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98 total reports available to all members05-Aug-2011 - Peru: Is Sendero Luminoso rekindled?
The arrest of four Peruvians in El Alto, Bolivia this week may point to a renewed ideological foundation for the Shining Path.
Sendero Luminoso was once a Maoist ideological insurgency that, like its counterparts in Colombia, gradually turned to drug trafficking and other crime to fund its activities. In the 1990’s, several key military defeats by the Fujimori government including the arrest of top leader Abimael Guzman left the group decimated.
For several years in the early 2000’s, Sendero numbered less than 150 people. Most analysts considered them a drug trafficking group that was hiding under the old brand name of the Shining Path. Peru’s government dismissed them as “narco-terrorists.” Even Guzman, the group’s former leader, denounced the existence of what he considered to be a criminal group operating under a false name and fake ideology.
Surprisingly, Sendero’s ideology appears to have reappeared in the past few years. Recent seizures of drugs and weapons from Sendero stockpiles have turned up pamphlets with Communist and Maoist propaganda. Links with militant coca farmers groups in rural Peru appeared that they went beyond pragmatism and into some sort of ideological kinship. Now, the arrest of several alleged Sendero members in Bolivia may signal a resurgence of an ideological insurgency that Peru’s government thought was dead and with which Bolivia’s government must now be concerned.
In late June, Bolivian authorities arrested three Peruvians and a Bolivian who were wearing Bolivian counternarcotics police (FECLN) uniforms. That criminal cell, led by Ulser Pillpa Paitán, alias “Comrade Johnny”, was attempting to traffic over 40 kilos of cocaine across the Peru-Bolivia border near Lake Titicaca. Peruvian authorities said Pilpa was a member of Sendero Luminoso. During interrogation, Pilpa said he was working with the Minaya Romero brothers, two men who once ran arms and drug trafficking in Peru’s VRAE, a Sendero Luminoso stronghold (also see InSight Crime’s recent investigation on the VRAE). Pilpa indicated that the Minaya Romero brothers (William and Hugo) had begun operating out of El Alto, Bolivia. This began a month-long effort to coordinate intelligence between Peru and Bolivian authorities to see if they could wrap up others in the Sendero cells they believed were operating along the border.
During the first week of August 2011, Bolivia’s counter-narcotics police (FECLN) arrested the Minaya Romero brothers and two other Peruvians - Blanca Riveros Alarcón (alias “la camarada Rosa”) and José Antonio Cantoral Benavides - in El Alto, Bolivia, the sprawling poor suburb that surrounds the capital of La Paz. The four had been handing out pamphlets with ideological messages in front of the Public University of El Alto (UPEA). They were arrested with false documents including fake identification cards and the Bolivian government is also holding them on charges of “public instigation.”
The public instigation charges come as some of the pamphlets were encouraging protests against the Evo Morales government. They read: “Alerta, ¡no al gasolinazo!, fuera las transnacionales de Bolivia, socias de Evo, ¡Viva el marxismo, leninismo maoísmo!”. Other pamphlets encouraged college students to attend classes about Marxist political ideology and fighting class warfare: “Escuela de Formación Política Marxista”; “Los temas serán: lucha de contrarios, lucha de clases, semi feudalidad.”
On top of the charges they face in Peru, Bolivian authorities claim that the four arrested individuals were attempting to form a criminal cell that could rob houses and businesses in the area. They also attempted to link them to drug trafficking, but found no drugs during the arrest.
The arrests have not been without controversy. While three of the Peruvians have no status in Bolivia and should be easily deported or extradited after judicial proceedings, the fourth, José Cantoral, has a long history of both political involvement and criminal activity that is complicating this case.
Cantoral was accused (with some valid evidence it appears) of being a member of the Shining Path by the Fujimori government in the early 1990’s. However, in one of the many abuses of power of which the Fujimori government was guilty, Peruvian authorities arrested his brother, Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides, and unlawfully detained for four years (1993-1997). The case went to the Inter-American Human Rights Court and the Fujimori government was found guilty.
As a result of his brother’s unlawful arrest and perceived political persecution, in February 1993 José Cantoral was granted political refugee status in Bolivia, even though the Peruvian government continued to claim it had evidence he was tied to Sendero. Since that time, it appears Cantoral has built up quite an influential network in El Alto, while simultaneously maintaining covert ties to Sendero Luminoso and drug traffickers in Peru. According to local media, he worked for the Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos in the early 1990’s and was a representative for some international human rights networks from 1997-2000. For the past few years, Cantoral was serving as a professor of math and physics at the Isaac Newton Center of Learning near the University of El Alto. Authorities are now investigating the Isacc Newton Center to find out if it is a front for a political extremist group.
These long time political links by Cantoral have left him with many defenders in El Alto. Radical political groups in the Bolivian highlands, many of which have broken with the president in recent months over gasoline subsidies and other economic policies, claim these arrests are a form of political persecution. The Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos, now run by Yolanda Herrera, has said these arrests are a violation of the free speech rights of those handing out pamphlets. The Centro de Estudios Populares (CEP, website located at: http://estudioyrealidad.blogspot.com/), an organization that helped organize anti-Morales protests last December, has also denounced the arrests. It appears all four of the Peruvians were regular visitors to the CEP.
The National Council on Refugees (CONARE) will review the case of Cantoral to determine if his refugee status should be stripped so he can be deported to Peru.
If the facts in this case turn out to be accurate, Sendero Luminoso is using Marxist rhetoric to organize political unrest in Bolivia and potentially recruit new individuals to their cause in Peru. That’s a serious step back towards ideological insurgency and a problem for both the Humala and Morales governments. Even if they are only using the ideology to cover up for their drug trafficking, the links some Sendero operatives have built to radical political groups and human rights NGOs in both countries blur the lines of operation and complicate prosecution (criminal groups forming these links also endangers the NGOs and human rights activists who try to do good work in these countries).
President-elect Humala, who spent part of the early 1990’s fighting Sendero Luminoso, has vowed to fight criminals and drug traffickers and “solve this issue for good.” However, part of Humala’s political base comes from the Peru-Bolivia border region. If Sendero is returning to an ideological position, it may attempt to increase the already high political tensions in those regions and make governing particularly difficult for the new president.
For Morales, whose government has often claimed that destabilizing terrorist forces are behind its political opponents, there may be some short term benefits to being able to link certain political groups in El Alto with Peru’s insurgency. That said, the current opposition to Morales is real and not just a conspiracy by leftist or rightist “terrorists.” Most of those radical politicians have a real concern about Morales’s positions. Bolivia’s president could find himself chasing shadows and provoking political opposition instead of trying to compromise with the sectors of society that used to be strong political supporters.
Sendero’s ideology was never widely followed in Peru or elsewhere. It was at the fringe of fringe ideologies and could never come close to winning the hearts and minds of Peruvians, even those who may be open to Marxism or other policies that involve wealth redistribution. That said, it only takes a few hundred believers willing to commit violence for their disturbed ideology to create a danger for the governments in the region. If Sendero Luminoso is no longer just another violent criminal groups, but rather one with a renewed political cause and followers, it is an increasing threat to Peru and its neighbors.
05-Aug-2011 - Region: Ungoverned Spaces Part II, CitiesSendero Luminoso was once a Maoist ideological insurgency that, like its counterparts in Colombia, gradually turned to drug trafficking and other crime to fund its activities. In the 1990’s, several key military defeats by the Fujimori government including the arrest of top leader Abimael Guzman left the group decimated.
For several years in the early 2000’s, Sendero numbered less than 150 people. Most analysts considered them a drug trafficking group that was hiding under the old brand name of the Shining Path. Peru’s government dismissed them as “narco-terrorists.” Even Guzman, the group’s former leader, denounced the existence of what he considered to be a criminal group operating under a false name and fake ideology.
Surprisingly, Sendero’s ideology appears to have reappeared in the past few years. Recent seizures of drugs and weapons from Sendero stockpiles have turned up pamphlets with Communist and Maoist propaganda. Links with militant coca farmers groups in rural Peru appeared that they went beyond pragmatism and into some sort of ideological kinship. Now, the arrest of several alleged Sendero members in Bolivia may signal a resurgence of an ideological insurgency that Peru’s government thought was dead and with which Bolivia’s government must now be concerned.
In late June, Bolivian authorities arrested three Peruvians and a Bolivian who were wearing Bolivian counternarcotics police (FECLN) uniforms. That criminal cell, led by Ulser Pillpa Paitán, alias “Comrade Johnny”, was attempting to traffic over 40 kilos of cocaine across the Peru-Bolivia border near Lake Titicaca. Peruvian authorities said Pilpa was a member of Sendero Luminoso. During interrogation, Pilpa said he was working with the Minaya Romero brothers, two men who once ran arms and drug trafficking in Peru’s VRAE, a Sendero Luminoso stronghold (also see InSight Crime’s recent investigation on the VRAE). Pilpa indicated that the Minaya Romero brothers (William and Hugo) had begun operating out of El Alto, Bolivia. This began a month-long effort to coordinate intelligence between Peru and Bolivian authorities to see if they could wrap up others in the Sendero cells they believed were operating along the border.
During the first week of August 2011, Bolivia’s counter-narcotics police (FECLN) arrested the Minaya Romero brothers and two other Peruvians - Blanca Riveros Alarcón (alias “la camarada Rosa”) and José Antonio Cantoral Benavides - in El Alto, Bolivia, the sprawling poor suburb that surrounds the capital of La Paz. The four had been handing out pamphlets with ideological messages in front of the Public University of El Alto (UPEA). They were arrested with false documents including fake identification cards and the Bolivian government is also holding them on charges of “public instigation.”
The public instigation charges come as some of the pamphlets were encouraging protests against the Evo Morales government. They read: “Alerta, ¡no al gasolinazo!, fuera las transnacionales de Bolivia, socias de Evo, ¡Viva el marxismo, leninismo maoísmo!”. Other pamphlets encouraged college students to attend classes about Marxist political ideology and fighting class warfare: “Escuela de Formación Política Marxista”; “Los temas serán: lucha de contrarios, lucha de clases, semi feudalidad.”
On top of the charges they face in Peru, Bolivian authorities claim that the four arrested individuals were attempting to form a criminal cell that could rob houses and businesses in the area. They also attempted to link them to drug trafficking, but found no drugs during the arrest.
The arrests have not been without controversy. While three of the Peruvians have no status in Bolivia and should be easily deported or extradited after judicial proceedings, the fourth, José Cantoral, has a long history of both political involvement and criminal activity that is complicating this case.
Cantoral was accused (with some valid evidence it appears) of being a member of the Shining Path by the Fujimori government in the early 1990’s. However, in one of the many abuses of power of which the Fujimori government was guilty, Peruvian authorities arrested his brother, Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides, and unlawfully detained for four years (1993-1997). The case went to the Inter-American Human Rights Court and the Fujimori government was found guilty.
As a result of his brother’s unlawful arrest and perceived political persecution, in February 1993 José Cantoral was granted political refugee status in Bolivia, even though the Peruvian government continued to claim it had evidence he was tied to Sendero. Since that time, it appears Cantoral has built up quite an influential network in El Alto, while simultaneously maintaining covert ties to Sendero Luminoso and drug traffickers in Peru. According to local media, he worked for the Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos in the early 1990’s and was a representative for some international human rights networks from 1997-2000. For the past few years, Cantoral was serving as a professor of math and physics at the Isaac Newton Center of Learning near the University of El Alto. Authorities are now investigating the Isacc Newton Center to find out if it is a front for a political extremist group.
