By Maximilian Frederik van Oordt, Editor-in-Chief of the King’s College Latin American Society’s El Cortao
This article’s recommendations serve to complement, rather than substitute, those current and mainstream crimefighting mechanisms, practices, and policies employed by the contemporary state.
In June of this year, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in conjunction with their counterparts in over a dozen countries, arrested more than eight hundred suspects in one of the largest and most successful police operations in history. Dubbed ‘Operation Trojan Shield’, the international investigation demonstrated an extraordinary efficiency – and depth – in its infiltration of organised criminal groups using embedded surveillance technology. Undoubtedly the details behind the execution of this raid merit a paper all to themselves, yet our article will instead recruit this case study for the insight its extensive cyber-penetration can provide into contemporary criminal dynamics.
The key revelations produced by Operation Trojan Shield were those related to the brutality and reach of current forms of organised crime. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Reuters, over one hundred and fifty threats to human life were intercepted, including more than one hundred murder plots and one mass killing plot; the latter of which was disrupted by Australian authorities. Most disquieting, however, were the dozens of corruption cases brought against public officials – in developed and developing countries alike – as a result of their involvement at different stages of the criminal industry. One delivery of cocaine, for instance, relied on a diplomatic pouch belonging to the French embassy in Bogotá so as to guarantee a legally unhindered passage through international customs.
Given the unconstrained lethality of this breed of criminal and the depth of his connections in government, law enforcement tactics must enlist the authority and resources of every aspect of the state – financial, forceful, legal, and moral – should it wish to most effectively confront this threat. After all, what differentiates organised criminality from more generic forms of criminal misconduct, is the former’s reach into every aspect of its host nation’s life. Consequently, a state’s response to this must be equally, if not more, comprehensive, and must count on the support of law enforcement and civilians alike. This article hopes to make the case for such diverse, and inevitably more invasive, law enforcement powers and tactics, and hopes to demonstrate that such actions can be executed in the framework of democracy while simultaneously suffocating organised crime.
The first area into which law enforcement must expand is finance, and this is most starkly relevant in Latin America and the Caribbean; a region subsumed by remarkable levels of violence and boasting equally remarkable numbers of free trade zones and tax havens. These latter two entities are crucial in criminal finance networks and the region’s governments have failed to provide themselves with adequate legal tools to penetrate them. Research by the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Grupo de Acción Financiera Internacional (GAFI) argues that: “one of the most common methods for the financing of organised crime/terrorism in Central and South America is via trade-based money laundering” which, due to its reliance on international commerce, is keenly dependent on global ports and free trade zones. That this report has found Latin American states to “not reach a satisfactory level of efficiency in the prevention, detection, and fight against criminal/terrorist financing”, demonstrates a clear need for law enforcement tools to entrench themselves far more meaningfully in the commercial and financial sphere. Fundamentally, the organised criminal is first and foremost a businessman, and it is in finance, therefore, where the state must bare its teeth.
It will not have escaped the readership that the OAS report employed the words “organised crime” and “terrorism” almost interchangeably, and they are by no means mistaken in their choice. While the word “terrorist” may be stretched too thinly if applied to criminal organisations, its employment recognises the inhumanity and indisputably perverse morality behind the lifestyles and activities of the organised criminal. A 2018 British government report cheerlessly noted that “serious and organised crime affects more UK citizens, more often, than any other national security threat and leads to more deaths … each year than all other national security threats combined.” Few professions are based so heavily on human misery, and the sheer depravity of organised criminality demands a societal and terminological shift. Here, the state must again, cautiously, but steadily, take the lead. A legal reclassification of organised criminals, whether as ‘terrorists’ or using more bespoke terms, will better recognise the grade of antisocial behaviour inherent in their choices, and will lay the groundwork for harsher, more proportionate sentences. Additionally, even a minor shift in government rhetoric will increase the electorate’s appetite for necessary legal reforms that may otherwise have presented themselves as politically hazardous or institutionally disproportionate. The legal tools produced by these reforms would likely take the shape of increased intelligence and asset examination and confiscation capacities, as well as broader powers for relevant government agencies. In the case of the 2018 report, the powers cited included ‘Unexplained Wealth Orders’ and ‘Serious Crime Prevention Orders’, the deployment of which allowed for asset freezes, more invasive financial assessments, and greater confiscatory powers for UK authorities.
Naturally, such reforms must be accompanied by adequate and stringent provisions that may ensure the long-term protection of democratic rights and processes. Nevertheless, the electorate must be reassured that the risk of establishing authoritarian precedents or degrading institutional norms as a result of this legislation is generally mitigated by the strength of a policy’s protective provisions and not by the content of the bill. While outright opposition to greater government powers may be democratically understandable, it is neither constructive nor socially sustainable. Rather, such institutional concerns should be directed towards designing the guardrails of these reforms rather than preventing the legislation entirely. The tactics employed in Operation Trojan Shield, for instance, evidence the effectiveness and democratic sustainability of highly invasive law enforcement powers when deployed appropriately.
The consequences of inaction are visible in the brothels and morgues of our cities, where human life is bought, sold, and terminated in the name of profit. The finances of this industry, and the inhumanity of its executives, must be leveraged for their own suffocation. Recognising financial operations as a more important target, while toughening legal and societal approaches to organised crime, will allow governments to stock their arsenals with more contemporary, more relevant, law enforcement tools. The deployment of these measures understands that weak governance carries with it cruel, if not lethal, consequences for its most vulnerable citizens, including human trafficking, drug running, and modern slavery. Consequently, the future of policing must be broader, deeper, and more comprehensive than it may ever have dared to be.