Narco-guerrilleros: ¿qué lecciones se pueden extraer de Colombia para Afganistán?

Ante el problema de la inseguridad en aumento en Afganistán y la sensación abrumadora de que no se está ganando la batalla contra los rebeldes en este país, analistas y responsables políticos buscan analogías para comprender la dinámica del conflicto e idear respuestas al mismo. Una de las analogías que están siendo examinadas por los analistas es la campaña contra el narcotráfico y la insurgencia en Colombia. De hecho, existen similitudes asombrosas en la forma en que las FARC y los talibán se relacionan con la economía de la droga en sus respectivos países. Sin embargo, estas semejanzas no estriban en lo que podría considerarse como la característica esencial de las FARC, a saber, la pérdida de su sustrato ideológico y su transformación en una organización puramente lucrativa. Por el contrario, desde el punto de vista de la contrainsurgencia y del nexo entre droga y conflicto, el debate sobre ideología frente a ánimo de lucro es mucho menos importante de lo que suele creerse. Independientemente de su ideología y de la profundidad de sus creencias, tanto las FARC como los talibán no solo están obteniendo sustanciosos recursos financieros del narcotráfico, sino también un considerable capital político. Y este capital político está siendo acentuado en gran medida por las políticas gubernamentales de erradicación de los cultivos de droga, políticas que acaban siendo contraproducentes para los objetivos de la contrainsurgencia

Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons from Latin America

In response to a crime epidemic afflicting Latin America since the early 1990s, several countries in the region have resorted to using heavy-force police or military units to physically retake territories de facto controlled by non-State criminal or insurgent groups. After a period of territory control, the heavy forces hand law enforcement functions in the retaken territories to regular police officers, with the hope that the territories and their populations will remain under the control of the state. To a varying degree, intensity, and consistency, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica have adopted such policies since the mid-1990s. During such operations, governments need to pursue two interrelated objectives: to better establish the state’s physical presence and to realign the allegiance of the population in those areas toward the state and away from the non-State criminal entities. From the perspective of law enforcement, such operations entail several critical decisions and junctions, such as: Whether or not to announce the force insertion in advance. The decision trades off the element of surprise and the ability to capture key leaders of the criminal organizations against the ability to minimize civilian casualties and force levels. The latter, however, may allow criminals to go to ground and escape capture. Governments thus must decide whether they merely seek to displace criminal groups to other areas or maximize their decapitation capacity. Intelligence flows rarely come from the population. Often, rival criminal groups are the best source of intelligence. However, cooperation between the State and such groups that goes beyond using vetted intelligence provided by the groups, such as a State tolerance for militias, compromises the rule-of-law integrity of the State and ultimately can eviscerate even public safety gains. Sustaining security after initial clearing operations is at times even more challenging than conducting the initial operations. Although unlike the heavy forces, traditional police forces, especially if designed as community police, have the capacity to develop trust of the community and ultimately focus on crime prevention, developing such trust often takes a long time. To develop the community’s trust, regular police forces need to conduct frequent on-foot patrols with intensive nonthreatening interactions with the population and minimize the use of force. Moreover, sufficiently robust patrol units need to be placed in designated beats for substantial amount of time, often at least over a year. Establishing oversight mechanisms, including joint police-citizens’ boards, further facilities building trust in the police among the community. After disruption of the established criminal order, street crime often significantly rises and both the heavy-force and community-police units often struggle to contain it. The increase in street crime alienates the population of the retaken territory from the State. Thus developing a capacity to address street crime is critical. Moreover, the community police units tend to be vulnerable (especially initially) to efforts by displaced criminals to reoccupy the cleared territories. Losing a cleared territory back to criminal groups is extremely costly in terms of losing any established trust and being able to recover it. Rather than operating on a priori determined handover schedule, a careful assessment of the relative strength of regular police and criminal groups post-clearing operations is likely to be a better guide for timing the handover from heavy forces to regular police units. Cleared territories often experience not only a peace dividend, but also a peace deficit – in the rise new serious crime (in addition to street crime). Newly – valuable land and other previously-inaccessible resources can lead to land speculation and forced displacement; various other forms of new crime can also significantly rise. Community police forces often struggle to cope with such crime, especially as it is frequently linked to legal business. Such new crime often receives little to no attention in the design of the operations to retake territories from criminal groups. But without developing an effective response to such new crime, the public safety gains of the clearing operations can be altogether lost