These long time political links by Cantoral have left him with many defenders in El Alto. Radical political groups in the Bolivian highlands, many of which have broken with the president in recent months over gasoline subsidies and other economic policies, claim these arrests are a form of political persecution. The Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos, now run by Yolanda Herrera, has said these arrests are a violation of the free speech rights of those handing out pamphlets. The Centro de Estudios Populares (CEP, website located at: http://estudioyrealidad.blogspot.com/), an organization that helped organize anti-Morales protests last December, has also denounced the arrests. It appears all four of the Peruvians were regular visitors to the CEP.
The National Council on Refugees (CONARE) will review the case of Cantoral to determine if his refugee status should be stripped so he can be deported to Peru.
If the facts in this case turn out to be accurate, Sendero Luminoso is using Marxist rhetoric to organize political unrest in Bolivia and potentially recruit new individuals to their cause in Peru. That’s a serious step back towards ideological insurgency and a problem for both the Humala and Morales governments. Even if they are only using the ideology to cover up for their drug trafficking, the links some Sendero operatives have built to radical political groups and human rights NGOs in both countries blur the lines of operation and complicate prosecution (criminal groups forming these links also endangers the NGOs and human rights activists who try to do good work in these countries).
President-elect Humala, who spent part of the early 1990’s fighting Sendero Luminoso, has vowed to fight criminals and drug traffickers and “solve this issue for good.” However, part of Humala’s political base comes from the Peru-Bolivia border region. If Sendero is returning to an ideological position, it may attempt to increase the already high political tensions in those regions and make governing particularly difficult for the new president.
For Morales, whose government has often claimed that destabilizing terrorist forces are behind its political opponents, there may be some short term benefits to being able to link certain political groups in El Alto with Peru’s insurgency. That said, the current opposition to Morales is real and not just a conspiracy by leftist or rightist “terrorists.” Most of those radical politicians have a real concern about Morales’s positions. Bolivia’s president could find himself chasing shadows and provoking political opposition instead of trying to compromise with the sectors of society that used to be strong political supporters.
Sendero’s ideology was never widely followed in Peru or elsewhere. It was at the fringe of fringe ideologies and could never come close to winning the hearts and minds of Peruvians, even those who may be open to Marxism or other policies that involve wealth redistribution. That said, it only takes a few hundred believers willing to commit violence for their disturbed ideology to create a danger for the governments in the region. If Sendero Luminoso is no longer just another violent criminal groups, but rather one with a renewed political cause and followers, it is an increasing threat to Peru and its neighbors.
A massacre at a bar leaving 20 dead would be news anywhere in Mexico. The fact that it happened in downtown Monterrey made it an instant crisis for the government. One of Mexico’s most important cities economically, sections of Monterrey have fallen outside of government control. As major criminal organizations fight over the city, the question of whether the government actually has control over the urban area is at stake.
Monterrey’s decline since March 2010 may be the most dramatic example of a trend in Latin America of ungoverned spaces in urban areas. Slums and other neighborhoods are an urban problem throughout the world, but the idea that governments lack control of areas with significant population densities has implications for security, politics and the social contract in general. Transnational criminal organizations have moved into a variety of these spaces, increasing their influence and finding new profit models.
To the north of Monterrey, Ciudad Juarez, Rynosa and Nuevo Laredo exemplify the fears of those in Monterrey. The border cities have had a near complete breakdown of governing in some aspects; in other aspects, they remain normal functioning cities flushed with border zone economies. Ciudad Juarez is perhaps the most infamous, with one of the highest murder rates in the world and Mexican troops patrolling the streets, but is perhaps not the worst of the group. Local government and police in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa are almost completely under the control of criminal organizations. The violence does is not the best sign of threat, largely because the government is not fighting back as hard.
Mexico will never be a “failed state” in the sense of other ungoverned countries of the world, but it increasingly faces the question of failed cities.
Mexico’s urban problem is in some ways more resolvable than the situation presented by major cities of Central America. Every capital in Central America has barrios with skyrocketing levels of crime. Local drug trafficking and drug consumption, driven by the tendency for transnational criminal organizations to pay street gangs with cocaine, not cash, adds to the finances of the gangs and social order breakdown.
Each of the capitals in Central America’s Northern Triangle - San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City - has neighborhoods that are almost completely controlled by youth gangs, organized crime or a combination of the two. Additionally, in Honduras, the city of San Pedro Sula and the port of La Ceiba have significant urban slums that are outside of government control and fit a similar pattern. In Guatemala, the city of Cobán is an exemplary case of how citizen and state operate in a city under criminal control. Many would argue that the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana is only just a few years behind becoming the next San Pedro Sula or Cobán.
One feature these cities and their neighborhoods share in common is an increase in illegal drug consumption and sales. The Central American corridor is no longer just a transit point for illegal drugs moving from South America to the US. There is an increase in the use of marijuana, cocaine and meth, as well as certain legal drugs and the use of paint and other chemicals to fight hunger, pass the time, or just escape a bleak reality. Criminal organizations control the distribution of many of these drugs. In some cases, the local gangs in urban areas are making higher profits from local drug distribution than the major trafficking of cocaine to the north.
Drug consumption, a social health problem exacerbated by the nature of paying criminal contractors with cocaine, is the underlying reason why Brazil was for many years second only to the United States for cocaine use. It’s the same reason why Mexico has today surpassed Brazil as the world’s number two.
While Central Ameria’s Northern Triangle receives more attention, it’s worth considering that Managua, San Jose and Panama City all have their own rougher sections of town where most people won’t enter and where local police have told Southern Pulse investigators that they are not in complete control. The murder and crime rates may not be as high in these neighborhoods as in their counterparts to the north, but the lack of security and government control has citizens in all three capitals nervous, and the fall from a once secure environment to the present condition has been more dramatic than any observers expected, especially in Costa Rica.
Not too long ago, any discussion of ungoverned spaces in the cities of the Americas would have started with Medellin. The city was notorious for its drug cartel, paramilitaries and local street gangs who controlled many neighborhoods. The criminal groups controlled nearly every aspect of life in the city.
In the mid-00’s, the city went through a revival. Violence decreased dramatically, police established stations in neighborhoods where they had never had a presence, and foreign investment entered the city. What happened is the subject for intense debate and isn’t just for historical significance. The government’s story is that Medellin finally got its act together, took on the violent groups, pushed them out, and brought in governance. Many critics, however, say the government struck an unwritten deal with a local paramilitary commander, giving his organization control in exchange for peace.
Today, Medellin’s security is again starting to devolve. What was once hailed as a major success in restoring government control to an urban ungoverned space may show that short term victories don’t necessarily equal long term success. Medellin is still far better than it was in the 1980’s and 90’s, but various criminal groups are fighting for control. From 2008 to 2009, the city’s murder rate nearly doubled.
Perhaps one of the least governed capitals in the Americas is ironically in a country where the leader portrays himself as a modern-day caudillo rolling over government institutions and leading a revolution. While critics complain that the government is overreaching, the fact is that the police and military cannot even enter several barrios just a few miles from the presidential palace.
Caracas under Hugo Chavez has become one of the most violent cities on earth, with murder rates rivaling Ciudad Juarez or San Pedro Sula for the top spot on that notorious list. Kidnapping is endemic and muggings are so common in a number of neighborhoods that every family surveyed knows someone who has been a victim. At one point in 2010, the government instituted rolling blackouts in Caracas to manage their electricity problems, and the thieves instituted an organized rolling wave of robberies to use the lack of lighting and alarms to steal. It was one of the reasons the government relented so quickly to not rationing electricity in the capital.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact the Caracas police force is an institution of corruption. Current and retired police officials have been linked to a significant number of homicides, kidnappings and other crimes, and the numbers of people executed while “resisting arrest” has increased over the past decade.
To the south, Brazil doesn’t just face ungoverned territory in the vast tracks of the Amazon and the “wild west” of the tri-border region. Several dozen favelas sit inside the city limits of Rio and Sao Paulo, which are the two cities that received the most attention, while festering pools of insecurity grow in Salvador, Recife, and other northern cities.
Local militia leaders, who have spread their control across several favelas in Rio de Janeiro, control many of the utility services in the favelas. Connections to electricity, water or cable came with a “protection tax.” Even sewage systems in some neighborhoods were unofficially “privatized” by the local warlord entrepreneur who filled in where the government services lacked. Extortion has never been more thorough.
In the run up to Brazil’s World Cup and Olympics, the country’s military and police have been retaking cities, favela by favela, most focused on Rio de Janeiro. The operations, which have been successful in some key urban centers but may have brought unintended consequences in others, have opened a window into just how ungoverned these favelas were.
Brazil’s security forces are now trying to create the model of retaking lost urban areas, bringing a “whole government” approach focused on building out all services as soon as possible after police have cleared a neighborhood of gang leaders.
In all of the cases above, the problem isn’t simply government neglect or incapacity. There is an intelligent and adaptive opponent in transnational crime actively working to undermine government initiatives. These organizations are working to hollow out the state presence in urban areas. Criminal organizations have implemented a type of counter-counter-insurgency, in which their own “clear, hold and build” strategy works to clear out government presence, hold ground and then build up their own resilient parallel parallel institutions.
This doesn’t indicate that the effort to provide governance is hopeless. Indeed, while Colombia and Brazil have seen setbacks, their success is measurable and has improved the lives of people living in the areas where governance has been restored. When the Brazilian military retook one favela, people clapped and cheered the military and police and have been vital in providing intelligence to take down additional gang leaders.
Citizens want governance, and while they will take gang and criminal leadership over anarchy, most people recognize it is not an ideal solution and a worse alternative to an effective municipal and nation-state government presence. Unfortunately, many municipal, state, and federal governments in Latin America have a hard time discerning between what’s effective and what’s simply “good enough” - a status quo easily attacked and defeated by criminal groups.
22-Jul-2011 - Bolivia: Bolivia's "chutos" errorMonterrey’s decline since March 2010 may be the most dramatic example of a trend in Latin America of ungoverned spaces in urban areas. Slums and other neighborhoods are an urban problem throughout the world, but the idea that governments lack control of areas with significant population densities has implications for security, politics and the social contract in general. Transnational criminal organizations have moved into a variety of these spaces, increasing their influence and finding new profit models.
To the north of Monterrey, Ciudad Juarez, Rynosa and Nuevo Laredo exemplify the fears of those in Monterrey. The border cities have had a near complete breakdown of governing in some aspects; in other aspects, they remain normal functioning cities flushed with border zone economies. Ciudad Juarez is perhaps the most infamous, with one of the highest murder rates in the world and Mexican troops patrolling the streets, but is perhaps not the worst of the group. Local government and police in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa are almost completely under the control of criminal organizations. The violence does is not the best sign of threat, largely because the government is not fighting back as hard.
Mexico will never be a “failed state” in the sense of other ungoverned countries of the world, but it increasingly faces the question of failed cities.
Mexico’s urban problem is in some ways more resolvable than the situation presented by major cities of Central America. Every capital in Central America has barrios with skyrocketing levels of crime. Local drug trafficking and drug consumption, driven by the tendency for transnational criminal organizations to pay street gangs with cocaine, not cash, adds to the finances of the gangs and social order breakdown.
Each of the capitals in Central America’s Northern Triangle - San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City - has neighborhoods that are almost completely controlled by youth gangs, organized crime or a combination of the two. Additionally, in Honduras, the city of San Pedro Sula and the port of La Ceiba have significant urban slums that are outside of government control and fit a similar pattern. In Guatemala, the city of Cobán is an exemplary case of how citizen and state operate in a city under criminal control. Many would argue that the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana is only just a few years behind becoming the next San Pedro Sula or Cobán.
One feature these cities and their neighborhoods share in common is an increase in illegal drug consumption and sales. The Central American corridor is no longer just a transit point for illegal drugs moving from South America to the US. There is an increase in the use of marijuana, cocaine and meth, as well as certain legal drugs and the use of paint and other chemicals to fight hunger, pass the time, or just escape a bleak reality. Criminal organizations control the distribution of many of these drugs. In some cases, the local gangs in urban areas are making higher profits from local drug distribution than the major trafficking of cocaine to the north.
