Warlords, Inc.
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Copyright © 2015 by Noah Raford and Andrew Trabulsi. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.
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Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.
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An older and—in parts—more detailed version of Chapter 6 previously appeared as “The (Un)bearable Lightness of Violence: Warlords as an Alternative Form of Governance in the ‘Westphalian Periphery,’ ” in State Failure Revisited II: Actors of Violence and Alternative Forms of Governance, edited by Tobias Debiel and Daniel Lambach (7–49), Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen (INEF Report, 89/2007).
A version of Chapter 10 was published as “Green Social Democracy or Barbarism: Climate Change and the End of High Modernism,” in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds., The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism, Volume 2 in the Social Science Research Council’s series Possible Futures, NYU Press, June 2011.
A version of Chapter 13 was previously published as “Beyond Survival: A Short Course in Pioneering in Response to the Current Crisis,” Triarchy Press, 2009.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warlords, Inc. : black markets, broken states, and the rise of the warlord entrepreneur / edited by Noah Raford and Andrew Trabulsi; foreword by Robert J. Bunker.
pages cm
Summary: “A cutting-edge examination of new types of political actors who emerge in a world of drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations. Leading experts chart the changing geopolitical landscape as the world’s elaborate but fragile political systems become increasingly vulnerable to breakdown and deliberate disruption” — Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-58394-901-6 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-58394-902-3 (ebook)
1. Warlordism. 2. Political stability. 3. Organized crime–Political aspects. 4. Transnational crime–Political aspects. 5. Political corruption. I. Trabulsi, Andrew. II. Raford, Noah.
JZ1317.2.W374 2014
364.1’3–dc23
2014032400
v3.1
To Napier Collyns
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Violent Entrepreneurs and Techno Warlords … All Edge
by Robert J. Bunker
Introduction
Warlords, Inc.—A Portrait
by Andrew Trabulsi
Part 1: The Dark Side
1. Of Warlords and Rodeos
Why Nothing Works
by Vinay Gupta
2. Social and Economic Collapse
Lessons from History and Complexity
by Peter Taylor and Noah Raford
3. Innovation, Deviation, and Development
Warlords and Proto-State Provision
by Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer, and Steven Weber
4. Sovereignty, Criminal Insurgency, and Drug Cartels
The Rise of a Post-State Society
by John P. Sullivan
5. From Patronage Politics to Predatory States
Crime and Governance in Africa
by Tuesday Reitano
Part 2: Shades of Gray
6. Warlord Governance
Transition Toward—or Coexistence with—the State?
by Daniel Biró
7. 5GW
Into the Heart of Darkness
by Mark Safranski
8. Weaponizing Capitalism
The Naxals of India
by Shlok Vaidya
9. Mexico’s Criminal Organizations
Weakness in Their Complexity, Strength in Their Evolution
by Samuel Logan and James Bosworth
Part 3: The Bright Side
10. The Politics of a Post-Climate-Change World
Pyongyang, Puntland, or Portland?
by William Barnes and Nils Gilman
11. Bringing the End of War to the Global Badlands
by Hardin Tibbs
12. The White Hats
A Multitude of Citizens
by Paul Hilder
13. Beyond Survival
Pioneering as a Response to Crisis
by Graham Leicester
Epilogue
Into the Future
by Daniel S. Gressang
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
Foreword
Violent Entrepreneurs and Techno Warlords … All Edge
Robert J. Bunker
Two Vignettes
When Frederick VI of Nuremberg called in his loan marker with Emperor Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire in 1411, times got downright nasty in the old fief of Brandenburg. Sigismund, perennially short of hard cash, had put up the fief as collateral—when he couldn’t cover his marker, Frederick VI foreclosed, like any self-respecting strongman would do. Sigismund didn’t care, since the lands had helped him become emperor, and he had no real control over the fief anyway—it belonged to the Quitzow and other landed knightly families and now would be Frederick VI’s headache. Undaunted, Frederick VI worked a deal to contract a siege train—composed of what was then high-tech cannon like “Lazy Greta”—from Thuringia to blast the local Quitzows and the other knights out of their strongholds and make the foreclosure complete. It took only a few hundred years and quite a few suppressed rebellions, but the Hohenzollern family, of which Frederick VI was a part, became secure in their rule and the legitimate rulers of the fief. In time, Prussia and many other lands were added to the family holdings, with their Hohenzollern descendants eventually gaining the titles of kings and emperors. Not a bad run for a royal family that can trace back its origins to a medieval mafioso out of Nuremberg who made a killing—and killed with impunity—to get his principal and a tidy profit back from that fateful marker owed to him by a Holy Roman emperor.
Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán grew up a poor child of Sinaloa, Mexico, mostly in the 1960s. He was extremely ambitious, climbing up the trafficking ranks to become a member of the Guadalajara cartel while still in his twenties. With the split up of that cartel, due to the torture killing of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent “Kiki” Camarena and the creation of the plaza system, El Chapo went on to form the Sinaloa cartel with a triumvirate of other hardened traffickers. As a brilliant criminal mastermind, El Chapo thought strategically, only killed when necessary, and would rather corrupt his way into gaining influence than get into an all-out shooting war. “Shorty” at one time even made it to the Forbes list of richest individuals in world. Still, he is responsible for a number of invasions of plazas in Mexico controlled by opposing cartels, has sent his forces into Central and South America, and has readily terrorized entire cities with broken and tortured bodies dumped on the str
eets and hung from bridges to get his sanguine points across. Unlike the progeny of Frederick VI, though, those of El Chapo will probably not ascend to dynastic greatness as a legacy of the little man’s violent entrepreneurial tendencies. But then the narco wars in Mexico are far from over. While El Chapo’s family has taken a hit with his 2014 arrest—he has gotten away from prison once before—his kids are still alive and ultimately the Sinaloa cartel has plenty of gunmen, territory, and illicit profits at its disposal, making it the most powerful criminal organization in all of Mexico.
All Edge
The above vignettes illustrate how historical patterns can and do repeat themselves. A Central American peasant’s fatalistic complaints of “La misma mierda, solamente las moscas son diferente” (The same shit, only the flies are different) about the Sandinistas pretty much nails part of this process.1 The insights offered by a science-fiction writer like William Gibson, on the other hand, are more focused with his take on conflict and entrepreneurship in cyberspace. We only have to look at the slogan of one of the predatory biotechnology corporations found in Burning Chrome: “Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge,” for that to become self-evident.2 Still, take away about 650 years of technological advances from his writings and the actions of Frederick VI of Nuremberg in the first vignette appear remarkably similar to those of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Strip away even fewer years of civilizational evolution—half-a-century or so—and, at its core, the vignette of “Shorty” also provides us with the same edgy and dangerous entrepreneurship vibe.
A more scholarly perspective identifies a four-stage process of human social and political organization that exists related to weapons systems and coercive-extraction mechanisms. This process, linked to the evolving economic and political systems of civilizations, not surprisingly underlies the key observation identified in this book’s introduction, “that, over time, the line between black, gray, and white markets blurs, and warlord enterprises become indistinguishable from other forms of legal enterprise or, indeed, even the state itself.” This process can be readily observed in the historical evolution of the knight—the rise and fall of a fundamental component of the medieval age.
The first stage of this process is that of entrepreneurism and experimentalism. A weapons system was required to contend with the barbarian raiders that had plagued Western Europe for centuries. These raiders were greatly responsible for the destruction of the Roman Empire and precipitated the shift from the classical to the medieval age. By the Battle of Tours, it was apparent that heavy cavalry was the solution to this threat. This required taking infantry and mounting them on horseback. The Carolingians and other empires of the era—essentially lead by local warlords and strongmen who had seized power—had to go through a trial-and-error process to make this new system work. The entire arms and armor, training and organization, and logistical support system (like the mass breeding and sustaining of warhorses) had to be created from the ground up. As this system was established, heavy cavalry forces grew increasingly deadly.
The second stage in this process is institutionalization. In this stage, not only have “things been worked out” but also standard operating procedures have developed. Mounted cavalrymen not only became the first line of defense for western Christendom but also gained position and privilege on their way to legitimacy within the new civilization that had formed. Lands were won, castles erected, and ultimately the knight allowed the empire and kingdoms of the West to go on the offensive in what were essentially crusades in eastern Europe and the Holy Lands.
Ritualism characterizes the third stage of this process. The effectiveness of the knight on the battlefield began to be severely degraded as technological threats matured. Dogma and oppressive bureaucracy set in, with armor becoming heavier and heavier and with cumbersome ornamentation beginning to appear. In this stage, things are done because that is the way they have always been done; process becomes more important than progress. Further, a climate of zero tolerance and risk aversion exists. Questions about the efficacy and logic of directives are suppressed while new and creative ideas are stifled.
The final and fourth stage of this historical process is satirical in nature. That visionary brute with a hunger in his eyes, quite willing to kill quickly and without remorse, who existed in the first stage has now been fully neutered. Strong arms and armor and a stout warhorse have given way to orders based on fluff, the wearing of gaudy dress, and cushy saddles. Once heroic figures, embodied in images such as St. George the Dragon Slayer, devolved into old men on broken-down mounts fighting monsters made out of windmills. The time of knights had passed and to field them now in battle would be blatantly suicidal.
