Selected excerpts from the report

Key findings

Treating organized crime and corruption as a ‘cancer’ or a ‘virus’ has become shorthand in international policy circles, a diagnosis that is used to explain how countries as diverse as Mali, Ukraine or Mexico have fallen under the influence of criminal rackets that exercise control over certain state bodies, politicians, judges, police forces or territory.

However, this paper will argue that an approach rooted in the notion of institutional capture by an external criminal force is – despite its persuasive rhetoric – gravely mistaken. For various reasons, illicit activity has become part of the living organism of many countries’ public and business affairs. It must be treated not as a foreign body, but as an integral part of governance and economic systems, and it is essential that policy responses are adapted to this reality.

In short, it (ed. note- organized crime) has become a systemic part of governance: a constant resource for politicians and officials, which in certain circumstances can trigger mass public discontent and even political instability. Crime has moved from being a cause of prosecution to a pretext for revolution.

The development of new transnational trafficking networks – generating large mark-ups in value for their products, as well as sophisticated new divisions of labour – brought resources, recruits and weakly governed or fragile countries into an increasingly sophisticated criminal business chain.

It is this development that has been synonymous with the rise in violence in Central America, or the conversation of parts of the Sahel, such as northern Mali and Niger, into hubs for illicit activity, notably the trafficking of drugs and humans. Many of the conflicts that are now attracting high levels of geopolitical concern feature illicit activity and organized crime at their heart.

Links between crime and governance

The seepage of organized criminal activity into the political affairs of low-income and fragile countries raises a set of issues that require urgent consideration. Until quite recently, the profit-making criminal activities carried out by governments rarely preoccupied the international community, and were treated far more leniently that the atrocities or human rights violations carried out by states and their associated militias.

However, recent wars in Afghanistan and Mali, or cases of criminalized states in Guatemala and Guinea-Bissau, have pointed towards a change in this approach, and a much firmer commitment to international support for law enforcement, above all when the crises involve narco-trafficking that is linked to the actions of state officials and the recruitment strategies of non-state armed groups.

Even so, the same dilemmas affect policy towards crime-affected conflicts and states that plague foreign interventions in many other settings. In short, there is no easy way to navigate the tensions between the needs of the countries themselves for broad-based, equitable development, and the demands of Western donors for quick ‘wins’ in a campaign to bring about ‘stability’.

However, Mali’s crisis in 2012 also provided a telling case from sub-Saharan Africa, and one that is emblematic of the shift in the nature of organized crime, and its broader implications for international security. The role of criminal activity in fuelling the armed insurgency of the north was emblematic of the consequences of illicit activity in poor, fragmented and weakly governed environments, of the sort that has preoccupied the development community for several years, and will continue to do so.

But it was the central government’s own perceived complicity with corruption that prompted an eventual coup by junior military officers in Bamako, converting a separatist threat in the north of the country into an existential challenge to the nation-state.

The embeddedness of crime

Any assessment of national and international policies towards organized crime, and their shortcomings in practice, must begin by recognizing the ways in which crime is deeply embedded in society and politics.

The process of criminal entrenchment depends greatly on time and place: the examples offered by the Colombian city of Medellín in the 1970s (source of Pablo Escobar’s infamous cocaine-trafficking cartel) and northern Mali three decades later suggest that a structural change in people’s livelihoods alongside pragmatic political collusion in this shift are prerequisites for a generalized shift in public attitudes to crime.

For instance, Escobar’s huge economic influence was predicated on the collapse of the city’s cotton industry. Mali’s shift to illicit trafficking in drugs and arms came about after substantial investments were made in coastal trade facilities across North and West Africa, starving the trans-Saharan route of conventional commercial opportunities.

Disentangling the political-criminal nexus

For the moment, the fight against organized crime would appear to be at an impasse, hemmed in by the embedded nature of illicit activity in communities and states. In order to begin sketching a more effective and comprehensive set of policies to address the global presence of crime and corruption, and its impact within nations and regions, we must begin by understanding why organized criminal activity has evolved in such a way that is has become entrenched in communities and state systems, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states; and, on this basis, explain its evolution into a recurrent feature of popular discontent with governments, above all in flawed democracies. In short, it is essential to recognize and account for the systemic presence, real and perceived, of crime and corruption.

