Breathe
By Yuriria Rodríguez Castro
In my previous installment for Opinion 51, I recalled that at least a decade ago we anticipated that terrorism and drug trafficking would be one and the same criminal behavior, which would lead to the designation of certain criminal organizations as terrorists by the United States . https://www.opinion51.com/yuriria-rodriguez-2501-voluntad-decadencia
I now return to the developing theme:
When fentanyl was imposed on the drug market as a criminal business between Mexico and China, U.S. governments began to talk about terrorism in Mexican drug trafficking and the issue was placed at the center of the agenda in terms of immigration security. It was then that the opportunity arose for some, the defeat sung for others, called "convenience" to recognize the terrorism of drug trafficking.
Despite many previous warnings, the Mexican government only tried to calm US demands with the surrender of some leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, and a judicial reform was approved that, far from helping bilateral relations, complicated them even more. In addition to this, Trump and his harangues were also minimized, but as we warned, it was one of his first documents with the character of law.
Terrorism, populism and drug trafficking are social, political and market phenomena that historically emerged together and, in general, history itself gives them the opposite result to their intentions: when the anarchists assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, it was said that it was the end of tyranny and, on the contrary, what was unleashed was the First World War. To date, the entire Balkan region is controlled by paramilitary terrorist groups such as the Scorpions and by self-defense squads that represent -as in Mexico- thetriumph of the tyranny of organized crime, which emerged from the State itself, to later become independent, autonomous criminal groups.
There are many examples of results contrary to the expected results of terror: when the populist militant John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln under the cry: "Death to the tyrant", this assassination imposed centuries of tyranny on that nation.
Few know that World War II was also triggered by a terrorist attack and a migration crisis, when on November 9, 1938, the teenager Herschel Grynszpan, in protest against the deportation of thousands of Polish Jews, shot a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris, which served as an excuse for Hitler and Goebbels to unleash state terror with the massive anti-Semitic attack called the Night of Broken Glass, the preamble to the Holocaust.
Here we can see how, since the twentieth century, terrorism no longer seeks to overthrow the State, but appears in its crisis phase to provide or replace the violence that recovers it.
The episode of the sica helps to understand that the purpose of terrorism is the visibility of violence since antiquity, so any attempt to make it invisible is the denial of this phenomenon: the sicari were a Palestinian sect that emerged around the first century after Christ and were so called because they used a dagger that they had modified in a curved shape to carry out their murders in public squares and spill the viscera of their victims; from there to what we have now with the dismemberments in public streets or the videos of homicides from the so-called snuff genre to the so-called drug trafficking culture, are the demonstration of the criminal message that unites these behaviors.
It is still not understood that terrorism consists of making violence in public spaces as visible as possible; there are even those who think that terrorism and drug trafficking can only be fought by blocking their finances. This is how strict measures have been applied to stifle the centers of financing and money laundering, but visually extreme violence increases in countries like Mexico, where these measures are counterproductive, because if before criminal organizations invested illicit money in legal businesses owned by citizens to launder assets, now, as they are blocked by strong fiscal and banking measures, organized crime is financed by charging the citizen who previously benefited, serving as the most lethal tax collector.
In my next installment, here in Opinion 51, I offer analysis of several scenarios that the immediate future holds.
*PhD in Criminal Sciences and Criminal Policy. Academic specialist in terrorism and organized crime studies.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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