Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  Nationalism and national identity are always necessary fictions with a symbiotic relationship to their consumers: the citizenry create national identity, but that identity also creates the citizenry, who get a part of their personal identity from it. In asserting “I am American” or “I am Czech” or “I am Venezuelan,” I assert my identity, or at least that part of it as it relates to a collectivity in contradistinction to others; think of Marx, for whom nationality is nothing more than the outward assertion in foreign relations of an organized state.19 But I am only any of these things insofar as I accept and partake in the mythology of that nationality.

  These myths are not irrelevant. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true, because they set up a type or ‘persona,’ which the average person will do his best to resemble.”20 A change in the myth, then, will bring changes to the hearts of individuals, in two ways. First, it will shape what individual citizens will come to value as the virtues of citizenship in the nation to which they belong. Second, a change in the myth will result in a change in the individual’s relation to the group, to the collectivity, changing the way the individual sees him- or herself reflected in the gaze of fellow citizens.

  The public realm has, therefore, a fundamental and symbiotic role in connecting the personal to the political. British-American-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Appiah makes the point cogently: “Once labels are applied to people, ideas about people who fit the label come to have social and psychological effects. In particular, these ideas shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects … I shape my life by the thought that something is an appropriate aim or an appropriate way of acting for an American, a black man, a philosopher.”21

  IDENTITIES IN CRISIS

  Group identities that result in political violence or simply an erosion of justice are evident in the terrorist and criminal groups I have seen firsthand. Hezbollah, the Mafia, drug cartels: they all in one way or another identify themselves in contradistinction to the government they are challenging. For Hezbollah, the cause is allegedly religious: to redress the oppression of the Shia, as well as defend Lebanon against Israel. For the others, their cause might be more avowedly financial, but they too use religious iconography: cartels have patron saints and modern-day troubadours who sing of their exploits in narcocorridos. They all move us to participate in challenging the rule of law and the government institutions that (were they well functioning and not corrupt) would protect our rights and leave us a way out, with the levers of power in our hands, so we could change or reform those who govern us when we decide we have had enough.

  So how do we tell the good guys from the bad? How do we know whether the group we believe in and its leader, who purports to fight for our interests, is liberating or oppressing us? After all, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” goes the common refrain. How can we tell the difference between self-identifying groups fighting for better justice and equality and political inclusion and those groups whose identities are being hijacked by demagogues whose intent is to manipulate the groups’ emotions into a broad base of support for his or her sinister quest for power—which will ultimately oppress the people the demagogue claims to be liberating?

  What we as autonomous citizens want is not just freedom from interference—to be left alone to get on with our lives and our plans—but freedom from tyranny. Freedom from tyranny means that the rules (laws) cannot suddenly be changed without our consent, that we cannot suddenly wake up and find ourselves oppressed. Freedom from tyranny is what we philosophers call positive freedom: it is freedom with power.

  It is not my project here to destroy identities completely, as cages from which we, as intelligent beings, must escape in order to attain our ultimate individualistic and rational apotheosis—though that position does have some arguable cogency and inherent elegance. Rather, the point is to examine numerous instances where rational citizens seeking a better life through identifying with a group have been cajoled into sacrificing their long-term goals for short-term stability. Authoritarian regimes are particularly adept at this manipulation, particularly when they utilize political parties to mobilize support and indemnify political labor through the game theory economics of stable (if corrupted) political institutions.22 One way to tell the power-hungry demagogue from a justice-loving revolutionary is through their actions: over time, their actions will reveal their motives. In all institutional reform to governance structures, the Devil is in the details.

  To use one example, people in Mexico generally choose the relative stability of life under the shadow of the drug cartels over being caught in the crossfire of the violent clashes of the war on drugs waged by the Mexican government. For example, as noted, “Calderón’s War” led to Felipe Calderón’s leaving the presidency in 2012 with an 8 percent approval rating. However, what citizens would truly prefer is what would be behind the nonexistent Door #3: life under a just, inclusive, liberal democratic system where politicians are honest, law-abiding, and responsive to the needs of their citizens and drug cartels and terrorist attacks do not exist.

  But since criminal and terrorist organizations benefit from each other’s exploitation of state weakness or failure for their advantage, they both have a vested interest in corrupting good governance. It is not just because such degradation is the short path to their achieving their smuggling and money-laundering aims, but because the expansion of their activities requires broad-based popular support: the bad guys need good guys to sign on. In order to achieve this, they need to restrict the options of good, rational citizens. They can restrict the options either by taking real actions to limit them (such as changing the constitution or governing institutions) or by psychologically manipulating fear, resentment, or other emotions of nationalism or group identity. In this way, citizens become the pawns of criminals and terrorists and tools in their own oppression.

