State change and shifts in sovereignty are a potential consequence of the erosion of state authority, legitimacy, and capacity. Possible outcomes of such shifts could include failed states, the capture of state authority by transnational criminals, and potentially the emergence of new state-forms. Insurgencies, high-intensity crime, and criminal insurgencies that challenge state legitimacy and inhibit governance are a key national and global security issue.
State failure is one potential outcome of insolvent governance and extreme instability. This issue has been a concern to the global security and intelligence communities for several years, specifically since the implosion of the Somalian state. State failure refers to the complete or partial collapse of state authority. Failed states have governments with little political authority or ability to impose the rule of law. They are usually associated with widespread crime, violent conflict, or severe humanitarian crises, and they may threaten the stability of neighboring countries.1 Understanding this issue has led to some very good work on the dynamics of state erosion. For example, the State Failure Task Force—now the Political Instability Task Force (PITF)—a CIA-funded academic research initiative, was established in 1994 to examine Somalia. Its mandate includes assessing general political instability, including revolutionary or ethnic war, adverse regime change, genocide, and politicide. After 9/11, it added the relationships between states and terrorists to its scope of inquiry.
Among the powerful research presented by the PITF is a global model for forecasting political instability.2 That model is simple. It uses a few variables and has achieved a reliable degree of accuracy for forecasting conventional changes of political states—including violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals. This suggests common factors are at play in both situations. The four independent variables incorporated in the PITF model are regime change, infant mortality, conflict-ridden neighborhood indicators, and state-led discrimination.
This robust work looks at state failure from a conventional or political vantage point, but what about nontraditional or irregular drivers like transnational crime?
Two United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that highlight the impact of transnational crime on states are: “Threat of Narco-Trafficking in the Americas”3 and “The Globalization Of Crime: A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment.”4 According to the reports, both states and communities are caught in the crossfire of drug-related crime and the violence that it fuels in the Americas and across the Atlantic to Europe and Africa. According to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Narco-trafficking is also posing a threat to urban security, from Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. Gang violence and gun-related crime are on the rise. Some neighborhoods have become combat zones.”5
Transnational criminal enterprises appear to be the early beneficiaries of the knowledge society. Manuel Castells outlined the rise of the networked, information society in the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.6 In that work, Castells envisioned the emergence of powerful global criminal networks as one facet of the shift to a new state/sovereignty structure in which the state no longer controlled all facets of the economy and society. The conflict and security dimensions of networks have given rise to the concept of netwar7 and criminal netwarriors.8
The shift of government authority from the state to “para-states” or non-state actors/non-state armed groups or criminal netwarriors is a consequence of globalization, networked organization, and the exploitation of regional economic circuits to create a new base of power. These new power configurations may result in the decline of the state,9 new forms of sovereignty, or new state forms such as the “network state”10 or “market state.”11 As such, criminal gangs and cartels may be acting as new state-making entities.12
The capture, control, or disruption of strategic nodes in the global system and the intersections between them by criminal actors can have cascade effects.13 The result is a state of flux, resulting in a structural “hollowing” of many state functions while bolstering the state’s executive branch and its emphasis on internal security. This hollowing-out of state function is accompanied by an extra-national stratification of state function with a variety of structures or fora for allocating territory, authority, and rights.
These fora—including border zones and global cities—are increasingly contested, with states and criminal enterprises seeking their own “market share.” As a result, global insurgents, terrorists, and networked criminal enterprises can create “lawless zones,”14 “feral cities,”15 and “parallel states.”16 Figure 4.1 describes the local through global geospatial distribution of these potentials, ranging from failed communities (or neighborhoods) to failed or feral cities through failed states or regions.
Figure 4.1. Governance (State) Failure Continuum
The result has been characterized as a battle for information and real power.17 These state challengers—irregular warriors or non-state combatants (i.e., criminal netwarriors)—increasingly employ barbarization and high-order violence, combined with information operations, to seize the initiative and embrace the mantle of social bandit18 and confer legitimacy on themselves and their enterprises. Sovereignty is potentially shifting or morphing as a result of these challenges. This shift could result in a New Middle Ages, with fragmented authority, competing governmental structures, and a proliferation of chaos and violent non-state (and state) competition and conflict that challenges the primacy of the Westphalian state.19 Power and sovereignty are challenged by globalization and may result in new state formulations.20
Mexico and Latin America are currently experiencing a onslaught from organized crime (cartels and gangs/maras) that challenges and erodes state capacity to govern, negates the rule of law through endemic impunity, and drives humanitarian crises through high-intensity violence and barbarization. In Mexico, over sixty thousand persons were killed in the crime wars between 2006 and 2012, along with an estimated twenty thousand in 2013. This extreme violence is concentrated in four of Mexico’s thirty-two states: Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Baja California.
The situation is not constrained to Mexico. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are also particularly challenged.21 The spillover of the cartel war in Guatemala threatens institutional collapse, as cartels align with already virulent gangs and strike out with impunity. As a result, Guatemala City is subject to the brutal murders of bus drivers who refuse to pay extortion taxes to the maras, and the Zetas have invaded Guatemala’s northern departments, which caused the government to declare a “state of exception” to bring martial forces to bear against the criminal incursion. The alliances of cartels and gangs are hollowing out the state, controlling turf and roads and establishing training camps. In addition, they are starting to provide social goods to the communities where they operate. The cartels are also actively pursuing information operations (info ops) to secure their freedom to operate.22
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, organized crime has diversified, gone global, and reached macroeconomic proportions: illicit goods are sourced from one continent, as the report neatly puts it, trafficked across another, and marketed in a third.23 Mafias today are truly a transnational problem, and they are a threat to security, especially in poor and conflict-ridden countries. Crime is fueling corruption, infiltrating business and politics, and hindering development. Essentially, transnational organized crime and gangs are undermining governance by empowering those who operate outside the law:
• 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.
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 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
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.
Specific 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.