Narcoterrorism: definitions, mechanisms, and global impact

Terrorism

Narcoterrorism & Money Laundering

Narcoterrorism is a modern reality. Terrorists often derive significant amounts of funding for their operations from the drug trade, leading many to conclude that illegal drugs facilitate terrorism (Blank, 2001). However, others go farther than this and suggest that the drug trade is sometimes a root cause of terrorism. This viewpoint is eroded by the realization that drugs hardly ever form a single backbone of terrorist funding -- it is quite often supplanted by other illegal operations such as kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, and human trafficking. Moreover, a successful trade in drugs requires territorial holdings to produce drug crops, something that modern terrorists like al Qaeda and others quite simply do not have (Felbab-Brown, 2006). In opportune circumstances, drug trafficking can be a crucial source of funding for terrorists; however, to suggest it is a root cause is to place the blame for terrorism squarely on state institutions that created a black market for narcotics by outlawing drugs in the first place.

A much more important avenue of interdiction to combat terrorism (and the drug trade, for that matter) is money laundering, by which money for illegal goods and services changes hands on the black market. Money laundering is facilitated by corruption within state institutions and international banks and can be most effectively fought there (Blank, 2001). Some potentially effective means of reducing money laundering include: providing more oversight and transparency to international banking, reducing layers of bureaucracy in government institutions in which below-board transactions can take place beyond the reach of law enforcement, and enacting strict penalties for corruption. While it will be impossible to fully eliminate money laundering, these are important key steps that can be taken.