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Naturalizing insecurity: resilience and drug-related Organized Crime in the Americas

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Abstract

This article critically interrogates the political effect of portraying drug-related organized crime in the Americas as a resilient market phenomenon. It works out how both drug demand and supply are constructed as immune to repressive policy interventions of the War on Drugs. Drug demand is seen as a pathologic consumer habit which is inelastic to price changes brought about by interdiction. Drug supply, in turn, cannot be permanently suppressed as the ‘balloon effect’ ensures that trafficking routes merely shift from one country to another. In this discursive framework, policy making is consigned to perpetual adaption rather than purposive social transformation. In consequence, the political horizon of international policy making is limited to living with danger. This discursive move is facilitated by the resilience approach which consigns human communities to coping with threats and upheavals they can no longer have any hope of overcoming.

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Notes

  1. According to a recent study by México Evalúa, over 90% of crimes in the country remain unpunished (Monroy 2020). Mexico has a serious organized crime problem. In 2020, the murder rate was 29 per 100,000 (Romero 2021). The year 2017 saw a record number of murders with 29,158 homicides (Cole 2018).

  2. There are currently more than 90,600 desaparecidos in Mexico (Urrutia 2021). There are more than sixty dedicated groups of trackers (rastreadores) in Mexico (Zatarain 2020). The issue of forced disappearances in Mexico gained international attention after the abduction of 43 school children in Ayotzinapa (Guerrero) in 2014 (see, for example, Committee on Enforced Disappearances 2015).

  3. Likewise, the victims of disappearances are usually marginalized and lower-class people: ‘poor men and women, low-ranking delinquents, disposable manual laborers’ (Elizalde 2022, 131, author’s translation; see AFP 2021). What is more, the victims of disappearances are often stigmatized as ‘linked to illegal activities and victims of the settling of scores’ (Martos 2017, 22, author’s translation).

  4. For a feminist reading of Las Buscadoras as women moving beyond passive, domestic roles, see Iliná (2020). Iliná argues that the women of Las Buscadoras challenge their traditional gender roles and actively defy the state (2020, 133). In equally positive terms, Cynthia Bejarano calls the women of Las Buscadoras ‘super mothers’ (2002). She sees them as resisting state control and gendered citizenship roles (Bejarano 2002).

  5. In the case of Mexico, Ted Enamorado et al. have found a clear causal link between economic inequality and drug-related homicides. According to their quantitative study of Calderón’s War on Drugs, a ‘one-point increase in the Gini coefficient raised the number of drug-related deaths per 100,000 inhabitants by 36%’ (Enamorado et al. 2016, 135). This causal link between inequality and crime is confirmed by comparative cross-country analysis (Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza 2002). Pablo Fajnzylber et al. find that ‘an increase in income inequality has a significant and robust effect of raising crime rates’ (2002, 7).

  6. In contrast, Marcelo Bergman has argued that rising crime in Latin America is, in fact, a consequence of growing prosperity (2018). He sees no empirical evidence for the claim that growing inequality and lack of economic development lead to violent crime. However, he concedes that the Washington Consensus of the 1990s has produced more social exclusion, unemployment and inequality in the region (Bergman 2018, 104). Contra Bergman, I argue that reducing violent crime in Latin America does require ‘fundamental social or structural changes’ (Bergman 2018, 307).

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  1. Coventry University, Coventry, England

    Peter Finkenbusch

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Finkenbusch, P. Naturalizing insecurity: resilience and drug-related Organized Crime in the Americas. Trends Organ Crim (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09454-1

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