Drug consumption, a social health problem exacerbated by the nature of paying criminal contractors with cocaine, is the underlying reason why Brazil was for many years second only to the United States for cocaine use. It’s the same reason why Mexico has today surpassed Brazil as the world’s number two.
While Central Ameria’s Northern Triangle receives more attention, it’s worth considering that Managua, San Jose and Panama City all have their own rougher sections of town where most people won’t enter and where local police have told Southern Pulse investigators that they are not in complete control. The murder and crime rates may not be as high in these neighborhoods as in their counterparts to the north, but the lack of security and government control has citizens in all three capitals nervous, and the fall from a once secure environment to the present condition has been more dramatic than any observers expected, especially in Costa Rica.
Not too long ago, any discussion of ungoverned spaces in the cities of the Americas would have started with Medellin. The city was notorious for its drug cartel, paramilitaries and local street gangs who controlled many neighborhoods. The criminal groups controlled nearly every aspect of life in the city.
In the mid-00’s, the city went through a revival. Violence decreased dramatically, police established stations in neighborhoods where they had never had a presence, and foreign investment entered the city. What happened is the subject for intense debate and isn’t just for historical significance. The government’s story is that Medellin finally got its act together, took on the violent groups, pushed them out, and brought in governance. Many critics, however, say the government struck an unwritten deal with a local paramilitary commander, giving his organization control in exchange for peace.
Today, Medellin’s security is again starting to devolve. What was once hailed as a major success in restoring government control to an urban ungoverned space may show that short term victories don’t necessarily equal long term success. Medellin is still far better than it was in the 1980’s and 90’s, but various criminal groups are fighting for control. From 2008 to 2009, the city’s murder rate nearly doubled.
Perhaps one of the least governed capitals in the Americas is ironically in a country where the leader portrays himself as a modern-day caudillo rolling over government institutions and leading a revolution. While critics complain that the government is overreaching, the fact is that the police and military cannot even enter several barrios just a few miles from the presidential palace.
Caracas under Hugo Chavez has become one of the most violent cities on earth, with murder rates rivaling Ciudad Juarez or San Pedro Sula for the top spot on that notorious list. Kidnapping is endemic and muggings are so common in a number of neighborhoods that every family surveyed knows someone who has been a victim. At one point in 2010, the government instituted rolling blackouts in Caracas to manage their electricity problems, and the thieves instituted an organized rolling wave of robberies to use the lack of lighting and alarms to steal. It was one of the reasons the government relented so quickly to not rationing electricity in the capital.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact the Caracas police force is an institution of corruption. Current and retired police officials have been linked to a significant number of homicides, kidnappings and other crimes, and the numbers of people executed while “resisting arrest” has increased over the past decade.
To the south, Brazil doesn’t just face ungoverned territory in the vast tracks of the Amazon and the “wild west” of the tri-border region. Several dozen favelas sit inside the city limits of Rio and Sao Paulo, which are the two cities that received the most attention, while festering pools of insecurity grow in Salvador, Recife, and other northern cities.
Local militia leaders, who have spread their control across several favelas in Rio de Janeiro, control many of the utility services in the favelas. Connections to electricity, water or cable came with a “protection tax.” Even sewage systems in some neighborhoods were unofficially “privatized” by the local warlord entrepreneur who filled in where the government services lacked. Extortion has never been more thorough.
In the run up to Brazil’s World Cup and Olympics, the country’s military and police have been retaking cities, favela by favela, most focused on Rio de Janeiro. The operations, which have been successful in some key urban centers but may have brought unintended consequences in others, have opened a window into just how ungoverned these favelas were.
Brazil’s security forces are now trying to create the model of retaking lost urban areas, bringing a “whole government” approach focused on building out all services as soon as possible after police have cleared a neighborhood of gang leaders.
In all of the cases above, the problem isn’t simply government neglect or incapacity. There is an intelligent and adaptive opponent in transnational crime actively working to undermine government initiatives. These organizations are working to hollow out the state presence in urban areas. Criminal organizations have implemented a type of counter-counter-insurgency, in which their own “clear, hold and build” strategy works to clear out government presence, hold ground and then build up their own resilient parallel parallel institutions.
This doesn’t indicate that the effort to provide governance is hopeless. Indeed, while Colombia and Brazil have seen setbacks, their success is measurable and has improved the lives of people living in the areas where governance has been restored. When the Brazilian military retook one favela, people clapped and cheered the military and police and have been vital in providing intelligence to take down additional gang leaders.
Citizens want governance, and while they will take gang and criminal leadership over anarchy, most people recognize it is not an ideal solution and a worse alternative to an effective municipal and nation-state government presence. Unfortunately, many municipal, state, and federal governments in Latin America have a hard time discerning between what’s effective and what’s simply “good enough” - a status quo easily attacked and defeated by criminal groups.
Legalization and amnesty have led to illicit trafficking and organized crime in Bolivia. We’re not talking about drugs or weapons or people. This is about cars. The government’s decision to grant amnesty to the owners of unregistered vehicles has had a fascinating effect on crime across the region, showing how one country’s regulations can create sudden large movements in the black market of others.
President Morales pushed a law through the legislature that would allow the owners of unregistered vehicles, known as chutos, to pay a fine and have them documented. The issue of chutos on Bolivia’s roads is significant and leads to related problems such as the inability to track cars used in crimes.
Bolivian officials expected about 10,000 cars to be legalized during this amnesty period, while Bolivia’s transportation unions said there were at least 100,000 unregistered cars on the road that would be registered. It turns out even the unions underestimated the problem, with people filing paperwork to register over 130,000 vehicles in June and July 2011. While the registration period is now over, the Bolivian government is still working its way through the sea of paperwork, inspections and fees that they did not expect.
Prior to the law’s passage, the domestic opposition to the amnesty law came primarily from those who believed that those owning an unregistered car had committed a crime. Some analysts inside Bolivia believed that cars were being used in exchange for cocaine, a method of laundering money. However, this appears to be a limited issue. Most of the owners of chutos were not criminals and had purchased them because they couldn’t afford a new car. Other domestic opposition came from taxi drivers, who thought that the increase in registered vehicles would harm their business and increase traffic.
Significant opposition to the amnesty also came from Bolivia’s neighbors, who believed that some of the chutos on Bolivia’s roads were vehicles stolen from their territory and trafficked to the Bolivian market. They were also concerned that stolen new cars would be trafficked to Bolivia in order to legalize them. In this case, Bolivia’s neighbors turned out to be correct.
On one street in Iquique, Chile, vendors lined up to sell unregistered or pre-2007 cars (Bolivia does not allow the importation of older cars). Bolivians purchased used cars by the dozen, some of them stolen, and planned to bring them back into the country. The vendors also sold advice as to how to “chutearlo” or how to get the cars past Chilean and Bolivian authorities on the border and into Bolivia to be registered under the amnesty.
Chile has complained to the Bolivian authorities about cars being stolen in the North, with vehicle theft up over 30% in some regions. Additionally, car sales in Chile and some parts of Argentina have vastly increased, distorting the domestic markets. Authorities believe that certain criminal organizations see an opportunity to launder cash and make a profit during Bolivia’s amnesty period.
Brazil has placed the issue of stolen vehicles on par with drug trafficking. Brazil’s embassy recently handed over a list of stolen vehicles to the Bolivian authorities and are demanding the vehicles are found and seized from their newly registered owners. It’s likely that Argentina and Paraguay will soon do the same.
According to Bolivian officials and media outlets who have cross-referenced the lists of stolen vehicles with the list registered in Bolivia under the amnesty, at least 4,000 stolen Brazilian cars are on that list, along with 800 from Chile, 130 from Peru, and 90 so far from Argentina, where as of 22 July 2011, authorities are still not finished going through the data.
In response, the Bolivian government recently ordered 2,000 soldiers to various borders with the goal of preventing the entrance of any more illicit cars. The Chilean government has also deployed forces to guard the over 80 crossing points that they believe cars are passing through. The most embarrassing moment for Bolivia - so far - occurred when Chilean authorities arrested 14 Bolivian soldiers, who were patrolling the border to prevent illegal cars from entering. It turned out those Bolivian soldiers were driving unregistered vehicles, which Chile did not return to Bolivia.
The government now realizes that they are not just registering cars for poor families who couldn’t afford a legal market car. They have created an artificial demand for black market vehicles, causing cars to be trafficked to Bolivia the way guns enter Mexico or drugs enter the United States.
One additional unexpected consequence of the chutos law turned up last week in La Paz. Due to a completely separate issue, protesters in El Alto used roadblocks to shut down the highway to La Paz. This event cut off fuel supplies into the capital for two days. Gas stations in La Paz ran out of fuel more quickly during this protest compared to previous protests. They believe, in part, this was due to the number of newly registered cars on the road. One energy expert estimated that the country must use an additional 8,000 barrels of fuel per day to run the newly registered cars.
One person inside Bolivia’s custom’s agency called the recent events a “legislative disaster” and said the government should think through its policies more carefully next time. Even the vice president admitted the government made errors in underestimating the challenges this law would bring.
And according to neighboring governments, the cars keep coming. Though the amnesty period is over, illegal chutos continue to be trafficked across Bolivia’s borders, particularly from Brazil and Chile. Brazil has announced they will be implementing a new electronic tracking system that uses cameras to read license plates and cross reference with a list of stolen vehicles. Chile continues to crack down on its border security to prevent more cars from leaving. The amnesty period may be over, but the illegal car problems for Bolivia appear to have multiplied.
22-Jul-2011 - Brazil: Brazil corruption hitting DilmaPresident Morales pushed a law through the legislature that would allow the owners of unregistered vehicles, known as chutos, to pay a fine and have them documented. The issue of chutos on Bolivia’s roads is significant and leads to related problems such as the inability to track cars used in crimes.
Bolivian officials expected about 10,000 cars to be legalized during this amnesty period, while Bolivia’s transportation unions said there were at least 100,000 unregistered cars on the road that would be registered. It turns out even the unions underestimated the problem, with people filing paperwork to register over 130,000 vehicles in June and July 2011. While the registration period is now over, the Bolivian government is still working its way through the sea of paperwork, inspections and fees that they did not expect.
Prior to the law’s passage, the domestic opposition to the amnesty law came primarily from those who believed that those owning an unregistered car had committed a crime. Some analysts inside Bolivia believed that cars were being used in exchange for cocaine, a method of laundering money. However, this appears to be a limited issue. Most of the owners of chutos were not criminals and had purchased them because they couldn’t afford a new car. Other domestic opposition came from taxi drivers, who thought that the increase in registered vehicles would harm their business and increase traffic.
Significant opposition to the amnesty also came from Bolivia’s neighbors, who believed that some of the chutos on Bolivia’s roads were vehicles stolen from their territory and trafficked to the Bolivian market. They were also concerned that stolen new cars would be trafficked to Bolivia in order to legalize them. In this case, Bolivia’s neighbors turned out to be correct.
On one street in Iquique, Chile, vendors lined up to sell unregistered or pre-2007 cars (Bolivia does not allow the importation of older cars). Bolivians purchased used cars by the dozen, some of them stolen, and planned to bring them back into the country. The vendors also sold advice as to how to “chutearlo” or how to get the cars past Chilean and Bolivian authorities on the border and into Bolivia to be registered under the amnesty.
Chile has complained to the Bolivian authorities about cars being stolen in the North, with vehicle theft up over 30% in some regions. Additionally, car sales in Chile and some parts of Argentina have vastly increased, distorting the domestic markets. Authorities believe that certain criminal organizations see an opportunity to launder cash and make a profit during Bolivia’s amnesty period.
