Area: Latin America. (Translated from Spanish) - ARI 84/2006 Date: 28/9/2006 A Parallel Power: Organised Crime in Latin America Luis Esteban G. Manrique ∗ Theme: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the number of homicides committed with firearms in Latin America –between 73,000 and 90,000 a year– has reached three times the world average. In the past two decades, violence has been the leading cause of death among Latin Americans between the ages of 15 and 44. And at the same time as public safety has been deteriorating, a potent ‘parallel power’ has been growing: organised crime. Summary: Crime rates indicate that Latin American cities are the most unsafe in the world: in the 1990s, 74.5% of inhabitants of major Latin American cities were victims of some kind of criminal act. Despite having only 8% of the world’s population, Latin America registered 75% of the kidnappings in the world in 2003. This has made public safety one of the top concerns of Latin Americans today, second only to the economic situation. What is worse is that organised crime is making a qualitative leap towards ‘colonizing’ private initiative and subordinating it to the criminal hierarchy. In the most visible example of this phenomenon, there were five continuous days (May 10-14) of attacks against police stations and public buildings in the state of São Paulo, accompanied by prison riots and hostage taking which, according to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, caused 272 deaths, including 91 police officers. The assaults were carried out by one of the largest criminal groups in the continent: the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), also known as the ‘Crime Party’, which may have a ‘grassroots base’ of half a million people. Brazil is now the world’s second-largest consumer of cocaine and, according to WHO figures, has also become the country with the third-highest number of violent deaths, after Colombia and Russia, with an annual murder rate of 40 per 100,000 inhabitants, rising to 53 in the big cities. Analysis: Drug trafficking has contributed substantially to the increase in criminality, generating corruption, violence and political instability. In 10 of the 13 countries that offer reliable comparative figures, crime rates increased between 400% and 600% in the 1990s. As government authority has diminished, broad urban and rural areas have become off bounds to police –areas where drug lords impose their political control, collecting taxes, setting curfews, carrying out recruitment and making seizures–. In the Caribbean and Central America, small island nations have become transfer points for drugs and havens for organisations that operate networks controlling prostitution, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, counterfeiting, in-transit robbery of merchandise and other criminal activities, all with minimal state interference. Drug trafficking has flooded the entire region with vast quantities of money that enter the financial system and provide the means to corrupt government employees, the police and the armed forces. In turn, criminal impunity intimidates civil society, and the social and economic costs of insecurity ∗ Independent analyst of international economic and political affairs. 1 Area: Latin America. (Translated from Spanish) - ARI 84/2006 Date: 28/9/2006 affect foreign investment, as infrastructure is destroyed and additional security services are needed. According to the World Bank (WB), criminal violence costs Latin America more than US$30 billion a year. In Brazil, crime-related losses come to US$7 billion a year, or 1% of GDP. This figure may be as high as 13% in Colombia, if military and policing costs are included. Dirk Kruijt, co-editor (with Kees Kooning) of Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America, believes that violence has taken on a variety and dimensions not seen in the past, with criminal activity mixed in with the activities of the national security forces, ethnic conflicts and ‘social cleansing’ aimed at eliminating people on the margins of society. In some cases, mafias operated by the police and intelligence services have gained control of the state machinery, for example in Peru under Fujimori and Montesinos, when 70% of the National Intelligence Service budget was allocated to reserved funds that financed drug and arms trafficking operations and extortion rings. A 1997 WB study on criminality in Latin America showed that criminals base their decisions on a kind of cost-benefit analysis, calculating the potential benefits of a crime in terms of the costs and risks of committing it and the likelihood and severity of the punishment. If the kidnapping ‘industry’ in countries such as Colombia and Mexico is a reliable indicator of this theory, then criminal organisations have concluded that crime is extremely lucrative and goes largely unpunished. In the 2004 kidnapping and murder of Axel Blumberg, Argentine investigators