Sovereignty and Organized Crime

Military occupation is no longer the only way to erode sovereignty. In the 21st century, criminal organizations are challenging the exercise of authority over territories and forcing us to rethink the recovery of the state beyond security and social assistance.

Sovereignty and Organized Crime

Despite it being summer, temperatures in the southernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean are quite hostile. The wind cuts across exposed cheeks and fingers turn pink from the cold. Technology is an ally of human beings in such extreme conditions, which prevail for much of the year. Technological advances have made it possible to inhabit some of the most inhospitable places on the planet and even to imagine the conquest of other worlds.

But in the 19th century that technology did not exist, and those who moved from the Pampas plains to the Malvinas Islands embodied either the courage of the daring or the necessity of the desperate. Living in ramshackle houses battered by temporary occupation and harsh weather, the gauchos arrived to hunt sea lions, raise cattle, break horses and reaffirm Argentine sovereignty over the islands.

On January 2, 1833, the English captain J. J. Onslow arrived at what was then Puerto Luis —in the northeast of East Malvinas— in command of the corvette HMS Clio and ordered the Argentine military personnel to abandon the outpost. The following day, January 3, 1833, the Argentine military personnel and their families boarded the schooner Sarandí and left the islands.

That cold summer day marked the beginning of the permanent British occupation of Argentine territory. Through force and with diplomatic backing from the United States, British military personnel and settlers —and, more recently, foreigners from all over the world— began to occupy, control and exploit the Malvinas Islands.

In the cases of the Malvinas Islands, Gibraltar and the Chagos Archipelago —all occupied by Great Britain— the legal framework is broad and conclusive, recognizing the rights of Argentina, Spain and Mauritius, respectively. For a long time, sovereignty was violated through military occupation and was subsequently consolidated through economics and politics.

But that was no longer the only way to lose sovereignty. Without flags, declarations of annexation or regular armies in sight, criminal organizations managed to control territories in different regions of the world, regulate sectors of the economy, infiltrate institutions and condition a large part of social life.

New Forms of Occupation

Territory constitutes the physical foundation of sovereignty, and the state must exercise effective control over it. However, territorial control does not guarantee the full exercise of sovereignty. Territorial control requires the state to exercise the functions that properly belong to it, such as enacting laws, enforcing them, collecting taxes, administering justice and guaranteeing the security of those who inhabit that territory. Without effective control of the territory, sovereignty becomes merely declarative, and without control over the space, its exercise is constrained.

There are territories in different regions of the world where sovereignty has only legal recognition. Places such as the Malvinas Islands, Gibraltar and Chagos are the subject of sovereignty claims that are broadly recognized under international law, although such recognition does not translate into effective territorial control.

In all these cases, sovereignty was violated through military occupation and is sustained, among other things, by the political support of the great powers. One could say that the legitimate rights of each of these states are being violated from above, by the established institutions of states with far greater military, economic and diplomatic capabilities.

However, violation from above —or through superiority— is no longer the only way to erode soveAreignty. With the evolution of criminal organizations, the sovereignty of states is being undermined from below, through infiltration. Borders remain intact, no foreign army imposes its laws, and other states do not debate whether or not to recognize a new government.

Criminal organizations that manage to control territories do not merely administer violence; they distort markets and impose rules of coexistence. They move from being more or less complex organizations structured to commit crimes to imposing their authority, a function reserved for the state.

Over time, criminal organizations manage to refine their mechanisms of coercion and replace explicit violence with more discreet forms of control. They begin their activities by exercising authority through violence, but those that manage to consolidate themselves in territories do so through a system of self-regulation. In such cases, physical violence ceases to be a constant and becomes an exception.

The systematic displays of power and impunity, together with the vulgar luxury they exhibit in physical territory and, above all, in the digital sphere, become an inexhaustible source of stimuli for an aspirational model suited to the times. In addition, the economic assistance that criminal organizations provide to citizens excluded from the system transforms them into providers of assistance where the state fails to guarantee it, generating in those same excluded citizens a willingness to preserve their presence, despite the high social costs.