Brazil has placed the issue of stolen vehicles on par with drug trafficking. Brazil’s embassy recently handed over a list of stolen vehicles to the Bolivian authorities and are demanding the vehicles are found and seized from their newly registered owners. It’s likely that Argentina and Paraguay will soon do the same.
According to Bolivian officials and media outlets who have cross-referenced the lists of stolen vehicles with the list registered in Bolivia under the amnesty, at least 4,000 stolen Brazilian cars are on that list, along with 800 from Chile, 130 from Peru, and 90 so far from Argentina, where as of 22 July 2011, authorities are still not finished going through the data.
In response, the Bolivian government recently ordered 2,000 soldiers to various borders with the goal of preventing the entrance of any more illicit cars. The Chilean government has also deployed forces to guard the over 80 crossing points that they believe cars are passing through. The most embarrassing moment for Bolivia - so far - occurred when Chilean authorities arrested 14 Bolivian soldiers, who were patrolling the border to prevent illegal cars from entering. It turned out those Bolivian soldiers were driving unregistered vehicles, which Chile did not return to Bolivia.
The government now realizes that they are not just registering cars for poor families who couldn’t afford a legal market car. They have created an artificial demand for black market vehicles, causing cars to be trafficked to Bolivia the way guns enter Mexico or drugs enter the United States.
One additional unexpected consequence of the chutos law turned up last week in La Paz. Due to a completely separate issue, protesters in El Alto used roadblocks to shut down the highway to La Paz. This event cut off fuel supplies into the capital for two days. Gas stations in La Paz ran out of fuel more quickly during this protest compared to previous protests. They believe, in part, this was due to the number of newly registered cars on the road. One energy expert estimated that the country must use an additional 8,000 barrels of fuel per day to run the newly registered cars.
One person inside Bolivia’s custom’s agency called the recent events a “legislative disaster” and said the government should think through its policies more carefully next time. Even the vice president admitted the government made errors in underestimating the challenges this law would bring.
And according to neighboring governments, the cars keep coming. Though the amnesty period is over, illegal chutos continue to be trafficked across Bolivia’s borders, particularly from Brazil and Chile. Brazil has announced they will be implementing a new electronic tracking system that uses cameras to read license plates and cross reference with a list of stolen vehicles. Chile continues to crack down on its border security to prevent more cars from leaving. The amnesty period may be over, but the illegal car problems for Bolivia appear to have multiplied.
When Minister of Defense Jobim said he was surrounded by “idiots,” many in the media, who were in the room, believed his comments were directed at some of the other high level political appointees in the Rousseff administration.
Certainly, some ministries within the Rousseff administration are not off to a good start. The resignation of Transportation Minister Alfredo Nascimento and the firing of several lower level officials after a scandal involving bribery and skimming off contracts did not look good for the president. As of 22 July 2011, 14 officials in the ministry have been fired due to the scandal and several others appeared likely to be forced out. As the country works on bids for new infrastructure, including a stalled bid for high speed rail between Rio and Sao Paulo, this sort of scandal is exactly what many analysts feared.
The transportation scandal comes a month after her chief of staff, Antonio Palocci, was forced to resign over a separate set of corruption charges. While charges against Palocci do not implicate Rousseff in any way, the loss of her key negotiator with the Congressional coalition has created a major political headache for her government and is holding up legislation and appropriations.
Corruption at the municipal and state levels continue to be a regular story in the media. Scandals from the previous Lula government have also hit the headlines, with the Supreme Court ruling last week that da Silva’s chief of staff Jose Dirceu was charged in a cash for votes scheme along with 36 other people.
There are some analysts who counter-intuitively suggest that the resignations are good for Rousseff. That interpretation implies that Nascimento and Palocci were old Lula holdovers and their removal is reducing the former president’s influence in the new administration. It also comes from the idea that the forced resignations will show the Brazilian public Rousseff’s intolerance for corruption.
However, to treat this corruption as simply a holdover from the Lula government or to think that the public will believe that these revealed cases are the only examples of corruption is incorrect. Additionally, it appears the information about the corruption was leaked to the media as part of infighting within Rousseff’s own government, as various factions of Lula holdovers and technocrats battle for power and influence.
Unfortunately for Rousseff, the corruption is just beginning. No matter how noble the president’s intentions and no matter how transparent she attempts to make the process, the building contracts related to the World Cup and the Olympics are likely to create corruption scandal after scandal over the coming years. With Brazil already behind on its infrastructure projects, they are going to need to rush to get things built and there will be misappropriations and missing funds in the process.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Rousseff is going to face the public’s disapproval over corruption. The Brazilian public has shown itself to be surprisingly tolerant of corrupt officials, as long as they are fired when they are caught. President da Silva managed to stay above the fray for his entire term.
However, in order to mirror Lula’s teflon trick, Rousseff is going to need to deliver results. The economy will need to keep booming, infrastructure projects will need to be completed and Brazil needs to avoid a credit bubble “pop.” Brazilians will overlook corruption given a good economy and working government. However, if sections of the Brazilian economy begin to show weakness, corruption could becomes a political liability that sinks her administration’s political capital.
08-Jul-2011 - Region: Ungoverned Spaces in the Americas, Part ICertainly, some ministries within the Rousseff administration are not off to a good start. The resignation of Transportation Minister Alfredo Nascimento and the firing of several lower level officials after a scandal involving bribery and skimming off contracts did not look good for the president. As of 22 July 2011, 14 officials in the ministry have been fired due to the scandal and several others appeared likely to be forced out. As the country works on bids for new infrastructure, including a stalled bid for high speed rail between Rio and Sao Paulo, this sort of scandal is exactly what many analysts feared.
The transportation scandal comes a month after her chief of staff, Antonio Palocci, was forced to resign over a separate set of corruption charges. While charges against Palocci do not implicate Rousseff in any way, the loss of her key negotiator with the Congressional coalition has created a major political headache for her government and is holding up legislation and appropriations.
Corruption at the municipal and state levels continue to be a regular story in the media. Scandals from the previous Lula government have also hit the headlines, with the Supreme Court ruling last week that da Silva’s chief of staff Jose Dirceu was charged in a cash for votes scheme along with 36 other people.
There are some analysts who counter-intuitively suggest that the resignations are good for Rousseff. That interpretation implies that Nascimento and Palocci were old Lula holdovers and their removal is reducing the former president’s influence in the new administration. It also comes from the idea that the forced resignations will show the Brazilian public Rousseff’s intolerance for corruption.
However, to treat this corruption as simply a holdover from the Lula government or to think that the public will believe that these revealed cases are the only examples of corruption is incorrect. Additionally, it appears the information about the corruption was leaked to the media as part of infighting within Rousseff’s own government, as various factions of Lula holdovers and technocrats battle for power and influence.
Unfortunately for Rousseff, the corruption is just beginning. No matter how noble the president’s intentions and no matter how transparent she attempts to make the process, the building contracts related to the World Cup and the Olympics are likely to create corruption scandal after scandal over the coming years. With Brazil already behind on its infrastructure projects, they are going to need to rush to get things built and there will be misappropriations and missing funds in the process.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Rousseff is going to face the public’s disapproval over corruption. The Brazilian public has shown itself to be surprisingly tolerant of corrupt officials, as long as they are fired when they are caught. President da Silva managed to stay above the fray for his entire term.
However, in order to mirror Lula’s teflon trick, Rousseff is going to need to deliver results. The economy will need to keep booming, infrastructure projects will need to be completed and Brazil needs to avoid a credit bubble “pop.” Brazilians will overlook corruption given a good economy and working government. However, if sections of the Brazilian economy begin to show weakness, corruption could becomes a political liability that sinks her administration’s political capital.
Despite years of effort to extend sovereignty to borders, ungoverned spaces in Latin America continue to grow in size and, for transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), importance. These spaces, also referred to as "geopolitical black holes" or "stateless zones," exist in cities and across vast stretches of territory. TCOs thrive in these spaces, and once entrenched are very hard to remove. In this first part of a series on ungoverned spaces in Latin America, we will review specific ungoverned spaces in Mexico, Central and South America. In future reports, we will explore these spaces in cities across the Americas, specific zones where we expect new ungoverned spaces to open, and, finally, how the existence of these spaces facilitate black markets and terrorist organizations.
There is no doubt among even the closest observers that rival TCOs will drive violence well beyond the July 2012 presidential elections in Mexico. Meanwhile, local politics in the towns and villages along the US-Mexico border in Tamaulipas, known as the "frontera chica," are in many ways much more complex than federal elections. Trafficking corridors and the land that surrounds them in northeastern Mexico are some of the country’s most high profile ungoverned zones. The Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range is a rough patch of canyons, peaks, and ridges between the states of Sinaloa and Durango states, and is another well known, historical black hole. The third most salient piece of Mexico where the state has little presence is in the southeastern corner of Chiapas, and may be considered the tip of an iceberg that extends across most of the country of Guatemala.
Guatemala's Peten department, stretching from west to east is geographically the farthest possible point from the geopolitical center of the country in Guatemala City. Distance is not necessarily a deciding factor, however. Neighboring departments, Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz remain tightly in the control of Mexican TCOs, while the Caribbean department of Izabal, and another border department, Huehuetenango, all present challenges for the country's leadership.
El Salvador's Santa Ana and Calatenango departments represent a robust trafficking corridor from Honduras to Guatemala, and likely present the highest concentration of this country's ungoverned spaces. Local trafficking groups including Los Perrones and the Cartel de Texis have infiltrated the local politics and police in this region. They actively undermine any attempt by the national civilian government to attempt to improve the governance.
Honduras, much like neighboring Guatemala and Nicaragua presents vast lands with little to no government presence, with the Gracias a Dios department at the top of the list. Civilian authorities with the police, attorney general and development agencies in Honduras often require the assistance of the Navy to travel to this region and must utilize military equipment and bases to operate. Beyond Gracias a Dios, central provinces including Olancho have more developed infrastructure but still enough of a limited government presence that they have become important operating locations for TCOs.
The northern and southern autonomous regions of Nicaragua on the Atlantic coast are far removed from the population and governing centers of Managua and the Pacific Coast. The populations of these regions have never been close to the central government. They have a particular split with the current government as they were abused by the Ortega government in the 1980’s. This has been a growth region for drug money as small time traffickers have been able to buy influence from the population that has been long neglected.
The oldest and perhaps least governed space in all the Americas continues to be the Darien Gap, located between Panama and Colombia. South America's long-time focal point of organized criminal activity, Colombia, may have at one time looked much like Guatemala does today; eight years of an offensive against the FARC and other TCOs has recaptured much of the country's land, though with limits. A horse-shoe shaped band of territory, beginning near the border with Panama, and extending south along the pacific coast, the borders with Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, and turning north to follow the border with Venezuela presents more ungoverned territory than not. As mentioned in a previous report by Southern Pulse, plans by the Chinese government to build transportation infrastructure in this region will face critical challenges as the Darien Gap and Northwest Colombia have minimal government presence to protect any infrastructure that would be needed.
Ungoverned territory in South America largely follows border zones between most countries. The Amazon departments of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil have, arguably, never enjoyed the state presence afforded for coastal zones. The tri-border areas formed where Brazil meets with Bolivia and Peru, Colombia and Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and Venezuela and Guyana all present chronic areas of concern for the governments of all these countries. In many ways, they represent the future of smuggling corridors and other black market activity, even as the well-known Tri-Border Area (TBA) between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, with Ciudad del Este at the center, continues to throb with criminal activity.
