by Noah Raford
• Drug cartels are spreading violence in Central America, the Caribbean, and West Africa.
• Collusion between insurgents and criminal groups in central Africa, the Sahel, and Southeast Asia fuels terrorism and plunders natural resources.
• The smuggling of migrants and modern slavery have spread in eastern Europe as much as in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
• In many urban centers, authorities have lost control to organized gangs.
• Cyber crime threatens vital infrastructure and state security, steals identities, and commits fraud.
• Pirates from the world’s poorest countries (the Horn of Africa) hold ships from the richest nations for ransom.
• Counterfeit goods undermine licit trade and endanger lives.
• Money-laundering in rogue jurisdictions and uncontrolled economic sectors corrupts the banking sector worldwide.
These criminals are more than simple brigands; they are challenging the fabric of the state and civil society within the areas they operate in. This phenomenon is described in the essay “Criminal Insurgencies in the Americas.”24
Transnational criminal organizations and gangs are threatening state institutions throughout the Americas. In extreme circumstances, cartels, gangs or maras, drug trafficking organizations, and their paramilitary enforcers are waging de facto criminal insurgencies to free themselves from the influence of the state.
A wide variety of criminal gangs are waging war amongst themselves and against the state. Rampant criminal violence enabled by corruption and weak state institutions has allowed some criminal enterprises to develop virtual or parallel states. These contested or “temporary autonomous” zones create what theorist John Robb calls “hollow states” with areas where the legitimacy of the state is severely challenged. These fragile, sometimes lawless zones (or criminal enclaves) cover territory ranging from individual neighborhoods, favelas or colonias to entire cities—such as Ciudad Juárez—to large segments of exurban terrain in Guatemala’s Petén province, and sparsely policed areas on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.
As a consequence, the Americas are increasingly besieged by the violence and corrupting influences of criminal actors exploiting stateless territories (criminal enclaves and mafia-dominated municipalities) linked to the global criminal economy to build economic muscle and, potentially, political might.
Criminal Enclaves/Other Governed Areas
These criminal gangsters are removing themselves from the control of the state. Essentially, many areas in Mexico and Central America are experiencing the creation of para-states and lawless or contested zones within and across their borders. Understanding this situation is essential to recognizing the key factors in developing an understanding of the dynamics of non-state armed groups (criminal soldiers) and their impact on the state. These criminal soldiers are forging their own operational space. According to Sullivan and Weston:
Criminal-soldiers come in many guises. They may be members of a street gang or mara, members of a mafia or organized criminal enterprise, terrorists, insurgents, pirates, or warlords. In all cases, they challenge the traditional state monopoly on violence and political control. They may co-exist within stable states, dominate ungovernable, lawless zones, slums, or “no-go” zones, or be the de facto rulers of criminal enclaves or free-states. Likewise, the “criminal state” may range from a street gang’s narrow gangcontrolled turf of a few blocks or segments of blighted housing estates to larger uncontested neighborhoods in a barrio, favela, gecekondu, chawl, slum or mega-slum. Alternately, they can exist as “para-states,” “statelets” or “virtual states” in a combination of physical and increasingly networked terrain.25
The cartels and gangs are not only criminal actors, but they have several political dimensions. As recently stated by Sullivan and Rosales: “The cartels may not seek a social or political agenda, but once they control turf and territory and effectively displace the state they have no choice—they become ‘accidental insurgents.’ ”26
Criminal Insurgencies
Criminal insurgencies is one way to characterize these activities. Figure 4.2 shows a continuum of instability that embraces the types of state-challenging violence that may be experienced. This figure, adapted from a table in “Terrorism, Crime, and Private Armies,”27 places criminal insurgencies in context to other forms of civil war and strife. Criminal insurgencies challenge the state by generating high-intensity criminal violence that erodes the legitimacy and solvency of state institutions.28 Criminal insurgencies can exist at several levels:
• Local Insurgencies: First, criminal insurgencies may exist as “local insurgencies” in a single neighborhood or “failed community” where gangs dominate local turf and political, economic, and social life. These areas may be “no-go zones” avoided by the police. The criminal enterprise collects taxes and exercises a near-monopoly on violence. A large segment of the extreme violence in Mexico is the result of local insurgencies. Municipalities like Ciudad Juárez or portions of some states, like Michoacán, are under siege. The cartels and other gangs dominate these areas through a careful combination of symbolic violence, attacks on the police, and corruption and by fostering a perception that they are community protectors (i.e., “social bandits”). Here the criminal gang is seeking to develop a criminal enclave or criminal free state. Since the nominal state is never fully supplanted, development of a parallel state is the goal.
