Perspective: Getting Ahead of the Game in a new Multi-Polar World across Today’s Spectrum of Threats, Converging Ecosystems of Criminality, and Hybrid (Irregular) Warfare

On fake pharmaceuticals, CJNG’s expanded and diversified economic profile across the Americas now includes a growing dominance in the illicit trafficking of fake medicines and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, a multi-billion illicit industry which endangers the public health of safety of citizens across the Western Hemisphere.

In Mexico alone, some reports have found that 60 percent of commercially sold pharmaceuticals are falsified, counterfeited, expired, or stolen. Some pills are even laced with deadly fentanyl and highly addictive methamphetamine.

The medicines are sold online, in the informal economy, and in professional brick-and-mortar pharmacies, where CJNG liaisons coerce pharmacists and storekeepers to sell and store them alongside real medicine.

Confiscated fake medicines have included treatments for HIV, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, and obesity.

Outside of Mexico, the CJNG and other cartels are seeking dominance in Central America and stretching their illicit empires into South America with newer alliances, where they can control more ports through bribery and intimidation and thereby introduce new products into illicit markets.

Costa Rica represents a prime expansion area for criminals, due to its large international ports, lightly monitored coastline, lack of strong law enforcement entities, and geographic proximity to the deeply criminalized Ortega regime in Nicaragua, creating a nexus among different global markets.

Costa Rica, with functional infrastructure and easy access to the dollarized international financial system, is especially attractive following the consolidation of criminal networks in neighboring countries, particularly the Ortega regime’s expansion into illicit gold, drug trafficking and precursor imports.

In the Americas, multi-billion-dollar illicit economies across Latin America, long centered on the cocaine and narcotics trade, are expanding as criminals and other illicit networks diversify to new commodities, markets and methodologies.

The region’s transnational criminal structures are undergoing a volatile, profound reordering and restructuring, with long-term strategic repercussions in the years to come for the United States and its key allies in the hemisphere.

New actors, new markets, and new products are driving fragmentation among traditional groups, and consolidation of criminalized economies from the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise (BJCE) led by the Maduro regime in Venezuela to numerous other strategic alliances among TCOs, kleptocrats, business elites, and ideologically agnostic authoritarian states.

It is this crime-threat convergence and competition among different actors that is driving the growing instability and corruption.

It is now an often-violent race to control of strategic infrastructure, trafficking and smuggling routes, critical spaces where the state is absent or co-opted as a partner. The criminal groups consolidate their control through fear and brutality and use their territorial control and to accumulate greater power and wealth.

We see this being played out, for example, in the Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Haiti.The same dynamic is playing out throughout the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and other areas of high levels of organized crime, violence, corruption and kleptocracy, armed conflicts, and other cross-border illicit threats.

Expansion by CJNG and other TCOs in the Americas is putting these groups in contact with Chinese triads and Eurasian criminals especially in the ports, and money laundering havens.

The reality is such that traditional criminal actors based in Colombia and Mexico are now competing with—and sometimes collaborating with—new actors such as transnational gangs in Brazil and Central America, as well extra-regional, non-traditional actors.

The convergence is facilitated by the growing, ideologically agnostic criminalized authoritarian modelspreading across Latin America, where staying in power through alliances with transnational criminal structures has rendered ideology almost meaningless, has opened new possibilities for formerly antagonistic criminal groups.

In many cases, one-time ideological opponents are no longer enemies, but potential partners who can provide or purchase specific criminal services and financial rewards.

Take for example MS-13, which primarily operates in the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala) with franchises across the United States, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), based in São Paulo (and active in most Brazilian states), and the Tren de Aragua in Venezuela.

The MS-13 now operates in Mexico, concentrated in Tijuana and other key border areas. The PCC has expanded is operation to Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Africa and Europe. The Tren de Aragua has operations in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Central America. These groups are building alliances that could allow them to expand their operations in unprecedented ways.

In the changing pattern related to global crime, these groups—no longer localized prison- born gangs but transnational criminal enterprises—are becoming more diversified, deeply enmeshed in the global drug trade, illicit economies and armed conflicts in the hemisphere, and in other parts of the world.

These newer hybrids are rapidly amassing formal political power and seeking new alliances with each other and other state and non-state armed actors to achieve their goals of becoming major political forces embedded in the state, as the MS-13 has successfully done in El Salvador under the Bukele administration.

In Ecuador, the brazen assassination of leading presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio by an Ecuadorian gang, Los Lobos, believed aligned with Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation cartel, created chaos earlier this year. The gang leader escaped prison setting off a wave of violence across the country and coordinated riots in seven prisons.

