О некоторых аспектах современного кокаинового бизнеса и трафика в странах Латинской Америки

Статья посвящена отдельным аспектам современного состояния кокаинового бизнеса в Латинской Америке, прежде всего колумбийского, и трафика из нее. С использованием посвященных данной проблеме публикаций в научных и информационных СМИ обсуждается роль Пабло Эскобара в формировании нового типа латиноамериканских кокаиновых картелей, и их трансконтинентальная активность в XXI в. Сделаны выводы относительно отдельных социально-экономических и политических особенностей современного состояния кокаинового трафика и проблемах борьбы с ним.

On Some Aspects of Modern Cocaine Business and Trafficking in Latin America

Drug production and trafficking has become perhaps the first area where globalization has manifested itself to the greatest extent. However, despite the intercontinental nature of modern drug trafficking, the situation with it on other continents still remains poorly understood. The subject matter of my study is situation with cocaine business in nowadays’ Latin America. I focused on drug trafficking from particularly Columbia and analyzed such problem through historical role of drug baron Pablo Escobar to form the new type of Latin American cocaine cartels and their transcontinental activity in 21st century as it is represented in scientific papers and news media. So, for my purposes I used problem, source, institutional and comparative analysis, as well as method of historical reconstruction. Institutional weakness of official governments’ structure in modern Latin America and its susceptibility to the corruption creates positive conditions for rising the number of criminal cartels, especially connected with drug trafficking. Moreover so-called “Escobar’s epoch” clearly demonstrates that such drug cartels tend to replace the official government structures. Paradoxically such situation forms in two ways; when legal government could use ones’ cartel against others for their own purposes; at the same time, these cartels themselves are able to make a sponsorship for irredentists’ movements, which are in active armed state and struggle with legal government. As it represented in world’s scientific papers and mass media, general ways to struggle with cocaine business are still concentrated on forming the strong state, in both politically and economically ways: effective measures to provide social protection, salary rise, full government’s control of state borders, and so on. However, examples seem to indicate that such methods are not so effective. In fact, there is no country in Latin America, which could be able to deal with this problem with their inner resources and that leads to the necessity to provide help from abroad, especially the obliged one from USA. This could become the point of tension in saving the sovereignties in countries of Latin America, because population of these countries is starting to doubt that their own legal governments can solve them. The latter one is also provided by the drug dealers themselves via anti-American rhetoric. Thus, I conclude that one of the ways to solve the mentioned problems dwells on the anti-drug policy correction, especially in its transcontinental aspect, which means that a burden to struggle with drug cartels is not only the US “piece of cake” to solve but should be shared among international community, including Russia.