In short, while illicit activity is playing a greater role in shaping political life by taking advantage of weak controls on private financing of politics or by stepping into the institutional fragmentation and vacuums generated in certain weak state environments, this criminal presence also serves as a source of collective discontent and mass mobilization. While such mobilization could bring about far-reaching benefits to the probity and integrity of public life, as may occur in Latin America, it is also able to endanger basic political stability; or in the case of Ukraine or Mali, international security as a whole.

Recommendations

Civil society engagement

It is crucial to recognize the vital role that local populations have played in both the facilitation of, and the fight against, corruption and organized crime. These include efforts to raise awareness of the developmental and democratic costs of crime and corruption through information campaigns; as “watchdogs” of state actors and investigators of malpractice; and by supporting whistle-blowing through the creation of anonymous outlets.

Regulation of political financing

The increasing influence of private money in democratic politics provides multiple opportunities for corruption and criminal infiltration. In response, reforms aimed at better oversight of political financing are an essential step, especially in many ‘third wave’ democracies.

For instance, measures could include policies that ban certain types of anonymous or corporate contributions, ensure equal media access, regulate private funding, document and publish party and candidate finance information, provide a better balance between private and public funding, and implement spending limits for political campaigns. Strict selection requirements for party candidates are also required to prevent as far as possible the entry of criminal actors into government office.

At the same time, it is widely acknowledged that the problem of control over private and illicit finance in many democracies can be traced to a lack of enforcement of existing rules – especially since enforcement will often depend on judges, prosecutors or other authorities that are heavily influenced by the elected politicians of the day.

Establishing more autonomous bodies of electoral and political control is far from simple, although isolated pockets of progress can be found even in heavily politicized state structures.

For instance, making full use of a team of exceptional young prosecutors, and working with them to trace the networked connections between state officials, elected politicians, business figures and criminals, has been the basis of the CICIG’s (ed. note- International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala) most important indictments in Guatemala.

Strengthening the judiciary

In highly corrupt states, the judiciary often lacks political independence, as many judges have ties to corrupt politicians, are intimidated by them, or depend on them for their future career advancement.

As a first step, donors should be fully aware of the likelihood of such connections, and support targeted efforts to strengthen judicial independence. These could include bolstering the independent investigative capacity of the prosecution service, or supporting closer monitoring of judges’ personal fortunes and transparency of their rulings.

Increasing financial transparency

International agreements to increase the transparency of the financial system, and facilitate the detection, investigation and prosecution of transnational corruption and of money laundering, and the recovery of stolen assents should be fully respected, in practice as well as in theory.

Existing state commitments to anti-corruption agreements, such as FATF (ed. note- Financial Action Task Force) and UNCAC (ed. note- United Nations Convention Against Corruption), must also be closely monitored, and should be subject to some form of sanction when it is clear that they are not respected.

Rethink the multilateral approach to crime

Serious thought should therefore be given to the reform of this UN body (ed. Note- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC). To ensure effectiveness and reach, its member base would feature all nation-states as it does now, but with a greater emphasis on the voice of countries from the Global South, which tend to be most affected by crime.

The body would be devoted exclusively to crime and corrupt networks, thereby forsaking its controversial and, for certain states, legitimacy-sapping association with the failed ‘war on drugs’. Its novelty, however, would be the inclusion of a core civil society involvement.

The ideal, in fact, would be to establish a tri-partite body, similar to that of the International Labour Organization (ILO), where the governments of member states, representatives of their judiciaries and civil society actors could come together at a UN level to debate and elaborate new policies on transnational crime that correspond to the real possibilities for action and prosecution in each country.

This sort of body would not be captured exclusively by state actors, and would in fact have a margin in which to be openly critical of states’ willingness to act on embedded organized crime. Moreover, it could devote far more attention and energy to dealing with the socio-economic factors that are conducive to the spread of criminal activities, and which tend to be neglected by an exclusively law-enforcement approach.

It is unlikely that the suggestions made above could all be backed by the international community and civil society at one and the same time. But they do represent the bases for a more comprehensive approach – even if they leave to one side valid concerns over the links between criminal activity and the nature and effects of economic globalization, notably the rise of inequality and youth unemployment.

The proposals, however, acknowledge the very real threats now posed by organized criminal activity as it works through and inside democratic states, progressively hollowing them out as it does so.