Narcoterrorism and drug trafficking in Latin America. Interview with Vincenzo Musacchio

The rebirth and development of modern criminal organizations, the recent narcos attacks that bloodied the area endangering public order, endemic corruption, make Latin America a highly destabilized area.

We talk about it with the criminologist Vincenzo Musacchio.

Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon officially declared a "war on drugs" against the countries of Central and South Latin America.

Since then, unfortunately, those territories have remained battlefields between the state and drug traffickers.

Narcotic drugs represent the main business of the Latin American mafias that has strengthened significantly with globalization.

Criminal organizations engaged in drug trafficking have readily adapted to changes in the global market, both in demand and in local and global politics.

Today the cartels dominate those territories, in terms of popular consensus, militarily and politically.

They are able to endanger democracy and create real narco-states.

are we actually facing such a dramatic situation after all these years

The reason is not difficult to identify: we are facing the failure of global and national drug policies and have not been able to prevent and repress that fundamental change in the approach to the global drug trade that went from national to transnational.

We fought this battle with blunt weapons and without any really effective prevention strategies.

In my opinion, there is still time only if criminal policies adapted to the new developments in international drug trafficking are also adopted at the supranational level.

There are a variety of policy measures that individual states can consider.

Starting from targeted legalization in some health services for people with addictions, to prevention programs designed to limit the number of new hires.

The destruction of the plantations must actually be affected.

Implement social and labor policies that create an alternative to the activities that revolve around coca plantations.

Unfortunately, what makes this type of struggle really difficult is the perpetually high demand for drugs in the world.

The trafficking and distribution of drugs has always been a "service" offered by Latin America to our globalized world.

Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Equador and recently also other nations of the area, play a fundamental role in terms of world production and distribution.

While cocaine, heroin and marijuana have long been considered the main products of trafficking, drug trafficking organizations have increased shipments of methamphetamines and other unnatural drugs in recent years.

The production, trafficking and distribution of drugs to consumers has led criminal organizations to respond rapidly and widely to new needs and strong market demands in consuming countries, in particular, in Europe and the United States.

I believe that the earnings related to drug trafficking, in particular cocaine, cannot be estimated so much they are immeasurable.

The economy produced by global organized crime is equal to two per cent of world GDP.

We can well understand how drug trafficking is today the main source of income for the new mafias.

The European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction estimates that the cost of a gram of medium-high quality cocaine in Italy is around eighty euros.

The new generations of drug traffickers have understood that it was necessary to make cocaine no longer the "drug of the rich" but unfortunately within everyone's reach, even the youngest people.

This has led to the huge increase in drug trafficking on a large scale worldwide with the production of coca and coca-based products from Latin America.

All this has resulted in earnings that are difficult to estimate, contributing to the birth of new mafias that are much more lethal than the previous ones.

I believe one of the reasons is that I have not given valid alternatives to indigenous peasants who are forced to work endlessly to produce and refine coca and / or other drug seedlings and therefore be able to survive a life of hardship and often also of death.

There is also a lack of suitable international cooperation so that the individual states of Latin America are often left alone to their inexorable destiny.

The drug trafficking system has proved to be of fundamental importance for the local economy of those territories.

Almost all of the smallholder farmers in those territories rely to live only on the cultivation of various crops to create drugs.

It is on new alternatives that it will be necessary to influence in order to try to make the destruction of the plantations really effective.

Third generations of drug traffickers much richer than previous ones, have bonded with prominent local families, bribed politicians and officials at all levels, and bought legal businesses to launder dirty money.

With the increase in production and profits, however, violence has not diminished while the judicial and police institutions are insufficient and unprepared to fight this new type of organized crime.

Modern traffickers, taking advantage of the weakness of the state, have greatly extended their social and political influence by normalizing their shady affairs in civil society.

They contributed to electoral campaigns by electing their political contacts.

They bought television networks, radio stations and newspapers.

Pablo Escobar in his period of absolute hegemony created a welfare program, made economic contributions to the poor, built social housing in the slums and won the election as an alternate congressman on a Liberal Party vote.

This is enough to understand why these criminal cartels are so powerful.

What happened in Italy in the eighties and nineties happens.

Those magistrates seriously engaged in the fight against organized crime are killed.

We are facing a sign of weakness from the mafias.

It means that the magistrates killed were able to hit criminal organizations on a transnational level in the nerve centers.

A fact that must worry the international community and not a little and push it to become more involved in this type of fight against the mafias.

Not even we Italians can believe that this episode does not belong to us.

The mixes between Italian and Latin American mafias are well known.

From the point of view of criminal politics it was a necessary instrument of struggle.

It has, in fact, contributed to provoking a wide wave of violence from the various narcos cartels,

, of the Colombians.

I remember when an operation by the Colombian police and the American DEA, in the forts of the Yarí River in March 1984, led to the seizure of fourteen tons of cocaine, seven airplanes and some weapons and ammunition of war.

The Colombian cartel responded to that operation by assassinating the Minister of Justice.

The efforts regarding international cooperation - often uncoordinated - to eradicate coca plantations, especially since the so-called

"War on drugs", they have done little to end drug trafficking.

On the contrary, they have tended to influence the territorial displacement of drug production and the way drugs are distributed.

Drug traffickers are constantly adapting to the demands of international markets.

Of the top five illicit drugs trafficked in the world, demands for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana and ecstasy are all increasing exponentially.

This is one of the most serious problems to think about.

Europe has always been an interesting destination for Latin American cartels since the profitability of the traffic is similar to that of the US market.

In Europe, however, there is a variant that favors drug traffickers: the penalties for trafficking at the wholesale and retail level are considerably less heavy than in the US criminal system.

In addition, in the last two years, there has been a significant increase in cocaine trafficking in Spain and the United Kingdom as Colombians use unstable states in West Africa as transit nodes.

Few know that the new cartels are penetrating even more intensively into Asian markets, using Hong Kong as a bridge to China and Thailand.

If we assume that the number of global opioid, cocaine and marijuana users has increased dramatically over the past decade - and this despite the billions of dollars spent, the tens of thousands of lives lost and the hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated for the production, distribution and consumption - we understand the need to rethink how to deal with the various actors involved in the drug supply chain, for example, by creating social and work programs for farmers in order to offer them the possibility to grow alternative agricultural products and equally profitable and guarantee their access to European and North American markets.

different Latin America in

I believe that a different Latin America already exists.

There is a part of civil society that is beginning to react.

A judiciary that faces narcos with courage and determination (the example of Marcelo Pecci applies to all).

There is a demand for democracy, peace and fundamental rights.

Many of the most violent areas of that area have been converted into spaces of tourist and cultural attraction, through urban art and historical memories.

In my opinion, these are the winning examples of rebirth, which can inspire the whole Latin American area.

There are examples to imitate such as that of the peasant communities of Meta (Colombia) who have transformed coca crops into coffee plantations, have chosen the path of legality, replacing it with that of crime.

They are local processes, unfortunately,

not supported either by local institutions, let alone by international ones.

In order for Latin America to be given a chance of redemption, I believe that it is necessary to start afresh from this type of national reform, shared and above all supported at international level.

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