Human Security and Crime in Latin America: The political Capital and Political Impact of Criminal Groups and Belligerents Involved in Illicit Economies

Organized crime and illegal economies generate multiple threats to states and societies. But although the negative effects of high levels of pervasive street and organized crime on human security are clear, the relationships between human security, crime, illicit economies, and law enforcement are highly complex. By sponsoring illicit economies in areas of state weakness where legal economic opportunities and public goods are seriously lacking, both belligerent and criminal groups frequently enhance some elements of human security of the marginalized populations who depend on illicit economies for basic livelihoods. Even criminal groups without a political ideology often have an important political impact on the lives of communities and on their allegiance to the State. Criminal groups also have political agendas. Both belligerent and criminal groups can develop political capital through their sponsorship of illicit economies. The extent of their political capital is dependent on several factors. Efforts to defeat belligerent groups by decreasing their financial flows through suppression of an illicit economy are rarely effective. Such measures, in turn, increase the political capital of anti-State groups. The effectiveness of anti-money laundering measures (AML) also remains low and is often highly contingent on specific vulnerabilities of the target. The design of AML measures has other effects, such as on the size of a country’s informal economy. Multifaceted anti-crime strategies that combine law enforcement approaches with targeted socio-economic policies and efforts to improve public goods provision, including access to justice, are likely to be more effective in suppressing crime than tough nailed-fist approaches. For anti-crime policies to be effective, they often require a substantial, but politically-difficult concentration of resources in target areas. In the absence of effective law enforcement capacity, legalization and decriminalization policies of illicit economies are unlikely on their own to substantially reduce levels of criminality or to eliminate organized crime. Effective police reform, for several decades largely elusive in Latin America, is one of the most urgently needed policy reforms in the region. Such efforts need to be coupled with fundamental judicial and correctional systems reforms. Yet, regional approaches cannot obliterate the so-called balloon effect. If demand persists, even under intense law enforcement pressures, illicit economies will relocate to areas of weakest law enforcement, but they will not be eliminated

Impact of illicit economics on military conflict

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, February 2007.Page 642 blank.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 575-641).The study explores the nexus between illicit economies and military conflicts. It investigates when and how access by belligerents to the production and trafficking of illicit substances affects the strength of belligerents and governments. Although narcotics trafficking is often treated as sui generis, the study situates the drug trade within the larger class of markets for illicit products and services. The study presents a general theory of the relationship between illicit markets and military conflict - the political capital of illicit economies -- and contrasts it with conventional wisdom on connections between drug trafficking and military conflict. The political capital of illicit economies argues that belligerents derive much more than simply large financial profits from their sponsorship of illicit economies. They also obtain freedom of action and, crucially, legitimacy and support from the local population, called political capital. If belligerents choose to become negatively involved in the illicit economy (attempt to destroy it), they not only fail to increase their military capabilities, but also suffer costs in terms of political capital. The extent and scope of belligerents' gains/ losses from their involvement in the illicit economy depend on four factors:(cont.) the state of the overall economy; the character of the illicit economy; the presence of traffickers; and the government response to the illicit economy. These factors reflect both structural conditions outside of the immediate control of the belligerents and the government and strategic policy choices available to either the belligerents or the government. Contrary to the conventional wisdom about narcotics and military conflict, eradication of narcotics cultivation has dubious effects on the capabilities of the belligerents and is extremely unlikely to severely weaken them. However, it alienates the local population from the government and results in the population's unwillingness to provide intelligence on the belligerents - a crucial requirement for success against the belligerents. Thus, eradication of illicit crops increases the political capital of the belligerents without significantly weakening their military capabilities. The primary cases explored in the study are Peru, Colombia, and Afghanistan. Additional evidence is drawn from the cases of Burma, Northern Ireland, Turkey, and India.by Vanda Felbab-Brown.Ph.D

¿Quién paga por la paz en Colombia?