This TBA is both ungoverned and heavily watched for being ungoverned. The region is known for being a “wild-west” style location with illicit trafficking, money laundering and a whole range of bad actors including the FARC, Hezbollah, and a speckling of Chinese, Russian, and African criminal organizations. However, in recent years, the three governments, particularly Brazil, have increased intelligence, surveillance and policing in the region. A significant amount of illegal activity still occurs along the triple border, and while it is no longer “ungoverned,” rotating policies used to bring governance to this area underscore the difficulty with cross-border cooperation required to extend sovereignty into the region’s geopolitical black holes.
Brazil, apart from Colombia, has perhaps spent the most time, political capital, and state funds to extend a presence across the vastness of its ungoverned territories. Federal Police programs such as Co-Bra, Pe-Bra, Ve-Bra, and others have all cycled through various states of funding and readiness. Agreements between Colombia and Brazil, granting the right of hot pursuit for a limited amount of air space into sovereign territory remain progressive. Brazil’s geographical position, with borders that touch ten countries, three of them cocaine source countries, drives a political mandate to extend sovereignty, though the task remains massive.
Extending north, from the Brazilian state of Roraima, the country meets Venezuela and Guyana. Venezuela’s presence across most of the state may be counted as more robust than many of its counterparts, but its inability to provide security in spite of government presence has been a key point of failure for the Chavez government. The country presents an interesting twist on the definition of governance, however, as many observers consider the whole state to have been “captured” by criminal interests.
Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana all present unique problems. French Guiana remains, for all practical purposes, a department of France. Guyana maintains a close relationship with its former colonial power, the UK, but is financially and politically unable to control over 80% of its territory. Suriname is in the same situation, though likely more dire. The current president, Desi Bouterse, was once a military dictator heavily involved in the Suri-Cartel, which trafficked cocaine from Colombia to Holland in the mid-90s. He was convicted in absentia in Holland for drug trafficking in 1999.
At a glance, the entire region presents more ungoverned territories than one may expect. Collectively, governments across the region remain ineffective for extending presence, influence, and - most importantly - state services to a significant portion of the Americas. However, while the above mentioned spaces focus on large swaths of rural territory that has never had much official presence, a number of urban slums with high population densities can also be considered ungoverned or under the control of non-state actors. In the next installment, we will dig deeper into some of the chronic spots of insecurity inside several urban areas across the Americas.
08-Jul-2011 - Guatemala: Otto Perez: Guatemala's Calderon?There is no doubt among even the closest observers that rival TCOs will drive violence well beyond the July 2012 presidential elections in Mexico. Meanwhile, local politics in the towns and villages along the US-Mexico border in Tamaulipas, known as the "frontera chica," are in many ways much more complex than federal elections. Trafficking corridors and the land that surrounds them in northeastern Mexico are some of the country’s most high profile ungoverned zones. The Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range is a rough patch of canyons, peaks, and ridges between the states of Sinaloa and Durango states, and is another well known, historical black hole. The third most salient piece of Mexico where the state has little presence is in the southeastern corner of Chiapas, and may be considered the tip of an iceberg that extends across most of the country of Guatemala.
Guatemala's Peten department, stretching from west to east is geographically the farthest possible point from the geopolitical center of the country in Guatemala City. Distance is not necessarily a deciding factor, however. Neighboring departments, Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz remain tightly in the control of Mexican TCOs, while the Caribbean department of Izabal, and another border department, Huehuetenango, all present challenges for the country's leadership.
El Salvador's Santa Ana and Calatenango departments represent a robust trafficking corridor from Honduras to Guatemala, and likely present the highest concentration of this country's ungoverned spaces. Local trafficking groups including Los Perrones and the Cartel de Texis have infiltrated the local politics and police in this region. They actively undermine any attempt by the national civilian government to attempt to improve the governance.
Honduras, much like neighboring Guatemala and Nicaragua presents vast lands with little to no government presence, with the Gracias a Dios department at the top of the list. Civilian authorities with the police, attorney general and development agencies in Honduras often require the assistance of the Navy to travel to this region and must utilize military equipment and bases to operate. Beyond Gracias a Dios, central provinces including Olancho have more developed infrastructure but still enough of a limited government presence that they have become important operating locations for TCOs.
The northern and southern autonomous regions of Nicaragua on the Atlantic coast are far removed from the population and governing centers of Managua and the Pacific Coast. The populations of these regions have never been close to the central government. They have a particular split with the current government as they were abused by the Ortega government in the 1980’s. This has been a growth region for drug money as small time traffickers have been able to buy influence from the population that has been long neglected.
The oldest and perhaps least governed space in all the Americas continues to be the Darien Gap, located between Panama and Colombia. South America's long-time focal point of organized criminal activity, Colombia, may have at one time looked much like Guatemala does today; eight years of an offensive against the FARC and other TCOs has recaptured much of the country's land, though with limits. A horse-shoe shaped band of territory, beginning near the border with Panama, and extending south along the pacific coast, the borders with Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, and turning north to follow the border with Venezuela presents more ungoverned territory than not. As mentioned in a previous report by Southern Pulse, plans by the Chinese government to build transportation infrastructure in this region will face critical challenges as the Darien Gap and Northwest Colombia have minimal government presence to protect any infrastructure that would be needed.
Ungoverned territory in South America largely follows border zones between most countries. The Amazon departments of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil have, arguably, never enjoyed the state presence afforded for coastal zones. The tri-border areas formed where Brazil meets with Bolivia and Peru, Colombia and Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and Venezuela and Guyana all present chronic areas of concern for the governments of all these countries. In many ways, they represent the future of smuggling corridors and other black market activity, even as the well-known Tri-Border Area (TBA) between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, with Ciudad del Este at the center, continues to throb with criminal activity.
This TBA is both ungoverned and heavily watched for being ungoverned. The region is known for being a “wild-west” style location with illicit trafficking, money laundering and a whole range of bad actors including the FARC, Hezbollah, and a speckling of Chinese, Russian, and African criminal organizations. However, in recent years, the three governments, particularly Brazil, have increased intelligence, surveillance and policing in the region. A significant amount of illegal activity still occurs along the triple border, and while it is no longer “ungoverned,” rotating policies used to bring governance to this area underscore the difficulty with cross-border cooperation required to extend sovereignty into the region’s geopolitical black holes.
Brazil, apart from Colombia, has perhaps spent the most time, political capital, and state funds to extend a presence across the vastness of its ungoverned territories. Federal Police programs such as Co-Bra, Pe-Bra, Ve-Bra, and others have all cycled through various states of funding and readiness. Agreements between Colombia and Brazil, granting the right of hot pursuit for a limited amount of air space into sovereign territory remain progressive. Brazil’s geographical position, with borders that touch ten countries, three of them cocaine source countries, drives a political mandate to extend sovereignty, though the task remains massive.
Extending north, from the Brazilian state of Roraima, the country meets Venezuela and Guyana. Venezuela’s presence across most of the state may be counted as more robust than many of its counterparts, but its inability to provide security in spite of government presence has been a key point of failure for the Chavez government. The country presents an interesting twist on the definition of governance, however, as many observers consider the whole state to have been “captured” by criminal interests.
Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana all present unique problems. French Guiana remains, for all practical purposes, a department of France. Guyana maintains a close relationship with its former colonial power, the UK, but is financially and politically unable to control over 80% of its territory. Suriname is in the same situation, though likely more dire. The current president, Desi Bouterse, was once a military dictator heavily involved in the Suri-Cartel, which trafficked cocaine from Colombia to Holland in the mid-90s. He was convicted in absentia in Holland for drug trafficking in 1999.
At a glance, the entire region presents more ungoverned territories than one may expect. Collectively, governments across the region remain ineffective for extending presence, influence, and - most importantly - state services to a significant portion of the Americas. However, while the above mentioned spaces focus on large swaths of rural territory that has never had much official presence, a number of urban slums with high population densities can also be considered ungoverned or under the control of non-state actors. In the next installment, we will dig deeper into some of the chronic spots of insecurity inside several urban areas across the Americas.
Otto Perez has been the front-runner for Guatemala’s presidency for the entire year. The former general and runner up in the 2007 election, Perez’s promises to improve security have given him a solid base of support among the diverse field of candidates, none of whom provide a compelling alternative.
In the past week, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has been helping make sure the pieces fall into place for Perez. Disqualifying two candidates including the former first lady, Sandra Torres, Perez is left almost embarrassingly without much competition. Torres was dropped because the TSE considered her divorce of the president to be a type of “electoral fraud.” Another candidate was disqualified because of his former work as a religious minister. At least two other plausible candidates declined to run because they felt they would likely be disqualified.
Even without a real opponent, Perez cannot seem to obtain much higher than 40% in the polls, suggesting that he may have to face a second round. Given that he lacks a clear majority, there is still a chance that a new challenger will emerge to compete against Perez. However, if the general doesn’t win given his current lead, it would be a stunning show of political ineptitude.
The campaigns for Congress and mayoral posts, while receiving far less attention, point to the problems the next president will face. Several criminal organizations, including the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas, along with factions of the infamous “parallel powers” in Guatemala, are making a play for power and influence in Guatemala by offering the traditional “plata o plomo” to the candidates and their advisors.
So far, 32 people, either candidates or campaign workers, have been killed this election season, and that number is expected to rise in the coming month. On top of the organized crime threat, there are indications that a culture of impunity exists in certain regions that has allowed candidates to target each other with threats and physical violence without fear of arrest. In fact, for some candidates, it has become the easy method of winning.
Otto Perez, like the other presidential candidates, has promised a new tough crackdown on crime if elected. However, Perez, with his background and connections in the military, may be more capable of implementing a significant crackdown early in his administration. His methods would likely be military-focused and strike straight at the heart of organized crime.
With organized crime well infiltrated into Guatemala’s civilian political institutions, Perez may be undermined from the start from detractors in Guatemala’s political class on criminal payrolls. This factor will likely push Perez even further towards military options. While that may produce some instant results, it is also likely to lead to human rights abuses and create an unsustainable situation in which the military is tasked with clearing areas of organized crime while the government is unable to bring in the civilian institutions necessary to hold them long term.
Another factor to consider: Los Zetas, given the choice to fight or flee from a new government offensive, very well may choose to fight. If that occurs, the level of violence in bloodshed may well increase in the coming year in Guatemala and spread to new regions of the country.
01-Jul-2011 - Mexico: El Lazca and the New School of Mexican criminalsIn the past week, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has been helping make sure the pieces fall into place for Perez. Disqualifying two candidates including the former first lady, Sandra Torres, Perez is left almost embarrassingly without much competition. Torres was dropped because the TSE considered her divorce of the president to be a type of “electoral fraud.” Another candidate was disqualified because of his former work as a religious minister. At least two other plausible candidates declined to run because they felt they would likely be disqualified.
Even without a real opponent, Perez cannot seem to obtain much higher than 40% in the polls, suggesting that he may have to face a second round. Given that he lacks a clear majority, there is still a chance that a new challenger will emerge to compete against Perez. However, if the general doesn’t win given his current lead, it would be a stunning show of political ineptitude.
The campaigns for Congress and mayoral posts, while receiving far less attention, point to the problems the next president will face. Several criminal organizations, including the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas, along with factions of the infamous “parallel powers” in Guatemala, are making a play for power and influence in Guatemala by offering the traditional “plata o plomo” to the candidates and their advisors.
So far, 32 people, either candidates or campaign workers, have been killed this election season, and that number is expected to rise in the coming month. On top of the organized crime threat, there are indications that a culture of impunity exists in certain regions that has allowed candidates to target each other with threats and physical violence without fear of arrest. In fact, for some candidates, it has become the easy method of winning.
Otto Perez, like the other presidential candidates, has promised a new tough crackdown on crime if elected. However, Perez, with his background and connections in the military, may be more capable of implementing a significant crackdown early in his administration. His methods would likely be military-focused and strike straight at the heart of organized crime.
