The crime is being a democracy

Organized crime, exception, and power: an analysis of how security becomes a political argument in contemporary democracies.

Organized crime, exception, and power in United States.

The bombing of the city of Caracas in the early hours of January 3 and the subsequent kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife by U.S. military forces was not a novel practice in U.S. international policy, especially given the apparent objective of taking them to the United States and bringing them before a judge, charged with crimes related to organized criminal activity.

The closest precedent in terms of time, region, and circumstance is that of Manuel Noriega, a military officer who seized power in Panama—with the support of the United States—but who later ended up accused by his former ally of drug trafficking and money laundering.

On December 19, 1989, after bombing several military targets, more than twenty thousand U.S. soldiers invaded Panama with the aim of “restoring democracy” and capturing Noriega. Ironies of fate: after hiding for several days, on January 3, 1990, Manuel Noriega surrendered to senior U.S. military commanders and was ultimately sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking, organized crime, and money laundering.

President Donald Trump’s motives for bombing Venezuela and kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and his wife are multiple and of different kinds. In Venezuela’s particular case, the levels of Chinese political influence in the region and control over strategic resources such as oil, minerals, and so-called rare earths—fundamental to the development of the digital economy—are clearly among those motives.

But the public motives that supposedly led him to make that decision—which he never attempted to explain—are, according to President Donald Trump, the global expansion of organized crime, the consequences this has had for the United States—half a million deaths from drug consumption over the last decade—and the political opportunity to intervene in third countries.

President Trump decided to designate criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations, “which have flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” as stated in Executive Order 13224, signed one month after taking office for his second term. The campaign aimed at portraying migrants as those responsible for crimes committed in the United States was amplified once he assumed office and began intervening militarily in the Caribbean Sea, attacking ships allegedly carrying cocaine bound for the United States.

For President Trump, as for many of his allies in the region, the political situation and the violation of human rights in Venezuela became the perfect excuse to justify part of a repressive and politically controlling policy within U.S. territory.

The policy deployed by President Donald Trump in his own country is the result of a phenomenal deterioration of traditional political institutions—national and international—of a cultural and political heritage grounded in mythological foundations rooted in U.S. independence, and of a political philosophy that resurfaced after nearly one hundred years.

The Past as a Political Program

For several years now, in many regions of the world, we have found ourselves in the midst of a process of transformation affecting some of the pillars of the democratic system. New political, religious, social, community, and media actors have burst onto the political scene, while traditional or historical ones decline or survive with decidedly lower levels of approval and trust.

In their electoral campaigns and government administrations, this new class of leaders appeals to the recovery of supposed national values that shaped an alleged past of splendor, of which neither they nor their ancestors were part, either in its construction or in its supposed benefits.

These new leaders present themselves as antagonistic to traditional sectors of political and economic power, even though those same sectors often financed their costly public positioning campaigns. They tend to portray themselves as ordinary members of society, whose individual effort allowed them to reach the positions they hold, and they argue that through the restoration of traditional values, anyone who so desires—regardless of their starting conditions—can also succeed, as they supposedly did.

The idea of recovering a wonderful past necessarily entails the idea that, at some point in history, that past was destroyed. The genesis of that destruction is usually identified in 1945, with the end of World War II and the development of the political structures of the so-called Welfare State at the national level and multilateralism as the predominant practice at the international level.

Regarding this latter point, peripheral countries such as Argentina or El Salvador reject political multilateralism, but not economic multilateralism. If full political alignment with a single country were extended to trade relations, in a highly globalized world it would pose an exceptionally large risk not only to development but also to the survival of their governments.

During the final years of World War II, victorious political leaders agreed to establish a certain number of limits on the conduct of political actors in all arenas, especially economic and military ones. They also agreed to create institutions and to develop a more or less unconscious praxis aimed at promoting and guaranteeing human, economic, and social rights.

Although on countless occasions those institutions—the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Bank (WB), among others—failed to live up to their obligations, the general understanding reached favored, albeit unevenly, the economic and social development of certain regions.

Today, new leaders argue that those limits and institutions restricted the economic growth of states and that policies of integration and respect for guarantees exposed them to risks in terms of citizen security and geopolitics. They present themselves as enemies of the unrestricted respect for constitutional guarantees, in a kind of critique of the moderate or inclusive legal positivism that emerged as a response to classical positivism typical of wartime periods.