A rival gang, the Choneros, backed by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, called for peace in a statement apparently issued from Mexico City. But the reality is both gangs are fighting for criminal supremacy in Ecuador, aligned with other transnational organizations creating more violence.

Over the past five years, Ecuador’s homicide rate has risen almost 700 percent, from 6 homicides per100,000 people to 42, as the local gangs, their Mexican cartel rivals and extra-regional mafias vying for trafficking routes have made the nation the most violent in the hemisphere.

But the collapse of Ecuador’s rule of law is another manifestation of the diversification, expansion, and joint ventures among today’s leading TCOs, where rival gangs and alliances fight over strategic ports used as shipping points, especially those near the leading cocaine-producing countries of Colombia and Peru.

Illicit threat networks are finding Ecuador’s weak border controls, dollarized economy that facilitates money laundering, and the increasing presence of the Chinese in those ports to be attractive.

Ecuador also has to deal with external threats posed by the Albanian and Eurasian mafias now embedded in the port city of Guayaquil, who coordinate the warehousing of cocaine from Colombia, and coordinate withother transnational fixers including Italian mafia on the subsequent distribution in Spain, the UK, Germany, and other European markets. Ecuadorian fruit and flower companies are often used as fronts for these criminal activities.

From a trans-regional perspective, the fragmenting and realigning of organized crime operations across borders has seen the rise of Eastern European, Chinese, Turkish, Italian and Balkan syndicates vying for market share in Latin America, and reciprocally, increased illicit trade by the cartels, the PCC, and other Latin criminal networks in lucrative overseas illicit markets.

Panama continues to serve as a central logistics hub for multi-continental criminal organizations and its role came into further focus in November 2022, when a multi-jurisdictional task force arrested 49 people in Dubai,Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all with alleged ties to a transnational-networked “Super Cartel.”

Defendants were allegedly coordinating a massive drug trafficking operation out of Panama with support from leading cartels in Ireland, Italy, Dubai, Bosnia, the Netherlands, and Morocco.

According to Panama’s attorney general, Panamanian nationals had been helping the Super Cartel move drugs and maintain communications around the world.

Italian organized crime, in particular groups with ties to the ‘Ndrangheta, are also expanding their presence in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay to open new drug trafficking routes to Europe.

Panama’s Atlantic port and free trade zone (FTZ) of Colón is also a favored drug hub for the Colombian criminal group, the Urabeños, also known as the Gulf Clan (Clan del Golfo), and the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia – AGC).

Colón is a logistical hub notorious for illicit trade, corruption, drugs, illicit tobacco products, gangs, violence, and money laundering, as are other ports and FTZs in the Americas such as the mega-port of Brazil’s Santos or TBA or the port of Vancouver.

The massive levels of corruption fueled by enormous inflows of illicit funds, along with multiple, persistent armed conflicts among and between state and non-state actors, and sophisticated influence operations by Russia, China and Iran are key drivers of the regional decline in democratic governance and the wave of authoritarian populism in the hemisphere.

This significant reordering of illicit networks structure in the Western Hemisphere is not taking place in a vacuum.

In many parts of Latin America, a perfect storm is brewing. Growing economic, criminal and political stresses are eroding institutions and economic prospects, creating opportunities for Muslim extremist radicalization, and undermining a commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

This is exacerbated by major disinformation campaigns undertaken by China, Russia, and Iran, was well as predatory activities of these and other malign networks operating more brazenly across the region in the absence of a strong US presence.

In Panama, for example, China is leveraging bribery of government officials to win concession rights to control the port of Colón and other critical infrastructure along the Panama Canal. Alarmingly,China already owns, controls or operates important sections of more than 40 major ports across LatinAmerica, many of which Chinese triads are also quite active.

Another significant concern is China’s growing network of facilities in Latin America related to its civilian space and satellite programs with defense capabilities. These ground stations have the potential to expand Beijing’s global military surveillance network in the southern hemisphere and areas close to the United States. China is also literally buying islands across the Caribbean (e.g., in Antigua and Barbuda),building special economic zones, and likely planning to use these commercial outposts for military purposes.

Russian proxies are selling some of the more advanced surveillance technologies to state and non-state criminal actors across the hemisphere, greatly enhancing their ability to monitor and attackpolitical enemies, law enforcement, journalists, human rights workers and anyone else they perceive as a threat.

At the same time, the Rabbani Network and Iranian Hezbollah Illicit Network are making billions of dollars from illicit trade and financing the information space to shape anti-democracy messages in the region.

In a confluence of geo-security interests, China, Russia, and Iran continue to strengthen intelligence and military ties to weaken democratic institutions, expanding illicit economies, and bolster autocratic governance in Latin America, if not globally.

