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Mexican drug networks are large and violent, engaging in activities like the trafficking of narcotics, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and mass murder. Despite the impact of these activities in Mexico and abroad, these illicit networks are remarkably resilient to state intervention. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with US and Mexican law enforcement, government officials, organized crime victims, and criminals, Nathan P. Jones examines the comparative resilience of two basic types of drug networks—“territorial” and “transactional”—that are differentiated by their business strategies and provoke wildly different responses from the state. Transactional networks focus on trafficking and are more likely to collude with the state through corruption, while territorial networks that seek to control territory for the purpose of taxation, extortion, and their own security often trigger a strong backlash from the state. Timely and authoritative, Mexico's Illicit Drug Networks and the State Reaction provides crucial insight into why Mexico targets some drug networks over others, reassesses the impact of the war on drugs, and proposes new solutions for weak states in their battles with drug networks.
The drug war in Mexico has caused some U.S. analysts to view Mexico as a failed or failing state. While these fears are exaggerated, the problems of widespread crime and violence, government corruption, and inadequate access to justice pose grave challenges for the Mexican state. The Obama administration has therefore affirmed its commitment to assist Mexico through continued bilateral collaboration, funding for judicial and security sector reform, and building "resilient communities."David A. Shirk analyzes the drug war in Mexico, explores Mexico's capacities and limitations, examines the factors that have undermined effective state performance, assesses the prospects for U.S. support to strengthen critical state institutions, and offers recommendations for reducing the potential of state failure. He argues that the United States should help Mexico address its pressing crime and corruption problems by going beyond traditional programs to strengthen the country's judicial and security sector capacity and help it build stronger political institutions, a more robust economy, and a thriving civil society.
Drug trafficking represents a major sociopolitical concern across the developing world. In Latin America, organized crime groups have emerged as quasi-governmental authorities that exercise strict control over local economies and political institutions. Through a comparative-historical analysis of two Mexican states (Sinaloa and Michoac n), this dissertation explains the origins of illicit drug markets, as well as social responses to contemporary dynamics of criminal rule. I argue that the expansion of the drug trade in the twentieth century stems from state building projects that attempted to modernize the countryside, and from the selective application of prohibitionist policies in drug-producing regions and trafficking centers. By the turn of the century, trafficking networks, commonly referred to as drug cartels, emerged as perpetrators of violence in the context of militarized state repression. In Sinaloa, its eponymous cartel initiated a series of armed conflicts in key border cities that gave it the semblance organizational coherence. Yet its horizontal structure made the network resilient in the face of internal schisms and leadership removals. In southern Michoac n, criminal actors emerged as de facto local authorities, governing their communities through violence and exorbitant taxation. I argue that repressive criminal rule elicited an armed reaction from local elites who organized vigilante groups that reflected the region's unequal agrarian social structures.
Drug Trafficking, Corruption and States is cutting edge research. Garay Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán, along with their contributing authors help document the transition from economic to political imperatives within transnational drug cartels. The break from the Zetas by La Familia Michoacana is one example contained in their empirical survey. Social Network Analysis is their tool for illuminating the varying dynamics of cartel-state inter-penetration and reconfiguration. In doing so they clearly discern between State Capture (StC) and Co-opted State Reconfiguration (CStR). As the drug wars and criminal insurgencies rage in the Americas and beyond, this seminal framework will facilitate efforts by scholars, law enforcement officials, intelligence analysts and policymakers to understand shifts in sovereignty, and to illuminate the mechanisms of transnational illicit networks and their interaction with the state.
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 The State Reaction and Illicit-Network Resilience -- 2 The Arellano Félix Organization's Resilience -- 3 The State Reaction -- 4 The Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas, and Los Caballeros Templarios -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Comparison of Territorial versus Transactional Drug-Trafficking Networks -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
This dissertation elucidates the relationship between a profit-seeking illicit network's (PSIN's) business strategy and resilience. The dissertation finds that territorial PSIN business strategies challenge "the territorially sovereign state" through activities like kidnapping and extortion. The intensity of the state reaction to the illicit network was the single most important factor in its ability to survive disruptive events. The state, in this case Mexico, reacted more intensely to territorial PSIN's in collaboration with civil society, other states and rival "transactional" PSIN's. In this case the state (Mexico) dissolved a territorial PSIN, suggesting that the state is capable of effectively confronting this illicit network type. On the other hand, the case finds that the state was corrupted by transactional PSINs whose business strategies made them resilient. This finding suggests that through corruption, transactional PSINs will pose a long-term threat to democratic institutionalization in Mexico and internationally anywhere that states must address these illicit networks. The dissertation is an in-depth historical case study of the Tijuana Cartel, also known as the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO). Through archival research and interviews with experts on the illicit network a case study was constructed. Experts interviewed for the dissertation during nine months of fieldwork in Mexico City and Tijuana, included: journalists, law enforcement, scholars, extortion victims and businessmen. Given the similar structures of illicit networks, the findings of this dissertation have important implications for understanding other drug trafficking organizations, prison gangs, terrorists, insurgencies, arms traffickers, among a host of other potential "dark network" actors.
Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds describes the history of Mexican narco cartels and their regional and organizational trajectories and differences. Covering more than five decades, sociologist James H. Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, and covert connections.
Provides a broad range of informed perspectives on the key issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. Covers all sides of the problem and policy alternatives. Chapters include: changing patterns of drug abuse in the U.S.; Mexico's changing illicit drug supply role; U.S. narcotics policy toward Mexico: consequences for the bilateral relationship; controlling the U.S.-Mexican drug market; and production and supply of drugs.
Drug Trafficking in Mexico and the United States examines drug trafficking from an interdisciplinary and progressive perspective. Gabriel Ferreyra analyzes its origins, apogee, cultural globalization, and destructive effects in Mexico.
Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) pose the greatest crime threat to the United States and have "the greatest drug trafficking influence," according to the annual U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA's) National Drug Threat Assessment. These organizations work across the Western Hemisphere and globally. They are involved in extensive money laundering, bribery, gun trafficking, and corruption, and they cause Mexico's homicide rates to spike. They produce and traffic illicit drugs into the United States, including heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, and powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and they traffic South American cocaine. Over the past decade, Congress has held numerous hearings addressing violence in Mexico, U.S. counternarcotics assistance, and border security issues. Mexican DTO activities significantly affect the security of both the United States and Mexico. As Mexico's DTOs expanded their control of the opioids market, U.S. overdoses rose sharply to a record level in 2017, with more than half of the 72,000 overdose deaths (47,000) involving opioids. Although preliminary 2018 data indicate a slight decline in overdose deaths, many analysts believe trafficking continues to evolve toward opioids. The major Mexican DTOs, also referred to as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), have continued to diversify into such crimes as human smuggling and oil theft while increasing their lucrative business in opioid supply. According to the Mexican government's latest estimates, illegally siphoned oil from Mexico's state-owned oil company costs the government about $3 billion annually. Mexico's DTOs have been in constant flux. In 2006, four DTOs were dominant: the Tijuana/Arellano Felix organization (AFO), the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juárez/Vicente Carillo Fuentes Organization (CFO), and the Gulf Cartel. Government operations to eliminate DTO leadership sparked organizational changes, which increased instability among the groups and violence. Over the next dozen years, Mexico's large and comparatively more stable DTOs fragmented, creating at first seven major groups, and then nine, which are briefly described in this report. The DEA has identified those nine organizations as Sinaloa, Los Zetas, Tijuana/AFO, Juárez/CFO, Beltrán Leyva, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, the Knights Templar, and Cartel Jalisco-New Generation (CJNG). In mid-2019, leader of the long-dominant Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin ("El Chapo") Guzmán, was sentenced to life in a maximum-security U.S. prison, spurring further fracturing of a once hegemonic DTO. By some accounts, a direct effect of this fragmentation has been escalated levels of violence. Mexico's intentional homicide rate reached new records in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, Mexico's national public security system reported more than 17,000 homicides between January and June, setting a new record. In the last months of 2019, several fragments of formerly cohesive cartels conducted flagrant acts of violence. For some Members of Congress, this situation has increased concern about a policy of returning Central American migrants to cities across the border in Mexico to await their U.S. asylum hearings in areas with some of Mexico's highest homicide rates. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected in a landslide in July 2018, campaigned on fighting corruption and finding new ways to combat crime, including the drug trade. According to some analysts, challenges for López Obrador since his inauguration include a persistently ad hoc approach to security; the absence of strategic and tactical intelligence concerning an increasingly fragmented, multipolar, and opaque criminal market; and endemic corruption of Mexico's judicial and law enforcement systems. In December 2019, Genero Garcia Luna, a former top security minister under the Felipe Calderón Administration (2006-2012), was arrested in the United States on charges he had taken enormous bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.