convergence

The Geography of Badness
In fact, many of the major hubs in the illicit global economy are also hubs of the licit economy.
Bangkok, for instance, has long been appealing to human smugglers, weapons traffickers,
document forgers, and other transnational criminals precisely because it is a regional hub for
legitimate transportation and a prominent shipping center with a major international airport.
Because of the size of the licit economy in Thailand, Bangkok can absorb a high degree of
criminality without becoming completely overrun by, or identified, with it. This is not always
the case with more fragile states, and here we arrive at another key dynamic: while transnational
criminals may not be attracted to outright state failure, once they arrive in a state that
is already weak, their very presence can hasten the further degradation of sovereign control.
Mexico is a large and prosperous enough country that even in the context of a raging drug
war, the basic rule of law widely persists, the state continues to function up to a point, and the
country continues to enjoy both tourism and foreign direct investment.
In recent years, Mexico’s drug cartels have begun to expand southward into neighboring
Guatemala, which is already arguably on the brink of state failure. 32 In recent years, Guatemala’s
murder rate has been a multiple of Mexico’s; a 2007 study by the UN and the World Bank
ranked it the third most murderous country in the world with 97 percent of its homicides
unsolved. 33 Whereas Mexico struggles with drug cartels but for the most part maintains the
basic functions of a viable state, sovereign authority in Guatemala, such as it is, will likely erode
even further as the cartels become entrenched. Similarly, Kenya can assimilate the presence of
East African criminal groups, whereas the existing disorder in Somalia is only exacerbated by
their activities. Think of crossborder criminality as a kind of virus: in searching for a host, it
naturally gravitates to weakness. But whereas a big and only somewhat weak state like Mexico
or Kenya is robust enough to live with the virus without succumbing to it, an already demoralized
state like Guatemala or Somalia is much more vulnerable. So corrosive is the influence of
transnational organized crime that even if black market entrepreneurs aren’t attracted to state
failure, they may ultimately induce it. Occasionally, the virus simply kills its host.
Borderlands and Breakaway States
Importantly, these hosts are not always nation-states per se. Hubs of illicit activity often develop
in areas of overlapping or contested sovereignty. Consider the Tri-Border Area, where Argentina,
Brazil, and Paraguay meet. Though none of its constituent nations is itself a fragile state,
the Tri-Border Area has long been a notorious hotbed of black market activity. It “provides a
haven that is geographically, socially, economically, and politically highly conducive for allowing
the activities of organized crime, Islamic terrorist groups, and corrupt officials,” the Library of
Congress report observed in 2003. “Those groups are supported by drug and arms trafficking,
money laundering, and other lucrative criminal activities.” 34 Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este has
long been a vibrant hub of licit commerce, generating some $13 billion in merchandise sales
in 2000. But it also serves as a clearinghouse for counterfeit goods and has been the subject of
longstanding rumors (though not as much in the way of verifiable information) about fundraising
for Islamic extremism. The 2003 report identifies “Brazilian and Paraguayan mafias”
that are active in the area, “as well as non-indigenous syndicates from Chile, Colombia, Corsica,
Ghana, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Nigeria, Russia, and Taiwan.” 35
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