The Limit as a Problem

In the particular case of the United States, the wonderful past to which most of its presidents refer dates back to the first settlers who arrived from Great Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. The past—and above all the future—of the United States to which Donald Trump refers derives from the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

This doctrine, based on religious—or mythological—foundations, traces back to the first Protestant and Puritan settlers—mainly English and Scottish—who regarded the United States as a future nation chosen by God, whose people had the duty to expand it from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The apparent importance of recovering the past in order to return to the path of a predestined future for the United States was one of the first issues mentioned by President Donald Trump when he took office for his second term. In his inaugural address on January 20, 2025, the president assured that “the United States will once again see itself as a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag to new and beautiful horizons.”

President Trump is convinced that the well-being of citizens in the rest of the world comes at the expense of the sacrifice of the American people, an approach he extends to levels of criminality in the United States. Referring to this issue, then-candidate Trump stated that “crime was out of control.”

The number of violent crimes increased in the years immediately following the coronavirus pandemic, but those same studies show that by the time Donald Trump was elected president in 2024, the rate of violent crime—mainly robberies and homicides—had fallen to its lowest levels in the past thirty years.

Despite the numbers, President Trump now claims that crime levels remain extremely high and that migrants—especially Latin Americans—commit most of these violent crimes. Solely on the basis of origin or language, President Trump accuses migrants of belonging to complex criminal organizations. He also believes that these organizations were established in the United States at the initiative of Venezuelan, Mexican, Colombian, and Brazilian authorities, in an alleged attempt to rid themselves of the problem and destabilize order in the United States.

Through an unprecedented number of executive orders or decrees—many later overturned by the federal judiciary—through laws more than two hundred years old—such as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—or by means of a circumstantial majority of representatives and senators in Congress, President Trump enacted a series of measures aimed at “protecting American communities from criminal foreigners.”

From his earliest days as president in his second term as occupant of the White House, Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard—a reserve component of the U.S. Armed Forces—along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, and other federal security agencies in several U.S. cities, to detain and deport as many migrants as possible.

Managed Democracy

With nearly two thousand five hundred federal force members deployed in the state of Minnesota—the same number of soldiers the United States left as a reserve in Iraq—President Donald Trump set out to condition any form of opposition to his government’s policies.

The choice of Minneapolis as a testing ground is no coincidence. On May 25, 2020, a group of police officers killed George Floyd Jr., an African American man, father of five, with minor criminal records for drug possession. The murder, recorded on cell phones by bystanders at the time of his arrest, sparked outrage among a significant segment of the U.S. population and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The president at the time was also Donald Trump—his first term—and he immediately opposed the movement’s demands, as well as any proposal coming from it. “Left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our monuments, and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy,” he said at an official event on September 17, 2020.

In this second term, President Trump’s will appears to be to turn Minneapolis and a large portion of its citizens—many of whom protested against him during his first term—into a kind of demonstration of what he is willing to do across the entire country. Moreover, the state of Minnesota is cosmopolitan, with large migrant communities from Mexico, Southeast Asia, India, and Somalia, according to the American Immigration Council.

Invoking the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, President Trump seeks to stoke the embers of a significant sector of U.S. society that longs to recover a certain prestige that once served as a guarantor of order and development in the United States and that believes it should be extended to the rest of the world. In practice, however, President Trump also draws on a philosophy that emerged in Germany during the interwar period.

In his book The Dual State, German lawyer and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel argued that, in the years prior to and during the hegemony of the Nazi Party in Germany, two complementary types of state existed: a normative one, governed by law, and a prerogative or measures-based one, driven exclusively by unlimited political criteria.

The German jurist developed the idea that the normative state acted as the guarantor of the private rights of non-Jewish German citizens—especially capital owners—who, despite the circumstances, could continue to resort to state institutions—particularly the judiciary—to exercise their rights and guarantees against any arbitrariness committed by members of the state itself.

Regarding the measures-based state, Fraenkel argued that, for this type of philosophy, action precedes law—first comes the fact, then the right—and that the law is subject to the political needs identified by those in power, particularly when enemies are defined: in Nazi Germany, first communism, then Jews, and finally any opponent of the regime.