• Battle for the Parallel State: Second, criminal insurgencies may be battles for control of the “parallel state.” These occur within the parallel state’s governance space but also spill over to affect the public at large and the police and military forces that seek to contain the violence and curb the erosion of governmental legitimacy and solvency that results. In this case, the gangs or cartels battle each other for domination or control of the criminal enclave or criminal enterprise. The battle between cartels and their enforcer gangs to dominate the “plazas” is an insurgency where one cartel seeks to replace the other in the parallel state.
• Combating the State: Third, criminal insurgencies may result when the criminal enterprise directly engages the state itself to secure or sustain its independent range of action. This occurs when the state cracks down and takes action to dismantle or contain the criminal gang or cartel, and the cartel attacks back. This is the situation seen in Michoacán, where La Familia retaliates against the Mexican military and intelligence services in counterattacks. Here the cartels are active belligerents against the state.
• The State Implodes: Fourth, criminal insurgency may result when high-intensity criminal violence spirals out of control. Essentially, this would be the cumulative effect of sustained, unchecked criminal violence and criminal subversion of state legitimacy through endemic corruption and co-option. Here the state simply loses the capacity to respond. This variant has not yet occurred in Mexico or Central America but is arguably the situation in Guinea-Bissau, where criminal entities have transitioned the state into a virtual narco-state. This could occur in other fragile zones if cartel and gangs violence is left to fester and grow.
Figure 4.2. Warlord Continuum of Instability
Assessing the Situation
Traditional measures that may inform understanding of the situation include the work of the PITF, while data sets from the World Bank (and World Bank Institute) on indicators of “governance” aid the assessment of the impact on the state—that is, state capacity and governability. The World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators assesses six “governance” dimensions: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political stability and lack of violence/terrorism; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law; and (6) control of corruption.29
Pertinent units of analysis are the cartels and the Mexican state—the government of Mexico and its constituent states and municipalities—as well as the Mexican public. In a broad sense, the variables are violence, corruption, intimidation, and state capacity.
Spe
cific variables and indicators that are germane to developing intelligence and an analytical framework include violence (assassinations of police and public officials, beheadings, etc.)—specifically, violence among cartels (criminals) and violence directed toward state officials (including armed engagements between the cartel and the police or military)—corruption; the degree of transparency; the reach of the cartel or gang; the effectiveness of governance and policing; community stability; the effectiveness of economic regulation; and the degree of territorial control (loss or gain by the state versus the cartels).
The impact of warlord enterprises on state capacity, control of territory, and legitimacy is critical. All of these activities occur across time. Some changes are slow moving; some are rapid.
Moving forward, it’s important that such activity is explored through a variety of lenses, not just through the lens of state failure or atrophy, but also, as we explore in upcoming chapters, through the lens of the management and sustenance of the state itself.
5 From Patronage Politics to Predatory States
Crime and Governance in Africa
Tuesday Reitano
Big Man in Malibu
It is perhaps fitting that the case that finally put an end to the impunity of Equatorial Guinea’s second vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, in the United States would have such a bizarre name. On October 10, 2014, the United States Department of Justice made public the settlement of the case of United States v. One Michael Jackson Signed Thriller Jacket and Other Michael Jackson Memorabilia; Real Property Located on Sweetwater Mesa Road in Malibu, California; One 2011 Ferrari 599 GTO.1 One might ask how a former minister of environment of a tiny West African nation, whose official salary was less than $5,000 a month, might end up in possession of a $35 million house in Malibu, a Gulfstream business jet, and a crystal-covered white glove used by Michael Jackson on his Bad tour. You could equally inquire how his father, Equatoguinean president Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mbasogo, had stockpiled, by 2004, a $700 million fortune in U.S. bank accounts when, up until then, the GDP of his entire country was a mere $330 million a year. Or how he could spend public money to purchase a $180 million luxury building on the exclusive Avenue Foch in Paris—and furnish it with $50 million in furniture2—when more than half his population has no access to clean water.3
Regrettably, the scurrilous stories of the Obiangs’s shameless self-enrichment are by no means unique in global politics. There are countless stories, from all continents, of leaders who abuse power to amass private fortunes and massive shoe collections while their citizens suffer in poverty. One of the key observations of this book is that, over time, warlord enterprises can become indistinguishable from the state itself. Examples of this phenomenon cluster with particular frequency in Africa, where we hear appalling stories of corruption and crime by heads of states and their cronies. This distinctive style of governance has resulted in the coining of kleptocracy to describe the limitless pillaging of state resources and the culture of nepotism and corruption that accompanies it.4
African states are characterized by political tribalism and patronage systems that became ingrained as a system of governance in the colonial period and in the years following independence. Over subsequent decades, these systems were transformed first into authoritarian regimes and then into weak multiparty democracies dominated, in each case, by a series of “Big Men.” It is this structure, which can be seen in all corners of the continent, that has lead to the development of what are arguably warlord states, where the entire resources of the nation, both licit and illicit, are held hostage by the most potent of kingpins while the majority of the population remains mired in poverty and beleaguered by repression, human-rights abuses, and conflict. The analysis of warlord states reveals two uncomfortable truths, which earn this chapter its place rounding out the bleak picture presented in “The Dark Side.”
