We recently posted a report on the strength of criminal systems versus the weakness of the organizations themselves, one of several chapters submitted to the Warlord Entrepreneurs project organized by Noah Radford.

Our take on warlord entrepreneurs, such as it was, gathered a "must read" posting from the Council on Foreign Relations, we were pleased to note. And it's likely that readers of CFR pages grabbed our report to publish a couple of pieces on El Chapo Guzman in Mexico, who we referred to at the end of the report:

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.

In this piece, we presented four key questions, pasted below. Share your thoughts for what the answers might look like in the comments section.

1. How do governments exploit these weaknesses in individual terrorist and criminal groups to hasten their decline or disintegration? 
2. Can fear of a brief and awful life convince enough entrepreneurs to avoid the criminal route? 
3. Do government operations to destroy individual groups actually make the problem worse by allowing the system to adapt more quickly? 
4. Do governments speed up the evolutionary adaptation process of the criminal system by undermining the individual groups within it?