In fact, the knight had been stalked for some time by a new visionary businessman and killer, one wielding early firearms and siege cannon. This warlord entrepreneur was not of polite society and was not an agent of the state; in fact, he was considered little better than a common criminal—if not worse, as his weapons smelled of fire and brimstone and suggested that dark and demonic forces were at play. His weapons were strange and disruptive, he had no stake in the prevailing status quo, and he would readily kill if disrespected or if the contract was lucrative enough. Against such entrepreneurs and their brethren, the technologically inferior knight was no more than prey and was eventually hunted into extinction.
So the process began anew, and another social and political life cycle was born as history passed from the medieval to the modern age. Mercenary captains and master gunners linked up with dynastic entrepreneurs who connived and fought their way to legitimacy. In the process, economies, warfare, and states changed. Proto-capitalism and mercantilism evolved into free-market economies; standing armies were formed and divisional elements added; crude firearms and cannons gave way to armored formations, air forces, and ballistic missiles. In fact, civilization itself was recast as the modern age advanced, with the early dynastic states of Europe evolving into the present system of Westphalian states within our current international system.
Contrary to some earlier allegations, history has by no means come to an end. Social and political organizational change is constant—it is how human civilization advances. As this book will attest, this four-stage process has begun anew. Charles Tilly’s prosaic statement that organized crime is inherently linked to war making and state making cannot be denied.3 El Chapo’s story in Mexico, and the stories of millions of his lesser contemporaries across the globe—such as computer hackers, nihilist terrorists, or Chinese triad members—represent the emerging techno-warlords of our era. This is a new type of warlord, who is increasingly exploiting the deviant and dark forms of globalization and illicit economies that have appeared, ranging from narcotics to organ harvesting to cyber crime and beyond. These are the violent entrepreneurs of which Martin van Creveld has said, “In the future, war will not be waged by armies but by groups whom today we call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits and robbers, but who will undoubtedly hit upon more formal titles to describe themselves.”4
And so, with their onslaught, comes the transition from the modern to the postmodern age, and with it, a rise in political instability, black markets, and transnational crime. This book, at a visceral level—analogous to the Central American peasants with their mutterings about shit and flies—examines such a future as it exists today, yesterday, and tomorrow. It is not a pretty one for the Westphalian state and its social and political form of organization. While it might be easy to overlook in the buzz of our daily lives, once you see, you can’t un-see. Dark swarms are massing on the horizon.
Introduction
Warlords, Inc.—A Portrait
Andrew Trabulsi
On a rainy night in 1994, a squad of counternarcotics troops surrounded the first floor of a condominium complex in a wealthy suburb in Cali, Colombia, the country’s third largest city. The agents, prepared to uncover a stash of cocaine and automatic weapons, instead discovered something more menacing: a large and sophisticated computer center.
Owned by a front man for the godfather of the Cali cartel, José Santacruz Londoño, the complex housed a $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe networked to a half-dozen computer terminals and monitors, staffed by up to six technicians twenty-four hours a day.1 Loaded with custom-written data-mining software, the mainframe gathered intelligence that would otherwise have been available only to government agencies—the addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in the country; the entire call log for the local phone company, leaked after threats of violence against employees; shipping and distribution information for deliveries being made around the country and abroad; and a detailed record of complex money transfers through proxy off-shore bank accounts, via clients whose interests lay in everything from money laundering in Tel Aviv to counterfeit pharmaceutical sales in Lima.2 This was the kind of technology that many sophisticated Fortune 500 companies dreamed of, but for the Cali families, it was just a small piece of a much larger puzzle that kept operations humming everywhere from Bogotá to Madrid.
To international authorities, the Cali cartel was public enemy number one, having drawn fire from the U.S. State Department, Scotland Yard, and Interpol. Yet to their supporters, the Cali bosses epitomized the kind of rags-to-riches fame one could otherwise find only in a Hollywood movie. Jose Santacruz Londoño, a one-time delinquent, studied engineering and went into construction, emerging years later as “El Estudiante,” a sagacious real estate tycoon whose marble narquitectura mansion loomed high above the sugarcane fields of Cali. His business partner, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, earned his epithet, the “Chess Player,” as an operational mastermind, growing up impoverished only to parlay youthful jobs—as a drugstore clerk by day and a kidnapper by night—into a vast network of enterprises, including a pharmacy chain, office and apartment buildings, banks, car dealerships, radio stations, and Cali’s coveted América soccer team. His younger brother Miguel, a handsome socialite known as “El Señor,” became a fixture on the local scene, owning nightclubs and restaurants throughout the country. Their children, privately educated in the United States and Europe, held an esteem in the country comparable to that of the Rockefellers or Kennedys—a name not only respected but also aspired to by fellow Colombians.