Networks of Evil

[Valin]

City Journal:

Transnational criminal cartels, still poorly understood, are undermining order around the world. Here’s how they can be disrupted.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca

Spring 2016

 

In the early morning hours of Friday, January 8, 2016, Mexican marines closed in on the world’s most wanted man: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, a notorious drug trafficker with a net worth estimated near $1 billion. The climactic shootout in Sinaloa, Mexico, took place after Guzmán made a getaway into the sewer system from a house that the authorities had been watching. He was finally apprehended after he reemerged and stole a car. His capture brought to a close six months of humiliation for the Mexican government, which had struggled to explain how Guzmán could escape from a maximum-security prison by walking into the shower, under full view of a video camera, and slipping away through a tiny hole in the floor that led to a 30-foot-deep, mile-long tunnel that had taken perhaps a year to construct. It was the second time that El Chapo had broken out of prison under the noses of Mexican officials. Mexican officials are currently debating whether to hold Guzmán—really, whether they can hold him—or extradite him to the United States, where he faces indictments in multiple federal courts on drug trafficking and murder charges. His organization, the Sinaloa cartel, has smuggled vast quantities of drugs into the United States through elaborate tunnel systems near the border between the two countries.

 

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Grasping how critical resources flow between lawful and unlawful sectors is more relevant in disrupting cartels than is capturing criminal lords, like El Chapo, who are already overexposed. The false idea that complex criminal structures collapse when a single leader is taken out is sustained by stories like that of the Medellín cartel. In 1993, the Colombian government, Colombian paramilitary forces, the Cali cartel, and the DEA broke up the Medellín cartel by killing Pablo Escobar and rounding up other key members. Since then, other countries have tried to replicate this feat in the hope that similar results would follow. But today’s criminal networks are more complex, resilient, and decentralized than anything that existed in Escobar’s time.

 

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Traditional investigative procedures and concepts have proved insufficient for confronting macro-criminal networks. Comprehending the actions of thousands of players across legal and illegal sectors requires gathering, processing, and making sense of huge volumes of judicial and investigative information. A major obstacle to interpreting such vast quantities of data is that the human brain, according to Dunbar’s number, only possesses the capacity for understanding the structure of social networks in which 150 to 200 individuals participate. Beyond this number, we need additional tools.

 

These tools now exist. Computational techniques such as social-network analysis allow the processing of large volumes of information, while revealing characteristics that cannot be directly perceived by the human brain. For instance, the Vortex Foundation (founded by coauthor Salcedo-Albarán) has designed and applied protocols and software based on social-network analysis to map individual characteristics of each agent or node within a network as well as behaviors of the entire network. These tools have proved vital in developing a sharper understanding of criminal networks and how they operate at transnational, domestic, and local levels in several countries.

 

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Vortex.org