Este artículo examina los costos políticos que habrán de asumir las FARC, las fuerzas armadas, los políticos derechistas, la élite y los intereses creados, las personas desplazadas, los cultivadores de coca y la clase media. El análisis también aborda el papel y el impacto de otros actores, como las Bacrim y los grupos guerrilleros que aún siguen operando, incluido el ELN

Relinquishing and Governing the Volatile: The Many Afghanistans and Critical Research Agendas of NATO's Governance

This article invites academics and policy analysts to examine the mechanisms and legacy of NATO's security and development governance of Afghan social spaces by using critical theory concepts. It argues that such scholarly endeavors are growing in importance as the United States and NATO gradually pull their troops out of Afghanistan. Thus, the article suggests a broad twofold research agenda. First, it points out that researching social spaces such as towns, villages, marketplaces, and neighborhoods beyond the realm of intergovernmental politics can lead to thick descriptions of how such places have been governed from within by agents external to them. Second, the study argues for a multifaceted examination of instruments, strategies, and institutions of security governance, its conduct and social effects by deploying critical and Foucauldian concepts such as the rationality and apparatuses of power relations. Thereby, it proposes an inquiry into Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Afghan National Security Forces as spatially and temporally specific apparatuses of surveillance and security

Focused deterrence, selective targeting, drug trafficking and organised crime: Concepts and practicalities. Modernising drug law enforcement report 2.

The objective of this project, led by the International Drug Policy Consortium, with the participation of the International Security Research Department at Chatham House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is to collate and refine theoretical material and examples of new approaches to drug law enforcement, as well as to promote debate amongst law enforcement leaders on the implications for future strategies. Key points: • Organised crime and illicit economies generate multiple threats to states and societies. Yet, goals such as a complete suppression of organised crime may sometimes be unachievable, especially in the context of acute state weakness where underdeveloped and weak state institutions are the norm. • Zero-tolerance approaches to drugs and crime, popular around the world since the late 1980s, have often proven problematic. They have often failed to suppress criminality while increasing human rights violations and police abusiveness. • Focused-deterrence strategies, selective targeting, and sequential interdiction efforts are being increasingly embraced as more promising law enforcement alternatives. • These approaches seek to minimise the most pernicious behaviour of criminal groups, such as engaging in violence, or to maximise certain kinds of desirable behaviour sometimes exhibited by criminals, such as eschewing engagement with terrorist groups. • Focused-deterrence and selective targeting strategies enable overwhelmed law enforcement institutions to overcome certain under-resourcing problems. • How ‘the most pernicious’ group is defined or what is designated as ‘the most harmful’ behaviour to be deterred can vary. The broad concept is to move law enforcement forces away from random non-strategic strikes and blanket ‘zero-tolerance’ approaches against lowest-level offenders, and toward strategic selectivity to give each counter-crime operation enhanced impact. • Whether to focus selective interdiction on high-value targets or the middle layer of criminal groups is importantly related to whether incapacitation or deterrence strategies are privileged and what focus and objective they have. • The focused-deterrence approaches and prioritised-interdiction concepts are to a great extent derived from Boston’s fight against violent gangs in the early 1990s. Similar strategies, as well as transnational versions of focused-deterrence approaches, have been adopted elsewhere in the world. • Factors that impact the level of effectiveness of focused-deterrence strategies and selective interdiction include the political context, the level of pre-existing intelligence and enforcement capacity of the government, the government’s capacity to concentrate resources, the size and scale of criminality, the complexity of and power distribution in the criminal market, and the structure of criminal groups. • Careful monitoring of the effectiveness and side effects of these strategies is necessary, although evaluating their effectiveness presents difficult inferential problems and threats to validity

¿Quién paga por la paz en Colombia?

Este artículo examina los costos políticos que habrán de asumir las FARC, las fuerzas armadas, los políticos derechistas, la élite y los intereses creados, las personas desplazadas, los cultivadores de coca y la clase media. El análisis también aborda el papel y el impacto de otros actores, como las Bacrim y los grupos guerrilleros que aún siguen operando, incluido el ELN

Fentanyl Trafficking: The Role of Mexico and China and US Policy Responses

The evolution of fentanyl trafficking patterns and the role of Mexican and Chinese criminal networks, as well as the policy responses of the governments of Mexico and China, are critical policy issues for our region. Analyzing the crime and smuggling patterns at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as myths and realities of who smuggles fentanyl into the United States and how this is accomplished can help to identify possible policy interventions. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Mexico, this lecture examines the behavior of Mexican criminal groups in Mexico and analyzes U.S. supply side policy measure options. This lecture concludes with a conversation with Dr. Sara Hunt, assistant dean of behavioral health sciences for the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, discussing the state of treatment services and the mental and behavioral health workforce in Nevada