  In fact, a properly functioning governmental institution is as strong a basis as any for a sense of community belonging. The United States is an example of this. A country founded on the premise of being a “melting pot” has come together behind the unifying political principles of its Constitution and Bill of Rights and its judicial system. Whether these principles are always observed in the country’s institutions is another question. The fact is that they are ingrained in the American psyche as a unifying factor behind what it means to be American (to wit, Superman’s pledge to protect “truth, justice, and the American way”). Even when groups run afoul of each other (as is arguably the case with the current polarization in America along various fault lines), they all claim their stake in that unifying principle.

  Properly functioning governmental institutions will reinforce community ties; effective political ties will engender organic ones over time. A governmental institution that functions properly will lead to a community and a “state” that will cohere and peacefully reinforce the political and legal structure that unites its citizens, who will participate politically and seek to reform it if necessary, rather than to revolt, secede, and found a new nation-state or an alternate (perhaps criminal) system of governance. People who have had to cohabitate and share a territory and an extended history will naturally form bonds that unite them.

  Perhaps the problem with revolution and insurgency, secession and balkanization, is not the arbitrary drawing of geographical boundaries, but rather the breakdown of the legal and political infrastructure in such a way that it does not represent the interests or the will of one or more segments of the population.

  Government institutions are supposed to further human autonomy and dignity. When they no longer do so—when they, in fact, even quash autonomy and dignity—they have contradicted their purpose and become illegitimate. It has always been my view that it is not legitimate for a fearful citizenry to surrender the power and rights of current or future generations by allowing a charismatic demagogue to centralize power: some rights are simply inalienable. They are so intertwined with the notions of human
rights, political equality, and the very purpose of government that they simply cannot be taken away.

  The negation of future free choice that occurs with an elected dictatorship (e.g., Venezuelans giving Chávez the power to rule by decree) or when there is support of a criminalized governance certainly seems to imply that there are deep flaws in that country’s fundamental social and/or political conditions—conditions such as desperation, hunger, fear, ignorance, and intense propaganda (with possible censoring of differing views). The very conditions that led to the antidemocratic choice, though, are usually exacerbated, not alleviated, by that very choice—a prime reason for retaining electoral control and supporting good governance, anticorruption measures, and the rule of law.

  LIGHTS OUT

  Mid-2016, I was in New York on a video call with one of my sources in Caracas, Venezuela, when the screen went dark. A minute later, I got a text on the encrypted app we used to protect us from surveillance by the regime, which had imprisoned a lot of people for less than what we were discussing.

  Sorry. The lights went out. FML.

  The electrical grid was failing due to a lack of maintenance, mainly because corrupt government officials had just plundered government coffers and sent the money into bank accounts in Panama, Andorra, and Switzerland. The country’s collapse was accelerating; food was becoming scarcer with every passing day. By early 2017, riots for food were commonplace, with hungry protesters shouting at soldiers to shoot them because they were hungry. Friends of mine were hospitalized and dying because they could not find common medications.

  The government refused to grant a referendum on holding a midterm presidential election that had been overwhelmingly demanded by the desperate citizenry; it had canceled the December 2016 local elections and instead appointed the sanctioned drug trafficker and renowned terrorist supporter Tareck El Aissami as vice president, virtually ensuring that no one would overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, because El Aissami would be worse.

  In February 2017, my buddy Joe Humire, with whom I had done the asymmetric warfare seminar in Guatemala, was briefing the US Congress that Venezuela posed a threat to the US homeland, through its selling of passports to known terrorists. By that time, the wealthy people I knew in Caracas had dropped an average of 8 kilograms (17.5 pounds) because of food shortages; the poor were starving, with malnutrition rampant among children.

  FML? I texted back.

  Fuck My Life. It’s what we young people say.

  If we are to build a better future, with more equality and less violence, we need to understand how interconnected we are. We must accept responsibility for how the choices we make impact the lives of others—and then come back to haunt us as humanitarian or refugee crises or acts of terrorism. When we tolerate corruption, we increase inequality, needed infrastructure does not get properly built, and people become stuck in a system that does not care about them. When we pay for narcotics or prostitution or counterfeit goods or that rare antiquity, when we fuel our cars with gasoline produced by corrupt dictators, we give money to criminals and terrorists. When we buy into their stories that they are doing criminal or terrorist acts for some greater cause, we enable them to recruit our young and add to their ranks, and we give away our power as citizens and our human dignity. All we need to do is think before we buy: what is really happening with this transaction? Money may not buy happiness, but it need not pay for misery.

