-country business engaged in commerce with North Korea but not the U.S. may be able to shrug offthe threat of secondary sanctions,2 such as the loss of access to the U.S. market, ready access to the U.S. financial system is the lifeblood of most global financial institutions.Lacking easy access to a foreign bank account, an entity affected by financial sanctions may therefore find it difficult to conduct international transactions or remit hard currency. Resolving this problem may be as simple as finding a new banker willing to stomach the risks (perhaps in return for receiving premium rates), but a hardpressed entity may have to resort to more costly measures such as bartering, laundering money through front companies, or using bulk cash. When such an affected entity is a vital node in a country's economy, such as a major bank, the disruptive effects can spread far, complicating commercial activities and creating inflationary pressures. Both legitimate and illicit commerce may therefore be affected by financial sanctions, creating an incentive for legitimate businesses to step into the financial netherworld, and for illicit ones to delve further underground.3From the perspective of U.S. policymakers, financial sanctions are a significant addition to the more traditional sanctions toolbox of trade embargos, interdictions, and targeted smart sanctions. These measures fit well within the context of the overlapping objectives of why states implement sanctions: to coerce a target regime to change its behavior; to undermine its leadership; to deter it from future actions; to degrade its capabilities; to warn international audiences against undertaking similar behavior; and to satisfy domestic audiences demanding that something be done. …

Understanding Criminality in West African Conflicts

Most standard analyses and policies aimed at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa understand members of armed groups, and especially their leaders who engaged in illicit commerce, as criminals. This analysis and the policies that follow from it miss the extent to which these transactions now contribute to the construction of new political relationships and are seen by those who participate in them as one of the few avenues for active participation in the post-war economy and politics. This article explains how illicit commerce underlies new political relationships in West Africa. It shows how measures to disrupt these transactions can destabilize politics. But often those who participate in illicit markets prove able to manipulate externally imposed measures and assert their own interests.

TRAITORS, TRAFIQUANTS, AND THE CONFISCATION OF ‘ILLICIT PROFITS’ IN FRANCE, 1944–1950

ABSTRACTState measures to confiscate the ‘illicit profits’ earned from commerce with the enemy and the black market in Occupied France are generally considered to have been an abject failure. Economic collaboration and illicit commerce had been widespread. The need to ‘purge’ the profits from black market transactions and economic collaboration was considered essential at Liberation. An examination of the confiscation effort from archival sources shows that the purge achieved limited success, but that complete success was rendered impossible by factors that limited other post-war purges: the shortage of trained personnel and investigative resources, the need for hard evidence for legal procedures (rather than vigilante justice), the efforts of collaborators to cover their tracks, and the evolution of public opinion, which was quickly disappointed by the slow pace of confiscations. Although success was limited, the effort to punish the profiteers it could convict had been necessary, as a matter of elementary fiscal justice and an essential step in the restoration of the authority of the state.

Border Permeability and the State in Southeast Asia: Contraband and Regional Security

In Southeast Asia, governments have increasingly tried to regulate international flows of commodities for financial, territorial, and security reasons. This article examines the relationship between borders and contraband in this arena, arguing that their interrelationship has become an important -- and understudied -- part of the regional security mosaic. The article analyses some of the connecting mechanisms between A SEAN frontier regions, and then explores how these mechanisms are being undermined by a range of countervailing forces. Here, the focus is on two contraband lines in particular: the transit of wildlife, and the passage of a diverse spectrum of consumer goods. The widening transit of such commodities presents special challenges to regional security, which are likely to plague local regimes in the foreseeable future. Introduction The security agenda in Southeast Asia has undergone significant broadening in recent decades. Arms races, the desired role of Japan, and conflict in the South China Sea have been joined of Late by cyber warfare, theatre missile defence, and dialogues on Myanmar, among other pressing issues. Scholars have looked at ASEAN's particular dynamics as a security grouping, and have even begun asking whether its characteristics and mechanics might be emulated in other parts of the world. [1] Some of these reappraisals have been part and parcel of a larger shift in the cadence of security studies, not just in Southeast Asia, but on the international stage as well. [2] Yet, there is a growing sense in the literature that Southeast Asia's security equation is especially complex, as states in this region evince highly-complicated interrelationships, governed by a broad spectrum of thorny issues. This has been true at least since the 1960s, but the swirling of these forces seems only to have gathered momentum in the last t wo decades. This article suggests that two concepts -- border permeability and illegal trade -- should have a higher profile within this widening security agenda. The examination of international frontiers in the global political economy has become a fertile field of study in recent years. Ironically, this has happened at the same time that borders are becoming less important, in terms of their restrictive capabilities. [3] Scholars have approached frontiers as part of a regional security context in various ways. Some of the best work have been done in a comparative vein, while the observations and methodologies of anthropologists on the ground have also been very instructive. [4] The transit of illegal trade through borders has also received increasing attention of late, as theorists and planners alike seek to explain how porous boundaries affect the relationships between neighbouring states. [5] Southeast Asia, with its ten sovereign nations, differing systems of government, and myriad border populations, presents an interesting case-study for these dynamics. More than most global arenas, frontiers and illicit commerce here play a fundamental part in the region's security calculus. This article examines these boundaries and flows on a systemic, pan-regional basis. An initial attempt is made to situate Southeast Asia's frontiers in a regional context, as border agreements, surveillance, and organized crime are related to government security concerns. The remainder of the article then delves into two particular contraband lines as windows into these dynamics: the trade in natural resources or biota (including flora and fauna), and the illicit commerce in consumer goods. Both are shown to be enterprises on a huge scale, which have interpenetrated the normal economic flows of the region in a wide variety of ways. The importance of these shadow circuits on commodities cannot be overstated. Money to national treasuries is lost, and ends up in the pockets of actors whose aims are often inimical to the state. Alternative power sources are built, and are then padded with this income for the future. …