With organized crime well infiltrated into Guatemala’s civilian political institutions, Perez may be undermined from the start from detractors in Guatemala’s political class on criminal payrolls. This factor will likely push Perez even further towards military options. While that may produce some instant results, it is also likely to lead to human rights abuses and create an unsustainable situation in which the military is tasked with clearing areas of organized crime while the government is unable to bring in the civilian institutions necessary to hold them long term.
Another factor to consider: Los Zetas, given the choice to fight or flee from a new government offensive, very well may choose to fight. If that occurs, the level of violence in bloodshed may well increase in the coming year in Guatemala and spread to new regions of the country.
News that Gulf Cartel gunmen had killed Los Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, aka El Lazca, on 17 June 2011 exploded in both US and Mexican media sources. Some reports suggested that CDG gunmen had dragged off his body after a fierce firefight, preventing positive identification by police and military units who arrived in the wake of the Matamoros shootout to clean up the mess. Days later, it appears as though the Los Zetas leader is alive, though under a new level of public scrutiny. Whether he faked his death or not, as he previously did years ago, is not as important as the clear fact that the head of Los Zetas has firmly established himself as a member of Mexico’s criminal elite. In doing so, he has opened the door for those criminal leaders who would seek to follow his footsteps as an exemplary model of the new school of Mexican criminal behavior.
Now on the Mexican government’s top-three list of wanted men, next to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, the Los Zetas leader is the latest in a long line of venerated Mexican criminals who have generated enough impact in Mexico’s criminal markets to have left a lasting impression of his style, methods, tactics, and personality. Earlier this week, on 29 June 2011, Mexican Justice Department officials announced that they blame El Lazca for the 28 June 2010 murder of PRI gubernatorial candidate Torre Cantu. Some sources have indicated that Los Zetas approached the politician to see if he was going to work with them or not. His refusal was his death warrant. El Lazca has also been blamed for ordering the August 2011 murder of the 72 immigrants found dead in an abandoned building in Tamaulipas. Through these and other overt acts of violence, as well as the simple fact that El Lazca has survived when his enemies have been either arrested (La Barbie) or killed (Tony Tormenta, Nacho Coronel), the Zetas leader has earned his most wanted status.
More importantly, his presence as a king of Mexico’s deviant globalization markets represents the firm establishment of a new school of Mexican warlord entrepreneurs - a group of men who are extremely violent, who choose to wield fear as a weapon, and who resort to coercion and corruption only when the resounding threat of a vicious death does not work. The old school mindset adhered to tight control over the rank and file and contractors. El Chapo, for example, dislikes kidnapping and places a high importance on federal-level corruption. The new school of Mexican criminality, if solely defined by El Lazca’s experience, appears to take a decided step away from controlling elements at the federal level, focusing far more resources at the state- and municipal-level police forces, preferring violent threats over corruption.
Los Zetas recruitment strategy continues to focus on the military and police, though it is clear that Los Zetas gunmen are today much more along the lines of a “spray and pray” mindset than the triple-tap style of highly trained shooters. Still, training camps continue to surface, and Los Zetas’ rumored alliance with La Linea, if true, exemplifies El Lazca’s preference for working with men who already know how to use a weapon (La Linea originated as off-duty police, and is still thought to adhere to that model). Today, Los Zetas training camps are likely scattered across Mexico, as well as Guatemala and El Salvador.
In Central America, where Los Zetas have thoroughly penetrated Guatemala and El Salvador, there are numerous cases of their use of the military, specifically to obtain quality firepower. The most respected explosives expert in the Salvadorian military, one Major Espinoza, is thought to be on the Zeta payroll, operating an arms smuggling network in El Salvador from the relative safety of a safe house in Coban, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala - considered by many to be Los Zetas headquarters of operation for all of Central America.
Though both schools of criminality contrast sharply in some areas, there is overlap: both adhere to a strict accounting method. Enforcers ensure that payments from a variety of sources, from coyotes and drug mules to oil and gas thieves and kidnappers move up the criminal corporate ladder. Money laundering networks are equally well managed. And across the board, contractors are today paid with product, not cash.
Placed side by side, both schools are essentially methods for protecting a criminal business empire. The business is the same, with little deviance from core products and services. The methods for protection, survival, and market expansion are what differ. Just in the past few months, we have watched sections of the old school unravel, while the new school, arguably exemplified by Los Zetas and perhaps the La Tuta-run branch of La Familia Michoacana, appears to be well placed to survive well into 2012. As the public security landscape in Mexico and Central America moves forward past 2011, warlord entrepreneurs who follow in the wake of El Lazca, aka The Executioner, and El Chapo will most likely model their business structures using a blend of styles from both men. Leadership style and methodology for market entry, establishing a brand, expansion, and, ultimately survival is a separate concern. In a criminal world where extreme violence has become the norm, men who model themselves after El Lazca may have a better shot at survival.
01-Jul-2011 - Region: Latin America’s cyber gangsNow on the Mexican government’s top-three list of wanted men, next to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, the Los Zetas leader is the latest in a long line of venerated Mexican criminals who have generated enough impact in Mexico’s criminal markets to have left a lasting impression of his style, methods, tactics, and personality. Earlier this week, on 29 June 2011, Mexican Justice Department officials announced that they blame El Lazca for the 28 June 2010 murder of PRI gubernatorial candidate Torre Cantu. Some sources have indicated that Los Zetas approached the politician to see if he was going to work with them or not. His refusal was his death warrant. El Lazca has also been blamed for ordering the August 2011 murder of the 72 immigrants found dead in an abandoned building in Tamaulipas. Through these and other overt acts of violence, as well as the simple fact that El Lazca has survived when his enemies have been either arrested (La Barbie) or killed (Tony Tormenta, Nacho Coronel), the Zetas leader has earned his most wanted status.
More importantly, his presence as a king of Mexico’s deviant globalization markets represents the firm establishment of a new school of Mexican warlord entrepreneurs - a group of men who are extremely violent, who choose to wield fear as a weapon, and who resort to coercion and corruption only when the resounding threat of a vicious death does not work. The old school mindset adhered to tight control over the rank and file and contractors. El Chapo, for example, dislikes kidnapping and places a high importance on federal-level corruption. The new school of Mexican criminality, if solely defined by El Lazca’s experience, appears to take a decided step away from controlling elements at the federal level, focusing far more resources at the state- and municipal-level police forces, preferring violent threats over corruption.
Los Zetas recruitment strategy continues to focus on the military and police, though it is clear that Los Zetas gunmen are today much more along the lines of a “spray and pray” mindset than the triple-tap style of highly trained shooters. Still, training camps continue to surface, and Los Zetas’ rumored alliance with La Linea, if true, exemplifies El Lazca’s preference for working with men who already know how to use a weapon (La Linea originated as off-duty police, and is still thought to adhere to that model). Today, Los Zetas training camps are likely scattered across Mexico, as well as Guatemala and El Salvador.
In Central America, where Los Zetas have thoroughly penetrated Guatemala and El Salvador, there are numerous cases of their use of the military, specifically to obtain quality firepower. The most respected explosives expert in the Salvadorian military, one Major Espinoza, is thought to be on the Zeta payroll, operating an arms smuggling network in El Salvador from the relative safety of a safe house in Coban, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala - considered by many to be Los Zetas headquarters of operation for all of Central America.
Though both schools of criminality contrast sharply in some areas, there is overlap: both adhere to a strict accounting method. Enforcers ensure that payments from a variety of sources, from coyotes and drug mules to oil and gas thieves and kidnappers move up the criminal corporate ladder. Money laundering networks are equally well managed. And across the board, contractors are today paid with product, not cash.
Placed side by side, both schools are essentially methods for protecting a criminal business empire. The business is the same, with little deviance from core products and services. The methods for protection, survival, and market expansion are what differ. Just in the past few months, we have watched sections of the old school unravel, while the new school, arguably exemplified by Los Zetas and perhaps the La Tuta-run branch of La Familia Michoacana, appears to be well placed to survive well into 2012. As the public security landscape in Mexico and Central America moves forward past 2011, warlord entrepreneurs who follow in the wake of El Lazca, aka The Executioner, and El Chapo will most likely model their business structures using a blend of styles from both men. Leadership style and methodology for market entry, establishing a brand, expansion, and, ultimately survival is a separate concern. In a criminal world where extreme violence has become the norm, men who model themselves after El Lazca may have a better shot at survival.
June 2011 saw some of the most significant cyber-attacks ever in Latin America. Brazil had several government and private sector websites knocked offline and their Army personnel database was hacked with information posted online. Colombia’s Senate website was defaced. Peru had police information stolen. Chile was threatened for its monitoring of social networks. Information about El Chapo’s location in 2009 was leaked from an Arizona police database, and it turns out the US had not previously shared that information with Mexico.
Some of these events were global. The international group LulzSec was responsible for the leaks out of Arizona and had threatened to hack Brazil government websites. The group Anonymous was behind threats against Chile and Peru. While Latin America should do more to secure their websites and cooperate at the global level to prosecute cybercrime, these incidents were the least damaging.
It’s the local cyber-gangs that should be of immediate concern. It was a Brazilian group that did some of the greatest damage, including hacking the Brazilian Army database. It was a Brazilian group associating itself with LulzSec that did much of the local website denial of service attacks including those against Petrobras. Local Peruvian hackers operating out of Arequipa have previously broken into the police databases, long before LulzSec was ever involved. Local hacking groups in Venezuela and Colombia are going after email accounts of politicians, journalists and NGOs.
The cyber domain is adding new complexity to the criminal threat in Latin America at a time when the region is under pressure to focus on the more physical security threats such as high murder rates and illicit trafficking. While the cyber threat didn’t appear overnight, it is one that is increasing at a fast rate and is affecting every government in the hemisphere.
Knocking Latin American government websites offline with a denial of service attack is easy and cheap, requiring limited computer skills. Even someone with minimal computer skills can download the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software and participate in a DDOS from their home computer or cybercafe. Defacing a website is a bit more complex, but still doesn’t require a computer mastermind. While criminal, it is more of an annoyance than an actual attack against a government.
The more complex threats such as the stealing and publishing of military personnel information must be of immediate concern to the regional governments. This is a direct attack on their institutions and not a simple cybercrime.
Yet, it is “simple” cybercrime that is the fastest growing issue and one that is becoming quite profitable for individuals and cybergangs in Latin America. Two threats are worth watching: cybercriminals working with established transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and established TCOs moving into the cybercrime business.
The need for money mules drives the first issue - cybercriminals working with TCOs. Criminals from Russia and Eastern Europe are able to use complex malware and elaborate scams to steal money from innocent victims’ bank accounts, often in the US. However, they have hit roadblocks attempting to get the stolen money out of the United States. To solve this problem, they are relying on money mules, individuals in the US who withdraw money from banks and ATMs and then smuggle it in bulk out of the country. While the original wave of money mules were Eastern Europeans, as the amount of money increases, cybercriminals are turning towards the experts in bulk cash smuggling, the drug trafficking organizations of Latin America.
Of course, looking at the money mule issue, Latin American criminal groups aren't the sort that let an opportunity pass them by. It's clearly more profitable to run the malware from Latin America than serve as the intermediary muling money to Eastern European and Russian criminals. This new business opportunity creates the second threat of TCOs moving into the cybercrime business. Groups including La Familia and Brazil’s PCC have acquired black market hackers who can assist with committing crimes that bring in cash. Even MS-13, not often considered a computer-savvy group, is said to have been involved in various low-level malware schemes in Central America for stealing bank identification information and manufacturing fake credit cards.
The expertise in writing the malware certainly exists in Latin America. Brazilian groups have been writing malware to steal bank credentials for so long that some computer security firms have a series of traits and lines of code that they associate specifically with Brazilian written malware. Mexican hackers have also increased their capacity and a number of Mexico-centric botnets were identified last year by US security firms monitoring the issue.
