A View from the CT Foxhole: Vanda Felbab-Brown, SWJ-El Centro Fellow

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. She is also the director of Brookings’ Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and co-director of the Africa Security Initiative at Brookings. She directs the Brookings series “The Fentanyl Crisis in North America and the Global Reach of Synthetic Drugs” and is the host of the podcast show “The Killing Drugs.” She was also the co-director of the “Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions” series.

Felbab-Brown is an expert on international and internal conflicts, insurgency, terrorism, urban violence, and illicit economies. Her fieldwork has covered Afghanistan, South Asia, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Iraq, Somalia and the Horn of Africa, Nigeria, and other African regions. She is the author of Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption (The Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming) and The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (Hurst, 2018), among numerous other publications. Felbab-Brown received her doctorate in political science from MIT and her bachelor’s in government from Harvard University.

Visit the Combating Terrorism Center to read Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown’s answers to the following questions:

CTC: You are currently the director of the Initiative on Non-State Armed Actors, the co-director of the Africa Security Initiative, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. You’re a renowned expert on internal conflicts, non-traditional security threats, and the author of several books. What first drew you to this field and to this problem set?

CTC: You’ve studied cartels and TCOs (transnational criminal organizations) for many years, in addition to more traditional terrorist organizations. What have been the benefits of the U.S. government’s designation of a number of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) over the past year and a half?

CTC: Going back to the designation itself, can you help our readers understand a little bit more about where there is overlap between the objectives of the cartels and the objectives of traditional terrorist organizations. Which motivations of these two types of organizations are similar and which are dissimilar?

CTC: How have criminal groups in Latin America exploited governance gaps? And beyond trafficking and extortion, in what ways do they work with those local populations, as you were mentioning, and emulate state-like governance structures, creating forms of hybrid governance that may complicate traditional counterterrorism and security responses?

CTC: Could you explain the roles that these traditional terrorist groups play in Latin America and how their presence might impact cartel activities? One example is Hezbollah’s continued presence in Latin America, specifically in the Tri-Border Area and Venezuela. How do these groups collaborate, and what are the roles that these groups are playing?

CTC: In the near future, we plan to feature an article in Sentinel that examines lessons learned from the global war on terrorism that could be applicable or are at least useful to consider in counter-cartel efforts. In your view, what strategies that have been effective against terrorist groups will also be effective against cartels?

CTC: Let’s pivot to China and China’s activity in Latin America. As a starting point, could you describe the depth of cooperation that exists today between Chinese money laundering networks and Mexican cartels or Latin American cartels? And how and why did this cooperation develop?

CTC: How much does Beijing know this is going on or support this going on? Is it a bit of a turning of a blind eye because it’s advantageous in certain ways to that government?

CTC: What role does China play in the drug manufacturing process and how does it fit into the larger landscape of fentanyl and synthetic opioid production in Latin America? How big of a problem is it when it comes to China and that problem set?

CTC: Looking toward the future, what are the two or three new developments, particularly advances in technology, such as AI drones and other emerging tools, that you think could reshape the operations of cartels and also the effectiveness of counter-cartel efforts?

CTC: But maybe the next 10 years?