And where there is authoritarian revanchist power and revisionist mischief, criminal and militia proxies are not far behind.

These emerging security trends in ecosystems of criminality and corruption in Latin America are also being witnessed in other regions of the world that offer new challenges to law enforcement and policy communities.

These security risks are far-reaching and threaten to accelerate the negative trends unless dealt with effectively and decisively.

Global Trends

Criminal networks are similarly infiltrating and penetrating legal businesses and commercial pathways in Europe by exploiting corrupt nodes to advance their criminalities.

In a recent EUROPOL report, over 800 threatening criminal networks were identified, with more than 25,000 members operating inside the European Union.

According to EUROPOL, 86% of those networks are able to infiltrate the legal economy to hide their activities and launder their criminal profits.

Similar to Latin America, ports and FTZs in Europe are targeted by TCOs to control the movement of both licit and illicit goods that are often hidden among the thousands of containers. Shipping companies and unions are often co-opted by criminals to enable the trafficking and smuggling of drugs, and other contraband.

An emerging trend in Europe, and carrying over to Latin America and other parts of the world, is migrantsmuggling. Due to conflicts, climate change, pandemics, and humanitarian plight, migrant smuggling hasbecome a very lucrative business for criminals, with 90 percent of migrants paying smugglers to help them toreach the EU. It is estimated that migrant smuggling generates an annual turnover of between $5 to $6 billion worldwide.

If we examine Africa, one can see a further deterioration of governance structures and the rule of law ascriminals, kleptocrats, hostile militias, terrorist groups, corrupt military, customs, and police officials carve out trafficking corridors. For example, this is happening along the Sahel illicit superhighway, involving drugs, weapons, humans, maritime piracy, terrorist financing, and other crimes. In fact, sub-regional African hubs of illicit activities have the highest criminality in the world, according to research by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GITOC). They serve as a stronghold for criminal actors, whose influence is aggravated by prolonged conflicts and insecurity that make the region especially dangerous.

Gateway crimes and illicit activities such as weapons, drug, fuel trafficking, cattle rustling, artisanalgold mining, fake medicines, illicit cigarettes, and wildlife poaching are at the heart of providing revenue for terrorist groups; revenue which is essential to their survival and ability to finance their infrastructure and expansion.

To safeguard their interests amid stiffer competition, traffickers have hired armed groups to act as protective militias. They have also cut deals with corrupt state officials, whether to shield their business activity from official scrutiny or to buy the services of the military to protect their convoys.

Traffickers have also become legitimate businessmen and even entered national politics, allowing them to then work with others to hollow out state institutions, co-opt state security forces and, in effect, turn the state into a criminal enterprise and to bankroll militias, their partners in crime.

In states captured by militia groups such as Russia’s Wagner Group, Hezbollah, or through China’sBelt and Road Initiative, crime and corruption have further destabilized Africa with measurable democratic backsliding, the propping up of brutal dictators with human rights abuses, and a bonanza of pillaging, especially of gold and critical minerals.

In Southeast Asia, criminal syndicates in the Mekong Basin and ASEAN markets thrive across sprawling transnational zones of criminality and a convergence of crimes, including financial fraud, extortion, and money laundering especially with the proliferation of unregulated new casinos and online gambling controlled by such criminal organizations and non-state armed actors such as militias and paramilitary units.

Industrial scale money laundering operations originating in Southeast Asia’s Mekong region have gone global. It’s the infrastructure handles the proceeds of scams—such as the recent pig butchering cases targeting American citizens—as well as child pornography, trade in human body parts, illegal gambling, drug trafficking and people trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

The Mekong is notoriously the home of high-end restaurants where one can order bear claws as appetizers,a $1000 pangolin soup, other expensive endangered wildlife meats, and wash it all done with an aphrodisiac wine elixir made from tiger bones or rhino horn.

Cross-border crime in the region is also linking the world’s most dangerous criminals and allowing them to scale up and automate money laundering and cryptocurrency networks across the digital world. This activity is increasingly also linked to terrorist financing as well as sanctions evasion.

The tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits derived from illicit economies dwarf the formal economy,and have corroded state institutions and flowed into poorly governed jurisdictions with weak regulatory enforcement or into semi-autonomous enclaves beyond state authorities’ reach, particularly in Myanmar’s Shan State, or in Laos’ Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, which some have called, “the world’s worst special economic zone.”

In the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, and other hotspots, new opportunities have also arisen forTCOs and illicit threat networks to profit from the violent conflict and insecurity through numerous smuggling ventures, trafficking in weapons and illicit goods, illicit financial flows, and sanctions evasion. Syria’s illegal captagon trade allows it to ride out the war.