Like all criminals, the ones acting in cyberspace need to be investigated, arrested and prosecuted by local police forces. Unfortunately, many countries are behind the curve when it comes to digital forensics and other high tech investigations and most countries simply don’t have the resources to spare in giving their police the time and training to do these investigations. After all, how can a government justify a police officer sitting at a computer investigating a possible bank theft from the US instead of patrolling the streets to stop a gang from committing a physical assault.
24-Jun-2011 - Venezuela: Power outages, prison riots and presidential silenceSome of these events were global. The international group LulzSec was responsible for the leaks out of Arizona and had threatened to hack Brazil government websites. The group Anonymous was behind threats against Chile and Peru. While Latin America should do more to secure their websites and cooperate at the global level to prosecute cybercrime, these incidents were the least damaging.
It’s the local cyber-gangs that should be of immediate concern. It was a Brazilian group that did some of the greatest damage, including hacking the Brazilian Army database. It was a Brazilian group associating itself with LulzSec that did much of the local website denial of service attacks including those against Petrobras. Local Peruvian hackers operating out of Arequipa have previously broken into the police databases, long before LulzSec was ever involved. Local hacking groups in Venezuela and Colombia are going after email accounts of politicians, journalists and NGOs.
The cyber domain is adding new complexity to the criminal threat in Latin America at a time when the region is under pressure to focus on the more physical security threats such as high murder rates and illicit trafficking. While the cyber threat didn’t appear overnight, it is one that is increasing at a fast rate and is affecting every government in the hemisphere.
Knocking Latin American government websites offline with a denial of service attack is easy and cheap, requiring limited computer skills. Even someone with minimal computer skills can download the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software and participate in a DDOS from their home computer or cybercafe. Defacing a website is a bit more complex, but still doesn’t require a computer mastermind. While criminal, it is more of an annoyance than an actual attack against a government.
The more complex threats such as the stealing and publishing of military personnel information must be of immediate concern to the regional governments. This is a direct attack on their institutions and not a simple cybercrime.
Yet, it is “simple” cybercrime that is the fastest growing issue and one that is becoming quite profitable for individuals and cybergangs in Latin America. Two threats are worth watching: cybercriminals working with established transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and established TCOs moving into the cybercrime business.
The need for money mules drives the first issue - cybercriminals working with TCOs. Criminals from Russia and Eastern Europe are able to use complex malware and elaborate scams to steal money from innocent victims’ bank accounts, often in the US. However, they have hit roadblocks attempting to get the stolen money out of the United States. To solve this problem, they are relying on money mules, individuals in the US who withdraw money from banks and ATMs and then smuggle it in bulk out of the country. While the original wave of money mules were Eastern Europeans, as the amount of money increases, cybercriminals are turning towards the experts in bulk cash smuggling, the drug trafficking organizations of Latin America.
Of course, looking at the money mule issue, Latin American criminal groups aren't the sort that let an opportunity pass them by. It's clearly more profitable to run the malware from Latin America than serve as the intermediary muling money to Eastern European and Russian criminals. This new business opportunity creates the second threat of TCOs moving into the cybercrime business. Groups including La Familia and Brazil’s PCC have acquired black market hackers who can assist with committing crimes that bring in cash. Even MS-13, not often considered a computer-savvy group, is said to have been involved in various low-level malware schemes in Central America for stealing bank identification information and manufacturing fake credit cards.
The expertise in writing the malware certainly exists in Latin America. Brazilian groups have been writing malware to steal bank credentials for so long that some computer security firms have a series of traits and lines of code that they associate specifically with Brazilian written malware. Mexican hackers have also increased their capacity and a number of Mexico-centric botnets were identified last year by US security firms monitoring the issue.
Like all criminals, the ones acting in cyberspace need to be investigated, arrested and prosecuted by local police forces. Unfortunately, many countries are behind the curve when it comes to digital forensics and other high tech investigations and most countries simply don’t have the resources to spare in giving their police the time and training to do these investigations. After all, how can a government justify a police officer sitting at a computer investigating a possible bank theft from the US instead of patrolling the streets to stop a gang from committing a physical assault.
Another wave of power outages leading to rationing and government finger-pointing should have been the top story in Venezuela in mid-June 2011. Yet, violence at a prison and politics surrounding the president’s health have captivated Venezuela’s media and citizens - at least those who have had electricity to turn on their televisions.
The power outages are hitting the economy hard and certainly impacting voters across various economic strata. Unlike last year, the government can’t blame a drought this time. There is plenty of rain. It’s the government’s failure to invest in generation and transmission capacity that is the problem. The government has tried to blame opposition sabotage and has demanded that consumers cut their consumption and purchase separate generation equipment, difficult to do with Venezuela’s currency controls slowing the import of generators from abroad. While Caracas has been mostly spared from the rolling brownouts, the capital has seen its share of disruptions this year as well.
The prison riots have been a debacle for the government. Prisoners with weapons and explosives have held out against the National Guard. The government can’t go in with too heavy of a hand or it risks human rights abuses. Nor can the government take too light of a touch, believing that weakness on the prison issue will harm the Chavez government’s image of being strong on security issues and strong overall.
Image is a particularly tough subject today with Chavez in a hospital in Cuba, silenced for over a week while other aspects of the country appear to fall apart. His brother recently said that he could be out of the country another 10-12 days.
President Chavez’s health has been the source of speculation for months. Rumors on the street of cancer, heart problems, liposuction, pain killer addiction and other various maladies have been fueled by government silence and obvious half-truth statements about the flu, knee surgery and now an emergency abdomen abscess.
What was once a well-oiled political machine seems broken down without Chavez at the helm. Small mistakes, like a PSUV congressman announcing Chavez’s return “within hours,” forcing the foreign minister to deny the rumor, hint at the cracks within the coalition.
The machine doesn’t function without Chavez. There is no clear political leader to take his place. Those who speak on his behalf while he is ill, Vice President Jaua or the various cabinet ministers, have failed to inspire confidence among the Venezuelan population and look a bit timid in their actions, afraid that the president will come back and punish them as scapegoats for what went wrong. In fact, perhaps the strongest leader with the potential to replace the president as the head of the PSUV, former Vice President Rangel, sits on the outside of the government.
Chavez’s supporters have made ridiculous claims blaming the opposition for the power outages through sabotage, the prison riots through coordination with human rights NGOs and the “destabilization effort” while Chavez is away. They are daring the opposition to step over the line and try to take advantage of the current environment.
Yet, the opposition can’t or won’t pounce on the political weakness. Too many times over the past decade, they’ve pronounced Chavez weak or falling, only to be proven wrong by the president bouncing back to win another political battle. Too many times they have seen Chavez turn the polarized political environment into a political advantage, using the opposition’s errors as a shield to escape blame for what are clearly government failings. Neither his political opponents nor analysts on the outside, want to be the fool who says “this time Chavez is done,” only to be proven wrong a week or a month later.
So with Chavez in a hospital bed in Cuba, his ministers are afraid to act for fear of being scapegoats for Venezuela’s problems and the opposition is afraid to act for fear of being proven wrong once again by Venezuela’s resilient leader. The image created is that Venezuela is a government revolving around a single individual, and when that person is gone, the country will fall into chaos. Perhaps that’s an image Chavez wants, one that will convince Venezuelans to reelect him. However, if he really is sick and doesn’t bounce back, it’s a reality that should make political leaders across the ideological spectrum nervous. For now, Chavez is positive, even as he recovers, and tweeted from Cuba on 24 June 2001, "Good morning to my {Twitter followers]. It's Army Day, and the sun is shining brightly."
24-Jun-2011 - Mexico: Mexico's criminal organizations: weakness in complexity, strength in evolutionThe power outages are hitting the economy hard and certainly impacting voters across various economic strata. Unlike last year, the government can’t blame a drought this time. There is plenty of rain. It’s the government’s failure to invest in generation and transmission capacity that is the problem. The government has tried to blame opposition sabotage and has demanded that consumers cut their consumption and purchase separate generation equipment, difficult to do with Venezuela’s currency controls slowing the import of generators from abroad. While Caracas has been mostly spared from the rolling brownouts, the capital has seen its share of disruptions this year as well.
The prison riots have been a debacle for the government. Prisoners with weapons and explosives have held out against the National Guard. The government can’t go in with too heavy of a hand or it risks human rights abuses. Nor can the government take too light of a touch, believing that weakness on the prison issue will harm the Chavez government’s image of being strong on security issues and strong overall.
Image is a particularly tough subject today with Chavez in a hospital in Cuba, silenced for over a week while other aspects of the country appear to fall apart. His brother recently said that he could be out of the country another 10-12 days.
President Chavez’s health has been the source of speculation for months. Rumors on the street of cancer, heart problems, liposuction, pain killer addiction and other various maladies have been fueled by government silence and obvious half-truth statements about the flu, knee surgery and now an emergency abdomen abscess.
What was once a well-oiled political machine seems broken down without Chavez at the helm. Small mistakes, like a PSUV congressman announcing Chavez’s return “within hours,” forcing the foreign minister to deny the rumor, hint at the cracks within the coalition.
The machine doesn’t function without Chavez. There is no clear political leader to take his place. Those who speak on his behalf while he is ill, Vice President Jaua or the various cabinet ministers, have failed to inspire confidence among the Venezuelan population and look a bit timid in their actions, afraid that the president will come back and punish them as scapegoats for what went wrong. In fact, perhaps the strongest leader with the potential to replace the president as the head of the PSUV, former Vice President Rangel, sits on the outside of the government.
Chavez’s supporters have made ridiculous claims blaming the opposition for the power outages through sabotage, the prison riots through coordination with human rights NGOs and the “destabilization effort” while Chavez is away. They are daring the opposition to step over the line and try to take advantage of the current environment.
Yet, the opposition can’t or won’t pounce on the political weakness. Too many times over the past decade, they’ve pronounced Chavez weak or falling, only to be proven wrong by the president bouncing back to win another political battle. Too many times they have seen Chavez turn the polarized political environment into a political advantage, using the opposition’s errors as a shield to escape blame for what are clearly government failings. Neither his political opponents nor analysts on the outside, want to be the fool who says “this time Chavez is done,” only to be proven wrong a week or a month later.
So with Chavez in a hospital bed in Cuba, his ministers are afraid to act for fear of being scapegoats for Venezuela’s problems and the opposition is afraid to act for fear of being proven wrong once again by Venezuela’s resilient leader. The image created is that Venezuela is a government revolving around a single individual, and when that person is gone, the country will fall into chaos. Perhaps that’s an image Chavez wants, one that will convince Venezuelans to reelect him. However, if he really is sick and doesn’t bounce back, it’s a reality that should make political leaders across the ideological spectrum nervous. For now, Chavez is positive, even as he recovers, and tweeted from Cuba on 24 June 2001, "Good morning to my {Twitter followers]. It's Army Day, and the sun is shining brightly."
Power outages, prison riots and presidential silence
Transnational organized crime exists as a networked system that creates a high degree of resiliency. Government systems laden by a pyramid-shaped bureaucracy and sovereignty have had little effect when attacking networks of organized crime in Latin America. This uneven playing field is easily observed at the strategic level, where non-state threats appear to run circles around slower moving governments. The criminal system rapidly adapts, strengthens and increases in violence, independent of whether independent groups are fighting each other, government forces, or civilian vigilante groups. As a “counter-system,” criminality (or warlord entrepreneurs in the parlance of this volume), is inherently resilient, displacing from one territory to another and across international boundaries, as market conditions or threats to organizational structures present themselves.
