Globalization of Crime: Multi-Faceted Aspects One Aspect

Globalization of Crime: Multi-Faceted Aspects

One aspect of organized crime, aside from the fact that it is methodical, fortified and strategic that makes it so ripe for globalization, is that it's is distinctive from professional or street crime, in the sense that it wishes to control something -- be it a distinct territory or the city's ports or other arenas. In the last twenty years or so, the nature of crime has also changed dramatically: it used to be a hierarchy of operations with a clear division of labor and a specialization of operations. Eventually these vertical and horizontal hierarchies dissolved into a larger number of sparsely connected networks (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). This meant the globalization of crime: an event in one place meant that another arena was affected by it (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). In order to best comprehend the globalization of crime, it's best to consider it as a business activity: thus with things like the collapse of the Soivet Union and the fal of the Berlin wall and the spread of capitalism and increased transportation networks all over the world, trade has been able to boom: and this has meant illicit trade as well.

Background of Organized Crime

"Most organized crime problems today seem to be less a matter of a group of individuals who are involved in a range of illicit activities, and more a matter of a group of illicit activities in which some individuals and groups are presently involved: strategies aimed at the groups will not stop the illicit activities if the dynamics of the market remain unaddressed" (unodc.org, 2010). This is a truly formidable task as it's very difficult to find data and trends on clandestine markets -- though this is necessary nonetheless in order to better combat these markets. For instance, experts have found that while one can target the groups responsible for organized crime, such a maneuver is unlikely to interrupt the flow of illegal substances or human trafficking. Rather, as long as there is a demand for these illegal substances, products or trafficked people, government forces are not going to be enough to combat this problem (unodc.org, 2010).

Globalization of Crime: Drugs

In order to better understand the globalization of crime and all its facets, examining one particular brance can help to illuminate one angle of this complex problem. Drug dealing has moved overseas to nations like Mexico and Columbia, Myanmar and Afghanistan and to Mail, Ghana and Nigeria -- where drug cartels still engage in violence to maintain their monopoly (DK, 2013). However, the decline of the drug trade has largely mean an increase in other types of crimes, treated as emerging crimes by the United Nations: "…these include poaching, illegal logging and trafficking controlled goods, such as archeological artifacts and endangered animals. Those sorts of crimes required ever more dispersed networks, with specialised skills replacing sheer muscle. But even they require more violence than the newest of crimes: cybercrime, identity theft and fraud. These are increasingly being committed by new organisations from countries with little history of organised crime, and are probably the fastest-growing ways of making an illicit buck. By contrast, the trade of the old-fashioned gangster, well-known in his district, his monopoly enforced by violence, now looks antiquated. They have been replaced by a type of globetrotting businessman-gangster" (DK, 2013). Thus, when it comes to organized crime, the time of the neighborhood gangster who shot people in the head in pubs is long gone.

If there's anything that the experts on the globalization of crime have discovered, is that criminals are consistently able to find a way. Criminal enterprises exist for the sole purpose of making money: if the U.S. Or any other large nation attempts to stop or thwart them from such operations, the criminal enterprise generally finds a back-end approach, or dissolves into smaller un recognizable operations that take the matter into their own hands. For example, back in the days of Miami Vice, Columbian drug cartels used to smuggle drugs via the Caribbean islands to the United States (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). However, because of the successful action of law enforcement agencies, such smuggling flights were untenable; however, this just meant that the drug cartels from Columbia found a new way to move their goods into the U.S.: this mean the crux of the problem shifted from the Columbian Cartels to the Mexican Cartels, which invented sophisticated methods of money laundering that allowed them to better accrue their profits (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). More than anything, this shift meant that the Columbian cartels de-evolved, and allowed for five main cartels in Mexico to thrive (Gulf, Sinaloa, Juarez, Tijuana, and Valencia). Looking at the way in which these particular drug cartels engage in business can be a means of predicting what the future for the rest of the arenas of organized crime on a global scale will be.

In the case of Mexico, a tremendous amount depends on how vast the cartels end up becoming and whether or not the government is ever able to regain control and authority over the regions that are controlled by the cartels (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). Part of the reason that the drug trade has been able to thrive so immediately in this region has been because of the lawlessness which persists in massive parts of the country. To many Mexicans, the cartels own the country and it is the cartels which dictate the law of the land, and that the national government in Mexico is just a figurehead but doesn't exert any real power. Policy regime changes will probably just force the cartels to evolve into even more sophisticated mechanisms and more intricate criminal enterprises (Aguilar-Milan, 2008). Similarly, policy regimes which eradicate or restrict the cartels will probably just lead to the trafficking of persons on other borders (Aguilar-Milan, 2008).