by Noah Raford
• Narcotics. India is the world’s largest legitimate producer of opium for use by the pharmaceutical industry. Every year, it issues thousands of permits to farmers to match licit demand. Motivated by the potential for massive returns, some farmers operate outside this system, risking the wrath of security forces for a crop worth $80 per pound. The U.S. State Department estimates that as much as 30 percent of India’s opium production is diverted to the black market.32 Two districts in Jharkhand alone generate $200 million per growing season.33 Naxals, noting this opportunity, step in and provide protection in exchange for a share of the proceeds. Though government forces destroyed more than $270 million worth of illegal crops in 2007 alone, farmers are still motivated to participate in this alternate economy.
• Informal tolls. Naxals and their affiliates are notorious for establishing roadblocks on major road arteries. While this is not a high-yield enterprise, it does amount to forcibly transforming critical state infrastructure into an illicit profit center. These blockades are not complex affairs. Often, a few individuals knock down a tree, or a band of young men lock arms and form a human chain across the road. They then demand a two- to six-dollar payment from passing vehicles under the implicit threat of violence.
What money remains after covering operational expenses is used to expand and to arm. In 2007, the Naxals bought uniforms, AK-47s, vehicles, and medicine worth $35 million, a far cry from the days of bows and arrows. The Naxals are building an arsenal for the threat they see on the horizon.
A Strategic Half-Life
It’s a fact that they have been robbed of their livelihood. Therefore, they look to the Naxals for justice.
—Arvind Inamdar, director general of police, Maharashtra
While the illicit economy provides revenue, generates trained and hardened troops, and seeds rot in the heart of the state, the expansion of opportunity into their territory presents an existential threat to the Naxals. For now, the benefits of co-opted globalization sustain and enable the insurgency to surpass the wildest expectations of those who fought in Naxalbari, but a time draws near when Naxals will not be content with melting into the forest, partial systems disruptions will not cause enough damage, and the revolutionary tax across all sectors of the formal and informal economies will be outweighed by the impact of foreign investment on the lives of India’s most removed citizens.
India’s strategy of development-as-counterinsurgency is fundamentally sound. If capital finds its way to the edges of India, and if the government overcomes corruption, disruption, and overruns, rural citizens will advance. They will become better educated, find new work, or perhaps migrate to the cities. This is an unacceptable outcome to the insurgency, which is predicated on the suffering of this peasant base.
And so the Naxals prepare. In the densest of jungles, they silently shape the way the world invests in India, facilitate widespread corruption, and arm themselves for what they see as the fight for the future.
9 Mexico’s Criminal Organizations
Weakness in Their Complexity, Strength in Their Evolution
Samuel Logan and James Bosworth
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 different groups are fighting each other, government forces, or civilian vigilante groups. A warlord entrepreneur is inherently resilient, displacing from one territory to another and across international boundaries as market conditions or threats to organizational structures present themselves.
When looking at this system from the standpoint of any individual criminal or leadership group, however, one quickly sees that life is nasty, brutish, and short—a life 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 the radar of the government or rival warlords. Organizations that seem strong at one point 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 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 much as governments are, 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.
While criminality—and the visibility and strength of the criminal system overall—has increased in Mexico in recent years, individual groups 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:
• 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
Each phase overlaps the previous phase, and any given organization may find itself shifting from one phase to the next. There are no clean breaks.
The first phase is Start-up, 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-Félix, the Carrillo Fuentes, the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, and Los Zetas—this phase is already complete.
The second phase is Competition, 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 have calmed 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 the stronger criminal force.
The third phase, Dominance, largely involves market expansion, diversification, and brand protection. The organization focuses on expansion into neighboring areas (thereby beginning the cycle again at phase 1) or adjacent product segments. The third phase 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.
In the final phase, Transition, 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 phase in which c
riminal organizations operating under a vertical, government-like structure are most prone to fail. Groups often cannot sustain the scale to which they have grown at this phase, and they crumble under the loss of their leadership, fragmenting into smaller, competing organizations. We can see, for example, how the Arellano-Félix, Carrillo Fuentes, and Beltran Leyva (BLO) criminal syndicates have all dealt with the successive loss of their leaders (with varying degrees of stability)—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 Villarreal, which atomized after his death in July 2010. There are now several groups fighting for control of Guadalajara, when, less than a year ago, one organization controlled the territory. The Gulf Cartel 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 prospective warlord entrepreneurs to avoid the criminal routes.
• 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 Calderón administration’s policy in Mexico. By going after the cartels with military force, Calderón appears to have accelerated the speed at which the criminal organizations go through stages of growth and decline, thereby creating more resilient organizations and increasing violence in their communities.
This strategy suggests that while going after the criminal leadership is necessary to defeat warlord entrepreneurs, it 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 catalyzes 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 criminal network 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 strategy for public security 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, 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. Moving forward, as this pattern repeats itself, leaders in Latin America may find themselves at the precipice of a new phase of the evolution of the criminal system, where successful warlords, such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the former 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 kingmaker is relatively swift to complete and nearly impossible to reverse.
Part 3
THE BRIGHT SIDE
10 The Politics of a Post-Climate-Change World
Pyongyang, Puntland, or Portland?
