Are Criminals, Terrorists, and Bolivarians Teaming Up Against the United States?

On August 16, Doug Farah, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, published Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America: An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority. The monograph contributes in a major way to our understanding of the increasingly complex relationships that exist among criminal networks, terrorists, and sovereign states.

One of its most original contributions is to get away from the tired conventional wisdom about “failed states”—which suggests that it is the world’s basket cases that present the greatest opportunities for exploitation by illicit actors. In Weak Links , I’ve also suggested that the most dysfunctional, chaotic, or even collapsed states, do not provide conducive environments for most forms of crime (or for transnational terrorists, for that matter), since they provide little operational security from interdiction and are often too far removed from the sinews of global commerce.

Farah’s monograph takes that critique to another level, showing how variable the relationship between transnational criminals and states can be. He usefully distinguishes among three “ideal types” of states that facilitate TOC:

To be sure, this typology (and I tried to create one in Weak Links), is artificial, inasmuch as the categories bleed into one another and real-life cases may straddle the boundaries. But in the same way that criminologists distinguish among source, transit, and destination countries for illicit commodities, it might be illuminating to create a global map that apportions countries of the world into these three categories. This method could then capture the distinctive “functions” or “services” performed by each class of state within the global criminal economy—as well as ask whether certain types of states are more or less associated with particular sectors of transnational crime (e.g. narcotics, money laundering, intellectual property theft).

The paper’s second major contention—and this is one that has been controversial over the past decade—is that the connections between transnational criminals and transnational terrorists are growing. In the past, it has been commonplace to describe these relationships as at best episodic and tactical. In Phil Williams’ words, the two groups might appropriate each other’s methodologies—so that criminals engage in terror to intimidate citizens, authorities, or rivals, while terrorists sometimes turn to traffic in drugs and other illicit goods to raise funds, as in Afghanistan or the Sahel. But ultimately, the argument held, these groups had different objectives—financial, in the case of criminals, political or religious, in the case of terrorists.

Farah seeks to explode that argument, pointing to the growing presence of Hezbollah in the Hemisphere and documenting its links to major criminal organizations, to insurgent groups, and indeed to governments. Some of this is persuasive, such as his description of fluid alliances, and “recombinant networks” that could exploit existing criminal pipelines to traffic in various kinds of commodities and channel illicit profits. But I was not always persuaded these were more than alliances of convenience, at least when it came to the relationship between Latin American transnational organized crime groups and terrorists from outside the region.

Nor do I think that the threat of WMD trafficking through such networks was as acute as he seems to suggest. To begin with—involvement in WMD trafficking—at least when it comes to nuclear trafficking—would presumably need to occur with the connivance of state authorities in possession of fissile material or weapons themselves. And it is hard to believe, particularly given WMD forensics, that a government—say Iran—would transfer those weapons or WMD materials to a nonstate actor whose behavior it, in the final analysis, cannot control. That would be a tremendous existential risk to assume.

Farah’s third major argument is that we must take the ideological, political and security challenge posed by the Bolivarian states seriously. Although it is tempting to dismiss Chavez as a buffoon, Venezuela under his leadership has formed what he considers an alliance of criminalized states with Correa’s Ecuador, Morales’ Bolivia, and Ortega’s Nicaragua. As is well known, all four countries share an anti-American agenda, seeking to reduce the dominance of the United States in hemispheric affairs, while advancing their own populist goals.

The real significance of the Bolivarian bloc, Farah suggests, is in the mutual diplomatic support it offers its members in their parallel criminal activities, their support for the FARC and other leftist insurgencies, their growing alignment with Hezbollah and other transnational terrorists, and their increasingly deep enmeshment with extra-hemispheric powers unfriendly to the United States—most notably Iran, which has been quietly expanding its political, military, intelligence and economic presence and ties in the region.

In the end, I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Iran-Bolivarian alliance represents a true Tier One security threat to the United States, as opposed to (in the title of a recent book) an “Axis of Annoyance”. To be sure, both sides share a mutual antipathy toward the United States. But the manuscript may overestimate the depth of Iranian-Bolivarian solidarity, as well as the staying power of the Bolivarian regimes themselves. Whether these populist regimes continue to wield influence or prove to be a sideshow would seem to be hugely dependent on the continued presence of Hugo Chavez and the high price Venezuela can command for its oil.  Furthermore, the growing presence of China and Russian in the Bolivarian countries—about which Farah frets—could very well be just another result of globalization, and hold benign implications for U.S. national security.