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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1941 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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It'll be interesting to see what Noboa does next. He ran on and for now seems to be pursuing a genuine tough on crime policy, but there are a fair amount of people who suspect his family of having cartel ties as well. His family is a banana shipping magnate and banana shipments are the primary way (that we/Europe have caught at least) that the Ecuadorian cartels have been moving drugs. The cartels are more recent in Ecuador but at least in more established countries like Colombia (1, 2) and Mexico it's normal for them to spend significant sums backing friendly candidates to the Presidency.

Bukele somehow didn't manage to shut up all the doubters,

In fairness it's a lot easier to lock up all the criminals when they've tattooed "bad guy" on their face. The real trick is just to have such a permissive approach to crime that gang members feel comfortable labeling themselves, then you can swoop em up all at once. Fwiw though, Bukele does have a string of copycat candidates running/or who ran in elections across Central and South America, though not all of them successful.

There are very few important political actors in Central America who doesn’t have some sort of ties to some drug crime. It’s typically more useful to think of the “cartels” (what a weird name when you think about it) as public-private partnerships between the drug entrepreneurs and different levels of the government. The real difficulty these states have fighting against cartels doesn’t have anything to do with regular policing problems. It’s the challenge of organising the state apparatus to fight parts of itself. Army against police departments, judiciary against army, central government against provincial governors etc is how it usually goes. There is a reason why these states get a new “totally not corrupt this time” police department every 5 years to investigate the other police departments. “Cartel”s are often just a part of the state organism

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