William Barnes and Nils Gilman
Beyond Political Decay
Editor’s note: Modern industrialized states face a stark challenge when dealing with systemic risk. Such states are often large and locked into political pathways of growth predicated on increasing consumption and enhanced complexity. The authors of this chapter suggest that these pathways work strongly against the possibility of change and that under these conditions, existing institutions are likely to fail to adapt. This is particularly true against large, existential threats such as climate change, which the authors suggest is the largest and most important risk faced by society.
Despite these many difficulties, the authors propose a positive vision of political organization that they believe may be the only functional alternative to warlord entrepreneurship in post-crisis conditions. This vision, which they call “Green Social Democracy,” focuses on localized productive capacity and strong civic values that, they hope, will provide both the economic self-sufficiency and political meaning necessary to combat the worst elements of warlordism. This sense of vision in the face of pessimism is our first example of a “bright side” example of post-collapse conditions.
A Thousand-Year Perfect Story
As the present volume documents, the early twenty-first century is a sea of icebergs, full of hazards, threats, and crises-in-the-making, whose obscured bulk we are just beginning to appreciate and map. Atmospheric carbon, accumulating out of sight for two hundred years, is a mega-berg, one with the potential to sink modern civilization by itself. Climate destabilization, now inescapable, promises to exacerbate other crises, turning this mix into a thousand-year “perfect storm.” The long-term futures of societies all over the planet will be shaped in large part by their experiences of and responses to the destructive ramifications of climate change, especially as those ramifications interact with other crises. It is already too late to avoid a cascade of local and regional “natural” disasters in the medium term (i.e., by midcentury), and heroic near-term action will be required to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if a long-term civilizational catastrophe of historic proportions is to be avoided. This, in combination with the panoply of other system-threats and crises covered in this volume, is humanity’s playing field going forward—like it or not.
The message of this volume is that on this playing field, those of us who see green social democracy as the only winning game plan are at a distinct disadvantage. Of course, we already knew that, but this volume adds a new dimension to the problem. Our adversaries and competitors are not just those wedded to the status quo—its official agents, champions, and beneficiaries—but also the protagonists of the deviant underside of that status quo: those amoral warlords, smuggler cartels, mafias, and narrowly self-interested profiteers, whose lack of scruples makes them better positioned to take short-term advantage of the weaknesses and breakdowns of established systems, and who have no interest in seeing those systems replaced by any more beneficial alternative.
One must begin these sorts of discussions by emphasizing that major breakdowns of the existing world system, and some kind of long-term transition to a more decentralized world, are now inevitable. As it becomes more and more difficult to remain blind to the handwriting on the wall, the sorts of adversaries and competitors discussed in this volume will nonetheless continue to pursue their narrow self-interests, no matter what the larger human costs. The key political question will be, what kinds of local and regional actors will predominate in the new ecology of the climate-changed world that is coming, and will any of them organize any larger positive hegemony—such as what we refer to here as Green Social Democracy—to partially replace the current “official” world system. Will the advocates of such Green Social Democracy (with whom the present authors identify) gain the ability to accomplish enough politically, programmatically, and institutionally that we can not only co-opt or ne
utralize most of the “liberal” and “conservative” defenders of the current status quo (as it declines and collapses), but also hold off the warlord entrepreneurs? Or will quasi-fascist larger-system-builders (perhaps warlords writ large) have outdone us in those regards and be the only serious adversaries of the run-of-the-mill warlords? Or perhaps we are destined for a mix: a world “governed” by alliances, truces, and modus vivendis between and among local warlords, criminal gangs and cartels, regional quasi-fascist regimes, and lucky and plucky city-states—with the latter perhaps joined in regional “Hanseatic Leagues,” defending, and preserving for future use, something like Green Social Democracy.1
The Nature of the Looming Catastrophe
Indefinite business-as-usual GHG emissions are now virtually certain to increase planetary temperatures by at least several full degrees centigrade by the latter part of this century (perhaps sooner), and likely a good deal more thereafter.2 But it is misleading to focus on increase in global average temperature per se. The essential point is that such warming will manifest in the form of regional extremes in temperature increase (multiples of the global average, including in the arctic and regions already prone to hot summers). These changes will be accompanied by the virtually complete disappearance of precipitation in some places, and frequent extreme rain and wind phenomena in other places. Such will produce extensive flooding in some areas and permanent drought in others, dramatically alter hydrologies on every continent, destroy the agricultural productivity of many of the world’s bread baskets—and also allow the permanent spread of tropical disease-carrying insects and pathogenic microbes into regions where they formerly could not survive the nighttime low temperatures most of the year. In the longer term, these developments will raise sea levels, destroying coastal and river-delta cities that are home to several billion people and the majority of today’s industrial and long-distance-transportation infrastructure. All of this will lead to massive refugee flows, as large areas and mega-cities become incapable of supporting more than sparse human population. Nor will these effects arrive smoothly or incrementally, allowing societies clear projections and ample time to adapt; rather they will unfold as cascading acute crises, producing social and political breakdowns in weaker nation-states, if not everywhere. Scarcity-fueled interstate conflicts will be likely, with conflict over control of fresh water sources and flows particularly threatening. All of these developments have already begun in some parts of the world, and the latest data show the above-referenced (midcentury) global-warming calendar accelerating.3