found evidence of police collusion as high as the chief of the anti-kidnapping division himself, leading to massive street protests in Buenos Aires against police corruption. In Mexico, the ‘anti-drug tsar’, General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was arrested in 1997, when it was proved that he had links with the Tijuana cartel. Gutiérrez had been making use of military bases and sending his troops out to kidnap and murder members of rival gangs. One of Mexico’s most dangers gangs, the ‘Zetas’, which operate on the US border, include former army commandos trained in anti- drug trafficking techniques. Between 1960 and 1980, state terrorism, guerrilla warfare and conventional counter- insurgent action were the main sources of organised violence. With the transitions to democracy, many expected the newly elected governments to restore the rule of law. However, more than two decades later, violence by a variety of ‘armed players’ (irregular militias, narco mafias, urban gangs and paramilitary forces) continues to affect social and political life in a large part of the region. In Rio de Janeiro, around 6,000 children and teenagers work as ‘foot soldiers’ in the wars between rival gangs –a number comparable to the tribal conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leona)–. The reason for this is simple: by law, minors cannot be prosecuted. According to Amnesty International (AI), in Brazil twice as many young people are murdered as die in traffic accidents: among those aged under 25 there are 52.2 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 13.2 in the US and 2.1 in Italy. Furthermore, 93% of the victims are male. All this very often goes unreported. The region has become a kind of minefield for investigative journalism, in part because of fear of retaliation by organised crime and drug traffickers. Frequent threats, attacks and murders have led once again to self-censorship in countries that fought for decades against the silence imposed by dictatorial governments. Colombia holds a tragic record: 28 journalists have been murdered in the past decade. Ramón Cantú, editor in chief of El Mañana, of Nuevo Laredo (Mexico), says that his city has become a battlefield for the drug cartels: 2005 saw 182 violent deaths and so far this year there have been 128. In March, grenades and shots were fired at El Mañana after the newspaper published a photo of alleged members of a local drug trafficking cartel. 2 Area: Latin America. (Translated from Spanish) - ARI 84/2006 Date: 28/9/2006 The Kidnapping ‘Industry’ Kroll Associates, a New York security company, estimates that half the kidnappings in the world occur in Latin America. Colombia is the undisputed leader in the sector. Kroll calculates that in 2003 there were 4,000 kidnappings there (2,043 according to the Colombian government), while Mexico was in second place with 3,000, followed by Argentina with 2,000. Even Brazil, with a population nearly twice that of Mexico, had only one third the number of kidnappings. But while the trend in Colombia is downward, it is rising in Mexico: the main victims are among the prosperous communities of Spanish, Lebanese and Jewish origin, although the phenomenon is spreading to the upper middle class, who are being asked to pay ransoms averaging around US$100,000. The Mexican government claims that kidnappings declined from 568 in 2001 to 531 in 2003. For its part, the Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública (Citizen Council for Public Safety), a private organisation, says that nearly 4,000 people were kidnapped between 1997 and 2003 –an average of 571 a year–. But these are only the reported cases. Many families do not report kidnappings since they fear corrupt security forces, some of whose members are involved in the kidnappings. The worst aspect of this is their impunity: according to official estimates, only 75% of crimes are reported to the police in Mexico. In Brazil, only 8% of the 50,000 murders committed each year go through a full judicial process. According to the Latinobarómetro, only one in three citizens in the 18 countries in the region express confidence in the police (Chile is the exception, with 60% confidence). In 2003, around 23,000 police (almost half the total number) in the province of Buenos Aires, where the crime rate has doubled since 1991, were being investigated and 4,000 were tried for corruption or abuse of authority. In a survey in Mexico, 75% of respondents said they had no confidence in the judicial authorities. Another reason for concern is that violence against victims of kidnapping has reached unprecedented levels, with torture and mutilations becoming increasingly common. Security analysts believe that this is due to a kind of ‘class war’ in which kidnappers of the lowest social classes take out social vengeance on their victims. No country in the region has been free of the plague of violence, regardless of the political stripe of its governments.