The official secret police of Nazi Germany—the Gestapo—functioned like any other police force dedicated to establishing or preserving order, but by political decision it could detain anyone without a judicial warrant and send them to concentration camps without any due process to justify it.

Crime, Migration, and Exception

The deployment of ICE and other federal forces in the state of Minnesota—in numbers similar to those of U.S. soldiers in Iraq—the killing of two U.S. citizens who participated in spontaneous protests against such procedures—Renee Nicole Good (37) and Alex Jeffrey Pretti (37)—and the use of five-year-old children as bait to lure their migrant parents out of their homes in order to arrest them are publicly justified by President Trump.

Federal agents move through the city in unmarked vehicles, with covered faces, carrying long firearms and wearing bulletproof vests, resembling more a military occupation of a foreign city than the deployment of a police force seeking to enforce a migration policy that claims to aim at bringing calm and security to U.S. citizens.

The situation has exceeded all anticipated limits, and comparisons with a city under siege by occupying forces are constantly repeated in the media. Yet even in war there are rules of engagement that are observed to some degree. In the case of ICE agents—to cite just one of the forces—Vice President J. D. Vance stated that these agents have “absolute immunity to carry out the orders they receive.”

Federal agents not only pursue potential migrants—which in the United States effectively places them in the same category as criminals—but also frequently threaten to arrest anyone who approaches to record the procedures on their cell phones. These videos have made it possible not only to debunk official accounts of the killings of U.S. citizens in Minnesota over the past month, but also to reveal the ongoing violations of the law committed by these agents in their attempts to detain migrants.

They harass people with possible links to migrants in order to locate and arrest them, break into private property without judicial authorization or the owners’ consent, rapidly deport migrants held in new mass detention centers to avoid court filings that could halt deportation proceedings, and in many cases, despite having judicial protection, migrants are deported anyway.

Regarding this, President Trump declared in his White House office before members of the national press: “We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, they have to have a trial.’” On social media the day before, he had written: “We can’t give everyone a trial, because doing so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”

To complete his own version of the dual state, President Trump committed to continuing to appoint judges to appellate courts who support his measures. That tactic began during his first term and, in a crude attempt to amplify a sense of impunity among U.S. citizens, President Trump confessed: “If they’re my judges, you already know how they’re going to rule.”

Crime as Policy

The symbolic and generalized association between a migrant and a member of a criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, or money laundering is the central argument in President Trump’s political rhetoric to legitimize the measures-based state. A similar mechanism operated in Nazi Germany, when official rhetoric assimilated Jews as a threat to public order, facilitating the application of exceptional measures against that group.

Because even though this is a state that in many respects cuts across the state of norms, politics as a commanding force requires politics as a founding element. In this case, President Trump—like those of Argentina and El Salvador—uses it in his discourse and political practice, because organized crime is a real phenomenon that has long generated fear among the population, especially within the working class.

Large segments of U.S. society are mobilizing in the streets in an attempt to dismantle these kinds of practices, but national and international political representatives do not appear to be up to the task. The decoupling of the United States from the system of multilateralism and human rights protection is historic: it did not begin with Donald Trump, but it has never reached this point before.

The case of Maduro and his wife had already occurred almost forty years earlier. Attacks on the institutions that emerged after World War II failed once again when the United States decided to invade two Middle Eastern countries and disperse their populations after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Several U.S. presidents refused to sign or ratify human rights treaties such as the American Convention on Human Rights (1973), the Convention against Torture (1984), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (1996), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), among others. It was not—and is not—only Trump.

What happened in Venezuela quickly disappeared from the media, and attention shifted to Greenland, a territory that is part of a historic U.S. military ally, Denmark. It is only a matter of time before we know what will happen. But what is certain—and already happening—is that these kinds of discourses and, above all, these kinds of actions should awaken leaders around the world from the presumptuous idea of continuing to implement old solutions to old problems that were never resolved and that have only grown more complex.

Organized crime has already been used by the United States as an argument to justify its political and military interventions in third countries; today that practice continues, but it has also begun to be used as a tool of political control. Or perhaps organized crime is becoming the policy itself.