Third World Communism in Crisis: Castro's Last Stand

Third World Communism in CrisisCastro's Last Stand Carlos Alberto Montaner (bio) In October 1987, when no one was yet predicting the imminent collapse of the world's Marxist regimes, I spoke at a symposium in New York entitled "Will the Communist States Survive: The View from Within." My lecture assessed the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Castro regime at the time. I noted eight sources of weakness: 1) the general feeling of "temporariness" and need for change then current in Cuba; 2) the abysmal economic situation; 3) the government's patent exhaustion; 4) the African wars in which Castro had entangled his country; 5) the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika; 6) the absence of a truly hegemonic communist party; 7) the devastating effect of Radio Martí; and 8) Cuba's geographical distance from the USSR. On the other side of the balance, I pointed out five things that were helping to reinforce Castro's position: 1) The USSR's continuing support; 2) what at that time still seemed like the irreversible character of communist revolutions; 3) the regime's highly efficient apparatus of repression; 4) the international perception of Cuban communism as an immovable phenomenon; and 5) the absence of a viable alternative in the opposition. That was my assessment in the autumn of 1987. Now, nearly three years later, it is interesting to observe that of the eight weaknesses, six have intensified, while only one (the African entanglement) is on the [End Page 71] way out and the other (the distance from the USSR) has, curiously, begun to militate in favor of Castro rather than against him. As for Castro's strengths, there is no doubt that they have all diminished somewhat since 1987. Soviet economic and political support have clearly declined and may dip still further; communism is in retreat over most of the world and in many places has collapsed forever; the Cuban state's repressive apparatus has been shaken following the July 1989 firing-squad executions of General Arnoldo Ochoa and eight high-ranking officers; and the notion that Castroism is somehow invulnerable has given way to precisely the opposite view. The question now being asked both within and without Cuba is not whether Castro will fall, but when he will fall. Finally, the opposition to Castro now has a visible head inside Cuba, the lawyer Gustavo Arcos Bergnes. A human rights activist who became a hero of the fight against the dictator Batista in the 1950s, Arcos remains one today for his brave battle against Castro's totalitarianism. No analysis of the situation in Cuba today can leave out the remarkable political developments that have recently occurred in Latin America. When the United States invaded Panama and overthrew General Manuel Noriega in December 1989, Castro lost a trading partner and ally who was most useful in three fundamental respects. Panama furnished the entrepôt through which Castro easily violated the U.S. embargo; the sanctuary from which he supplied the Colombian M-19 guerrillas; and the place where he conducted shady dealings aimed at smuggling illegal immigrants and narcotics into the United States. Politically, the Panama invasion could hardly have been worse for Castro. For more than a year, the Special Troops of the Cuban Interior Ministry had been training Noriega's "Dignity Battalions" to offer fierce resistance to the United States. The idea was to show the world the picture of a small but proud nation bravely defying a bullying empire. But things did not happen that way. Less than an hour after the invasion began, its crucial battles had gone in favor of the United States. This was a result, moreover, which the people of Panama heartily applauded: polls later confirmed that more than 90 percent of them endorsed the U.S. intervention. For Cuba, it was a military and political defeat of enormous proportions. It is also possible that the costs to Castro will mount as Noriega's trial for drug trafficking proceeds and the Cuban dictator's ties to this illicit commerce come to light. Two months later, Castroism suffered another severe blow with the defeat of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in the...