Latest in Transnational Criminal Organizations
Two short items involving drug cartel violence in Mexico and the related issue of US cooperation with Mexican authorities in counter-cartel efforts.
United States v. Corly et al., announced today, is a very interesting case. From the DOJ press release:
This is a pretty remarkable development. Authorities have arrested a dual US-Iranian citizen on charges that he conspired with a senior official of Iran's Qods Force (of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States (potentially through the bombing of a restaurant in the United States), and potentially to carry out other operations as well. What is very scary about this fact pattern is the alleged attempt to pay a Mexico-based transnational drug trafficking organization to execute the hit. The attempt was doomed to fail, fortunate
A Second Circuit panel has affirmed, in United States v.Kassar (2d Cir. Sep. 21, 2011), the conviction of three defendants who were convicted on charges stemming from a sting operation involving a faux effort by the FARC to obtain weapons for use against U.S.
Another Mark Mazzetti story from the past week that deserves your attention: this piece, which sheds some additional light on the intelligence and logistical support that the United States is providing to Mexico's conflict with the cartels. The story primarily focuses on "boomerang" operations in which Mexican security forces preparing to conduct a raid on a cartel target in Mexico first gather and learn of their mission in the far-more-secure and discreet confines of a US government facility with
Matt Dahl is a 2009 graduate of the University of Richmond School of Law who works on legal and policy issues for a cybersecurity company in Virginia. We are pleased to welcome his guest post, which discusses the potential application to cybercriminal groups of the recent IEEPA-based executive order on Transnational Criminal Organizations:
U.S. involvement in Mexico's struggle against violent drug-trafficking organizations has deepened recently, according to Ginger Thompson's piece in the New York Times today:
I've written a lot over the years about the way law responds to changing practical phenomena such as the emergence of non-state actors as a strategic threat, ala al Qaeda, as have many others. This vein of scholarship often emphasizes themes of globalization and the decline of the Westphalian model in which sovereign states are the only serious players in the international order. One strand of that scholarship has repeatedly emphasized how similar transnational criminal organizations can be to terrorist groups, even if the nature of the threat they pose is distinguishable and (at least us
There are few topics more slippery--and more emblematic of the current age--than the intersection of transnational organized crime, narcotics, illicit arms, and violent non-state actors. On that front, this has been a busy week. Consider the pair of indictments announced today out of the Southern District of New York, one involving Hezbollah and the other the Taliban. From DOJ's press release:
Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning-News has an article that will be of interest to anyone trying to come to grips with whether a state of armed conflict can be said to exist in some areas of Mexico. In particular, the story is of interest with respect to the question of territorial control by a non-state actor, which for some observers is an important consideration in determining whether circumstances of violence in the non-international setting have crossed over the threshold of a