It is true that technology transforms old crimes giving bad actors and networks greater reach and scale. Digital criminals are increasingly exploiting emerging technologies and encrypted communications in the new Metaverse, using them to commit crimes against children, data theft, digital money laundering, financial scams, counterfeiting, ransomware, phishing, and online sexual harassment, as well as violent extremism, terrorism, terrorist financing, malign influence and disinformation, theft of 3D virtual/cultural property, trespassing in private virtual spaces, and robbery from an avatar.

In a nutshell: transnational crime is a booming business around the world and across the digital world alike.

Solutions

So what does one do about the immediate and horizon threats that you will be examining this week?

While there are no easy solutions to today’s security complexities, it is important that we stay ahead of the game with a meaningful framework with well-defined objectives and means that help to achieve some of the ends you are working toward.

In the advice of Walter Gretzky to his son Wayne: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.”

Although many lessons can be learned from past criminal investigations and methodologies about how criminals conduct their illicit activities, in an emerging multi-polar world where adversaries do not respect rules, norms, and are bent on reshaping the international order, breaking the cycle ofcorruptive influence and the economic power of illicit threat networks within ecosystems of criminality requires more anticipatory protocols and robust enforcement.

So we must go where the puck is going and get ahead of the active measures by criminals and illicitthreat networks that are exploiting Boyd’s OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, and act—faster than law enforcement and security agencies.

This is especially true where bad actors and threat networks recognize that international reactions to their criminal actions and malign operations require more energies for the defenders of justice, democracy, and the rule of law to dislodge, disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their illicit activities, maneuvers, criminal market offensives, and deliberately driven chaos within the ecosystems of criminality and corruption.

Transnational criminal organizations, China, Russia, and other illicit threat networks have perfected this strategic dark art: act first and faster than countervailing security forces when undertaking subversiveactivities. Using this tactic, these bad actors are expanding illicit markets or capturing states through coercive corruption, laundering dirty money, and achieving geopolitical dominance through aggression, control ofterritories, ports, global supply chains, and digital spaces.

Action beats reaction.

This entails more robust threat horizon measures including:

• integrating threat intelligence overlays and the full dimensions of threat convergence in national strategies so that we can better anticipate changing threat environments, and toprotect U.S. national security interests from TCOs and illicit threat networks.
• sharing threat intelligence in timely manner to mitigate harms, and help generate future capabilities and operations towards optimal success is also very important.

This further requires not only testing good game-changing policy ideas, but also developing more innovative multi-dimensional approaches and holistic, whole-of-society frameworks before the bad guys act on their criminalities and seize new market share or do more damage.

Additionally, we need to make criminal threat convergence a first-tier national security priority, as wellas include it in the National Intelligence Priority Framework (NIPF) so that there can be greater information-sharing across sectors, more joint and coordinated law enforcement operations withcommitted partners overseas, and more leveraging of national assets and resources.

Concluding Thoughts

A few final few words on the need to devote more attention to confronting the enablers and drivers of organized crime and horizontal threats, including the use of ports and newer money laundering methodologies:

• Crime-terror enablers and proxies are increasingly exploiting diasporic communities through coercive pressures, and act as extralegal enforcers for their authoritarian and criminal clients and benefactors. They are mobilizing diasporic communities to conduct activities in furtherance of criminality and corruption, political interference activities, and malign influence operations.

As noted earlier, “divide and conquer” strategies are intended to weaken US influence and sow divisions among allies and law enforcement communities.

If we look at Canada in recent years, it has become a crime convergence zone and forward operational hub for the world’s most notorious crime groups and threat networks including the likes of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, Chinese drug kingpin Tse Chi Lop, Hezbollah Financier Altaf Khanani, and other bad actors, and professional enablers and drivers in the sectors of technology and maritime shipping (e.g., Vancouver port), and as platforms for financing global insecurity.

For example, if you examine the so-called CCP police stations in North America, as certain investigative journalists have done in recent months, you have a nexus of PRC Intelligence Services operators converging with local Chinese triads in cities, often in the Fujian transnational crime networks. Such police stations are physically and mentally projecting Beijing’s political power to influence the diaspora community politically. They are connected to underground casinos, human trafficking and moneylaundering networks, and are connecting with other businesses to clandestinely fund influence and election interference.

Through the long-standing ties and use of diasporic communities and the Chinese triads, Hezbollah financiers, and oligarchic Eurasian and Balkan entrepreneurs and mafias, reinforced by targeted subversive operations by China, Iran, and Russia, an array of sinister illicit activities and active measures have had a disrupting and destabilizing impact on the political, governance, security, and business structures, and in some cases, have inhibited counter intelligence and law enforcement efforts through corruption in North America, Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world.