The legitimacy they gain —or appropriate— is the very legitimacy lost by state institutions, businesses and civil society actors that fail to transform the reality in which millions of people live.

Sovereignty in working-class neighborhoods erodes when self-regulation becomes consolidated and criminal organizations no longer need physical and explicit violence to impose their rules in the territory. When this type of conduct becomes automated and no longer depends on which criminal organization controls the territory, sovereignty ceases to be exclusively in the hands of the state and becomes contested and exercised by organizations that become an effective authority within the territory.

Governing the Consequences

The temporary loss of territorial control not only poses a risk to the lives of those who inhabit the territory; it also limits the state's ability to effectively implement public policies capable of addressing the causes that foster the development of organized crime.

The actions of criminal organizations generate two types of victims. The first group consists of those who can be individually identified, such as victims of human trafficking, forced labor, drug trafficking or sexual exploitation —among other crimes— whom we could define as direct victims.

For this group, states have programs of limited originality and effectiveness aimed at individually repairing the harm suffered by victims. They are offered financial subsidies that do not reach the minimum wage, training geared toward low-productivity sectors or sectors with limited prospects for economic mobility. At the same time, these training programs are wrapped in an inexorable mantra of cheap philosophy that shifts success or failure onto the willingness —or lack thereof— of those being trained, the casualties of the system, while ignoring the structural conditions of those who became victims of organized crime.

The second group cannot be individually identified as victims because the harm extends beyond individuals and reaches the community as a whole. In this case, the community itself becomes the territorial victim of criminal organizations, and states generally have no programs to assist it as a victim.

Policies tend to be partial and focused on containing the consequences rather than repairing the damage. The cinematic deployments of security forces in impoverished working-class neighborhoods are usually accompanied by a series of state programs that are far less effective than those aimed at the first group and that do not alter the territorial, economic and institutional conditions that made the expansion of organized crime possible.

The recovery and reparation of individual victims is an ethical and legal obligation of states, but it is not enough to repair the damage if the victim cannot develop within the community and, above all, if the state, through its institutions, does not recover effective authority over the territory and, on that basis, transform the conditions that made the expansion of organized crime possible.

Sovereignty Takes Politics, Not a Fork

Neither police raids, housing subsidies nor entrepreneurship workshops. When state sovereignty is eroded from below through the infiltration and capture not only of state institutions but also of strategic resources and community life, the tool to recover it —or defend it— is politics.

The violence that criminal organizations exercise in working-class neighborhoods is generally interrupted temporarily when a large number of federal security forces —including the Armed Forces— are deployed there to regain control of the territory.

But that intervention does not restore sovereignty. The sudden and necessary —although episodic— intervention of the Ministries of Security and Justice in working-class neighborhoods is not followed by a planned deployment of the other ministries. The ability to disrupt the criminal circuit is a necessary condition for rebuilding the social fabric, but it is not sufficient.

Despite the correct diagnosis made by political leaders regarding the appropriation and, in some cases, the de facto relinquishment of functions that properly belong to the state —employment, healthcare, education, culture and justice— to criminal organizations, public policies aimed at fully reclaiming those responsibilities do not usually follow.

It is not enough for the state to return to occupy the territory that was abandoned, relinquished or lost. It must govern it again. It is not enough to provide job training if jobs are not created in the territory. It is not about building hospitals without professionals, medicines or the capacity to care for those who need them, nor about maintaining schools that function as cafeterias but not as centers for human and intellectual development. A territory may be overflowing with police officers, offices and public officials and yet have criminal organizations dictating the rules.

The concrete of buildings, the grass in parks and the pavement of streets are urgent, but they must arrive alongside the rest of the state. Politics must arrive with them, in order to recover authority and restore sovereignty.