The first uncomfortable truth is that international community holds its share of culpability for enabling and perpetuating warlord states: an overreliance on elite pacts to end conflict has created a vicious cycle of fragility. Moreover, the failure of the international financial regime to prevent or prosecute major capital flight allows African resources to be diverted from development objectives. The second truth comes in recognizing the role that patronage governance has played in fostering the growth of terrorist movements (with both domestic and international agendas) from what might otherwise have been, arguably, legitimate insurgent movements.
There are few, if any, obvious fixes to this Gordian knot, though later chapters will highlight some glimmers of hope that can be seen, Pollyanna-esque, in the grim status quo. As this chapter morbidly concludes, however, there is little evidence that there are either the structural conditions or the political will to take the steps necessary not only to demand higher standards of accountability from these warlord states but also to achieve them ourselves.
Patronage Politics and Pacts of the Elite
There is a longstanding body of literature, covering multiple African states, that describes how the political order is shaped by a framework of patronage, also known as clientelism, whereby leaders purchase support by dispensing largesse: opponents are bought off; allies are rewarded. The ability to allocate resources at will is considered the entitlement of the victor, not theft from ordinary citizens. President Obiang has long used this argument in defense of his son’s playboy lifestyle: “He earned money in accordance with the laws of Equatorial Guinea, even if those don’t comply with international standards.”5 A recent continental study of the use of Chinese foreign development assistance to Africa, which, unlike assistance from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, comes entirely without earmarking, found that the birthplace of the head of state receives 270 percent more than other regions.6
Some locate the roots of this governance style in the colonial period, where colonizing states sought alliances with local big men in order to control territory. These territories were frequently organized along ethnic lines, and the administrative localities were organized accordingly, which increased the warlord’s territorial dominance.7 It was a significant challenge to transform these former colonies—whose primary objective had been the generation of resources for the colonizing states—into effective, independent entities that focused on equitable delivery of services to geographically and ethnically dispersed populations. Under colonialism, the formation of cities was not organic; urban areas were formed to serve as transport hubs for colonizers extracting resources.8 The postcolonial legacy to Africa featured sharp rural-urban divides—elite-centric governance in urban hubs and borderland populations who saw little or no evidence of the state. Those who could find no compelling means by which to ally themselves to the state elite found themselves quickly marginalized.
The key characteristic to note is that in these patronage arrangements, the big men do not generally control followers, but rather, it is in the interest of the followers to maintain ties with a big man, because he provides economic possibilities, political and physical protection, and social security.9 The gathering of power and its maintenance are built on reciprocity, and if the big man does not distribute enough largesse, he will eventually lose his supporters. This style of governance has also been described as “factional politics” and is based more on transaction than issues of principle. “That Big Men constantly have to demonstrate their power through displays of wealth and force is not indicative of their strength but of the very fragility and negotiability of their status … in the business of winning not votes but clients; not spearheading a party but a political network.”10 Societies that rely on this constant negotiation—a combination of patronage, coercion, and fragile pacts between elites—are far from stable. Any stresses that affect the status quo—such as the death of a leader, external security threats, or economic and demographic pressures—will shift the balance of power, cause a realignment of networks, and frequently trigger violence or conflict. As th
e UN secretary general concluded in 1998, “The nature of political power in many African States, together with the real and perceived consequences of capturing and maintaining power, is a key source of conflict across the continent. It is frequently the case that political victory assumes a ‘winner-takes-all’ form with respect to wealth and resources, patronage, and the prestige and prerogatives of office.”11
Regrettably, the default method of resolving these conflicts has been through the negotiation of another elite pact rather than a transformation of state-society institutions. A 2009 study found that the average number of cabinet posts in African democracies has grown by nearly 25 percent over thirty years, as leaders seek to accommodate potential dissenters by bringing them into government. The study further observed that when leaders are required to hand over the reins of power, they will reduce the number of cabinet posts before the transition, thereby hamstringing their successor by forcing him to make more uncomfortable power-sharing negotiations.12 The challenge is that societies that rely on patronage to find stability without broader and deeper institutional transformation risk a vicious cycle. Furthermore, each bout of violence further weakens institutions and destroys social capital, making it a trap that becomes increasingly difficult to escape from.13