As I have underscored, dark commerce across illicit economies is facilitated by criminalized ports, and whoever controls such strategic infrastructure can move illicit goods and contraband in any  country or region, and can export to flood markets around the world. 

In some risky ports and FTZs as well as nearby financial safe havens, dirty money is laundered to  fund greater criminality and insecurity.

In some cases, criminal networks arrange the infiltration of ports and coordinate local networks of  corrupt port insiders, and even law enforcement, to enable illicit goods and contraband to reach  demand markets, in furtherance of cross-border smuggling and trafficking operations.

The abuse of any one risky port or FTZs can cause serious security ripple effects across markets  and supply chains globally.

The ingenuity of criminals in finding novel ways to launder money or financial value seems both  infinite and troubling.  

As my ICAIE colleague, John Cassara, a former US intel and law enforcement official,  frequently underscores, criminals motivated by greed work with professional enablers and  facilitators to utilize trade-based money laundering, black market exchanges, hawala,  flying money, daigou, mirror swaps, M-payments, cryptocurrency and other digital assets  to launder dirty money, including for the drug cartels and other transnational criminal  groups. 

These days aided by professional enablers, criminals are using a variety of cryptocurrencies in  online businesses and marketplaces, both on the publicly accessible clear web and the dark web,  to generate and mix money, and to move commodities.

They’re using a range of social media apps to market goods and to operate different businesses, including the trafficking of drugs and precursors, and for human trafficking. At the core it’s all about profit, and these technologies allow them to generate and move large amounts of money  and value very quickly. 

Finally, through political interference and malign influence operations, hostile authoritarian  networks and their enabling proxies are polluting the truth through disinformation, curated  messages and false narratives designed to penetrate the West’s information spaces, sow discord, divide communities, and further weaken a community of democracies and the  international rules-based order.

In closing, to me the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence has in many respects illuminated clarity—that which is not only scientifically exponential, but also beautifully intelligent, to reflect  the possibilities for new innovative pathways-solutions and that illustrate the potential of our minds, as powerful as the secrets of the Fibonacci spirals. 

As we innovate new possibilities from each idea or brainstorm, we craft a force-multiplying trajectory that may lead exponentially to further discoveries and pathfinding actions (effective solutions that can be implemented and expanded), help us to better navigate  today’s chaos, manage change tomorrow, and bring enduring peace to multi-dimensional  security challenges and illicit vectors.

The US must also invest in developing innovative, evidence-based, and forward intelligence strategies with public and private sector partners to have more timely and accurate insights into  the intentions, capabilities, and actions of criminals by harnessing open source, “big data,”  artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics.  

We must also leverage international cooperation to disrupt and dismantle illicit supply chains by  deploying intelligence and law enforcement resources in both key domestic convergence zones  and international threat streams.

ICAIE is expanding greater energies in threat intelligence to harness a coalition of dedicated  networks across sectors to fight corruption, illicit economies, foreign malign influence by  authoritarian powers, and other destabilizing threats including through a new strategic  foresight ICAIE Peace and Security Sustainability (ICAIE PASS) Foundation, and a new  Mapping Latin America Security Threats Program lead by ICAIE Senior Advisor Douglas Farah. 

Without significantly more US leadership, creativity, and understanding the neural connections of today’s cross-border threats, many of the current trends may soon be irreversible against the  criminality crushing societies in many parts of the world. 

We must continue to outfox and react faster to the deviant machinations of criminals, money  launderers, enablers, and illicit threat networks with our unified, combined, and  multinational powers and steadfast resolve. 

If we break their corruptive and economic power, financial strength, and sever these newer  strategic alliances and their use of enablers and proxies across today’s transnational security landscapes and online criminal markets, we can begin a process to render them less powerful  by depriving them of their wealth, infrastructure, logistics, and safe havens.  

Otherwise, if we fail to thwart the collective influence of criminals and illicit threat networks  whose ambition is to thrive in a more chaotic multi-polar world, impunity will reign over the rule of law. 

And that’s a wrap! Getting Ahead of the Game in a new Multi-Polar World in 30 minutes!

David M. Luna’s Statement at ICAIE News here; complete text available at: https://icaie.com/2024/05/icaie-keynote-address-at-the-pentagon-getting-ahead-of-the-game-in-a-new-multi-polar-world-across-todays-spectrum-of-threats-converging-ecosystems-of-criminality-and-hybrid-irregular-warfare/.