However, when looking at this system from the standpoint of any individual criminal or leadership group, one quickly sees that life is nasty, brutish and short – in which most leaders find themselves in prison or dead within a few short years. The average life span for a budding warlord entrepreneur in Mexico or Central America shortens dramatically once he registers on rival or government radars. Organizations that seem strong at one point in time can quickly disintegrate once the military, police and intelligence operations, or rival groups target the top of their structure. Each individual organization is unlikely to have a long-term time horizon in which building sustainable services serves as a benefit. Any individual leader’s ability to function as a warlord entrepreneur, providing government-like services to a population after his organization has displaced the government, is therefore quite limited. And the fallout – normally violence as a new leader seeks purchase – is never a benefit for the host community.
Why is this the case? A close review of criminal structures at the operational level reveals that many organizations are structured very similarly to government, albeit with different rules. They have a vertical bureaucratic structure, often with one strongman at the top supported by a tightly knit group of trusted operators, specific lines of command, and harsh penalties for stepping out of line.
Over the last two years, Mexican authorities have killed or arrested more than half (20 out of 37) of their most wanted criminals since that country published its most wanted list in March 2009. While criminality – and the visibility and strength of the criminal system overall – has increased in Mexico in recent years, individual groups themselves have actually proven to be relatively unstable and weak due to their structures. Evolving through the phases of growth and decline, most criminal organizations have found themselves in a cycle of violence that ultimately leads to failure.
As a result, the life-cycle of many criminal organizations follows a similar, four-phased pattern. This pattern may be described as:
Each phase overlaps the first, and any given organization may find itself in a transition period from one phase to the next. There are no clean breaks.
The first phase is the Start-up phase, during which an organization seeks to establish a foothold for itself in the black market by clearing and holding an existing market niche or by creating a new one (for example, bringing existing drugs to a new market or new drugs to an existing one). For each of Mexico’s top-tier organizations – the Arellano Felix, the Carillo Fuentes, the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, and Los Zetas – this phase is already complete.
The second phase is the Competition phase, during which a group must compete against its rivals in this space to establish market dominance. As in business, this phase appears to be endless for some groups, such as Los Zetas, who are continually at war with rival factions in an ever-shifting balance of power and influence. Some geographic areas of Mexico calm down when a criminal organization completes this phase and achieves dominance, such as Sinaloa and Sonora where the Sinaloa Federation holds sway, while other areas are prone to flare up as smaller organizations form to fight against the stronger criminal force (as is the case in Guadalajara and Acapulco in 2011).
The third phase, Dominance, largely involves market expansion, diversification and brand protection. The organization focuses on expansion into neighboring geographies (thereby beginning the cycle again at Phase 1) or adjacent product segments. It is also marked by efforts to clean out smaller groups that unofficially use an established group’s criminal brand to further its own endeavor, such as Los Zetas, which are still struggling to establish themselves as an organization strong enough to exist at the highest order of criminal nobility – yet nimble enough to enforce its rule of law in every corner where it purports to operate.
The final phase, Transition, is one where the organization must deal with succession normally caused by the death or arrest of a leader. This is often the most turbulent and violent phase of a criminal organization’s life cycle. It also the key phase where criminal organizations operating under a vertical, government-like structure are most prone to fail. Often groups cannot sustain the scale to which they have grown at this phase and crumble under the loss of their leadership, fragmenting into smaller, competing organizations. We can see for example how the Arellano Felix, Carrillo Fuentes, and Beltran Leyva (BLO) criminal syndicates have all dealt to varying degrees of stability with the successive loss of their leaders – with the BLO in 2008, 2009, and 2010 providing the best example of how a criminal organization passing through this phase often spins-off smaller groups which in turn begin their own cycles of violence.
Another example is the methamphetamine-producing subsidiary of the Sinaloa Federation, run by the late Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villareal, which has atomized since his July, 2010 death. There are now several groups fighting for control of Guadalajara when less than a year ago, one organization controlled the territory. The Gulf Cartel has also weathered this phase with a hostile spin-off – Los Zetas – that as an independent group began its own cycle of violence as it established itself as an independent organization in Mexico’s criminal landscape and beyond.
The ultimate disintegration and weakness of individual criminal groups leads to several questions:
It is that last question that is tangentially raised by critics of the Calderon administration’s policy in Mexico. By going after the cartels head on with military force, Calderon appears to have accelerated the speed at which the criminal organizations go through various stages of growth and decline, thereby creating more resilient organizations and increasing violence in their communities.
This strategy suggests that going after the criminal leadership is necessary to defeat warlord entrepreneurs, but may also lead to more violence if it is not combined with stronger police and judicial institutions. Herein lies a paradox – conflict is necessary to defeat warlord entrepreneurs, but their very defeat catalyses more violence and the rise of new warlords. In addition, states such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Brazil suffer from pockets of economic malaise, which combined with ineffective sovereignty provides a social perch upon which warlord entrepreneurs find purchase to establish a new presence in the black market. In effect, the very existence of such a vast and undulating networked criminal system is a symptom of deeper issues that observers have long identified as social, not security, problems. Yet the readily-presented solutions attack the symptom, not the disease.
Unfortunately Latin America relies on a public security strategy that depends heavily on the military. This does not bring enough institution-building capacity to counter the criminal organizations in the one area of state-building where they should be weak. As long as institutional reforms lag behind, every ‘win’ for security forces creates a more atomized and violent set of drug trafficking organizations. This is the pattern that explains why 2010 was so violent in spite of numerous successes by security forces in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As this pattern repeats itself moving forward, leaders in Latin America may find themselves at the precipice of a new phase of evolution of the criminal system, where successful warlords, such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Federation, seek to find sustainable power beyond the criminal realm, in the political world, where the transition from criminal king to political king maker is relatively swift to complete and nearly impossible to reverse.
However, when looking at this system from the standpoint of any individual criminal or leadership group, one quickly sees that life is nasty, brutish and short – in which most leaders find themselves in prison or dead within a few short years. The average life span for a budding warlord entrepreneur in Mexico or Central America shortens dramatically once he registers on rival or government radars. Organizations that seem strong at one point in time can quickly disintegrate once the military, police and intelligence operations, or rival groups target the top of their structure. Each individual organization is unlikely to have a long-term time horizon in which building sustainable services serves as a benefit. Any individual leader’s ability to function as a warlord entrepreneur, providing government-like services to a population after his organization has displaced the government, is therefore quite limited. And the fallout – normally violence as a new leader seeks purchase – is never a benefit for the host community.
Why is this the case? A close review of criminal structures at the operational level reveals that many organizations are structured very similarly to government, albeit with different rules. They have a vertical bureaucratic structure, often with one strongman at the top supported by a tightly knit group of trusted operators, specific lines of command, and harsh penalties for stepping out of line.
Over the last two years, Mexican authorities have killed or arrested more than half (20 out of 37) of their most wanted criminals since that country published its most wanted list in March 2009. While criminality – and the visibility and strength of the criminal system overall – has increased in Mexico in recent years, individual groups themselves have actually proven to be relatively unstable and weak due to their structures. Evolving through the phases of growth and decline, most criminal organizations have found themselves in a cycle of violence that ultimately leads to failure.
As a result, the life-cycle of many criminal organizations follows a similar, four-phased pattern. This pattern may be described as:
- Start-up: market entry and early-stage competition
- Competition: intense fighting with rivals to establish market dominance
- Dominance: Consolidation of dominance and expansion into neighboring markets or product segments
- Transition: Succession challenges brought about (usually) by the death or capture of key leadership
The first phase is the Start-up phase, during which an organization seeks to establish a foothold for itself in the black market by clearing and holding an existing market niche or by creating a new one (for example, bringing existing drugs to a new market or new drugs to an existing one). For each of Mexico’s top-tier organizations – the Arellano Felix, the Carillo Fuentes, the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, and Los Zetas – this phase is already complete.
The second phase is the Competition phase, during which a group must compete against its rivals in this space to establish market dominance. As in business, this phase appears to be endless for some groups, such as Los Zetas, who are continually at war with rival factions in an ever-shifting balance of power and influence. Some geographic areas of Mexico calm down when a criminal organization completes this phase and achieves dominance, such as Sinaloa and Sonora where the Sinaloa Federation holds sway, while other areas are prone to flare up as smaller organizations form to fight against the stronger criminal force (as is the case in Guadalajara and Acapulco in 2011).
The third phase, Dominance, largely involves market expansion, diversification and brand protection. The organization focuses on expansion into neighboring geographies (thereby beginning the cycle again at Phase 1) or adjacent product segments. It is also marked by efforts to clean out smaller groups that unofficially use an established group’s criminal brand to further its own endeavor, such as Los Zetas, which are still struggling to establish themselves as an organization strong enough to exist at the highest order of criminal nobility – yet nimble enough to enforce its rule of law in every corner where it purports to operate.
The final phase, Transition, is one where the organization must deal with succession normally caused by the death or arrest of a leader. This is often the most turbulent and violent phase of a criminal organization’s life cycle. It also the key phase where criminal organizations operating under a vertical, government-like structure are most prone to fail. Often groups cannot sustain the scale to which they have grown at this phase and crumble under the loss of their leadership, fragmenting into smaller, competing organizations. We can see for example how the Arellano Felix, Carrillo Fuentes, and Beltran Leyva (BLO) criminal syndicates have all dealt to varying degrees of stability with the successive loss of their leaders – with the BLO in 2008, 2009, and 2010 providing the best example of how a criminal organization passing through this phase often spins-off smaller groups which in turn begin their own cycles of violence.
Another example is the methamphetamine-producing subsidiary of the Sinaloa Federation, run by the late Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villareal, which has atomized since his July, 2010 death. There are now several groups fighting for control of Guadalajara when less than a year ago, one organization controlled the territory. The Gulf Cartel has also weathered this phase with a hostile spin-off – Los Zetas – that as an independent group began its own cycle of violence as it established itself as an independent organization in Mexico’s criminal landscape and beyond.
The ultimate disintegration and weakness of individual criminal groups leads to several questions:
- How do governments exploit these weaknesses in individual terrorist and criminal groups to hasten their decline or disintegration?
- Can fear of a brief and awful life convince enough entrepreneurs to avoid the criminal route?
- Do government operations to destroy individual groups actually make the problem worse by allowing the system to adapt more quickly?
- Do governments speed up the evolutionary adaptation process of the criminal system by undermining the individual groups within it?
It is that last question that is tangentially raised by critics of the Calderon administration’s policy in Mexico. By going after the cartels head on with military force, Calderon appears to have accelerated the speed at which the criminal organizations go through various stages of growth and decline, thereby creating more resilient organizations and increasing violence in their communities.
This strategy suggests that going after the criminal leadership is necessary to defeat warlord entrepreneurs, but may also lead to more violence if it is not combined with stronger police and judicial institutions. Herein lies a paradox – conflict is necessary to defeat warlord entrepreneurs, but their very defeat catalyses more violence and the rise of new warlords. In addition, states such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Brazil suffer from pockets of economic malaise, which combined with ineffective sovereignty provides a social perch upon which warlord entrepreneurs find purchase to establish a new presence in the black market. In effect, the very existence of such a vast and undulating networked criminal system is a symptom of deeper issues that observers have long identified as social, not security, problems. Yet the readily-presented solutions attack the symptom, not the disease.
Unfortunately Latin America relies on a public security strategy that depends heavily on the military. This does not bring enough institution-building capacity to counter the criminal organizations in the one area of state-building where they should be weak. As long as institutional reforms lag behind, every ‘win’ for security forces creates a more atomized and violent set of drug trafficking organizations. This is the pattern that explains why 2010 was so violent in spite of numerous successes by security forces in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As this pattern repeats itself moving forward, leaders in Latin America may find themselves at the precipice of a new phase of evolution of the criminal system, where successful warlords, such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Federation, seek to find sustainable power beyond the criminal realm, in the political world, where the transition from criminal king to political king maker is relatively swift to complete and nearly impossible to reverse.
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