  In January 2010, I was touring Colombia with an international delegation observing Colombia’s reintegration of paramilitary fighters under the Justice and Peace Law. The FARC, though, were still very active, so we relied on snipers, Black Hawks, and Counter-Terrorist Special Forces like these guys to keep us safe, even in the capital city of Bogotá.

  In July 2016, “Chris Howard” was on duty again in Somalia, where he has spent an inordinate amount of time. During that tour, the Al Shabaab terrorist group set off two bombs simultaneously, just outside the Mogadishu International Airport compound where he was living. A quarter century of hunger and war have made Mogadishu’s beautiful coastline into an outdoor museum of misery.

  In April 2016, I was one of the panelists at a plenary session of the OECD’s Integrity Week. Our topic: corruption and illicit trade. My conclusion was simple: I have never seen a major case of smuggling or trade-based money laundering without corruption, and corrupt government institutions recruit corrupt people, so they can all enrich themselves without threat. On the far left is the then-chairman of the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade, David Luna, a State Department contractor.

  On May 20, 2017, there were simultaneous protests all over the world commemorating fifty days of ongoing demonstrations for food and elections in Venezuela. In this protest in New York’s Washington Square Park, organized by the NGO SOS Venezuela NY, chalk outlines with name cards represented protesters killed by government forces.

  A view from a neighboring building into the backyard of a “rancho” in Medellín, Colombia, in 2009. The makeshift (likely pilfered) building materials are typical, as are the mountains of uncollected trash. Both point to the marginalization of Latin America’s poor and the lack of public services.

  Hills of slums in Medellín, Colombia, in 2009, as the city boasted advances in infrastructure, the rule of law, and economic inclusion. In neighborhoods like these in the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the capo of the local cartel and the “King of Cocaine,” would have been revered as a Robin Hood hero and protected by the locals.

  Postcard given to me at the Jama Masjid Islamic Foundation on Mexico Avenue in Panama City. The mosque is identified by US security services as being involved in Islamist recruitment and radicalization in Panama.

  The monument to Genghis (Chinggis) Khan outside Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in August 2012. Its remote location in the middle of the steppes is allegedly the site where he found his horsewhip (which he holds), enabling his conquest of Asia all the way to modern-day Europe from the back of his horse. He faces east to symbolize the rise of the Mongol Empire.

  This Fernando Botero sculpture of a bird, exploded by a bomb, stands as a memento of more violent times in Medellín, Colombia, when drug cartels, Marxist insurgents, and paramilitaries all fought for territorial control over narcotics distribution routes.

  Authentic contraband Marlboros (“illicit whites”) sold in the market of Mogadishu, Somalia, in July 2016. This photograph was taken by a source of ours, just days before two bombs were set off at Mogadishu International Airport by al Shabaab while “Chris Howard” was there. The sale of illicit whites benefits the Islamist terrorist group (37.5 of these cartons will buy one rocket-propelled grenade launcher).

  The aquarium in Medellín, Colombia, in 2009, as the city’s mayor was showcasing infrastructure and economic development after the dismantling of the Medellín drug cartel (whose late leader was Pablo Escobar) and during the reintegration of right-wing paramilitaries.

  A counterfeit Hermès Birkin bag from Beijing, sitting on a sofa in an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue, where the bag is considered one of the key status symbols of that social set. Most people cannot tell this $500 fake from the real one, which often retails for $15,000 or more. If these socialite women understood the human suffering along the counterfeit bags’ supply chain, they would be ashamed.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  107th Congress of the United States of America. H.R. 3162 (“Patriot Act”). Washington, D.C.: Government Publishing Office, 2001.

  Albanese, Jay S. Transnational Crime and the 21st Century: Criminal Enterprise, Corruption and Opportunity. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.

  Asher, David and Scott Modell. Pushback: Countering the Iran Action Network. Washington, D.C.: Center for a New American Security, September 2013.

  Bartell, Dawn L. “Hezbollah and Al Shabaab in Mexico and the Terrorist Threat to the United States.” In Global Security Studies 3, number 4 (Fall 2012).

  BASCAP and UNICRI. Confiscation of the Proceeds of IP Crime: A Modern Tool for Deterring
Counterfeiting and Piracy.

  Bate, Roger. Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2012.

  Beittel, June S. Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations. Congressional report, Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, July 22, 2015.

  Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 133–34. New York: Oxford UP, 1969.

  Blackstone, Erwin A., Joseph P. Fuhr, and Steve Pociask. “The Health and Economic Effects of Counterfeit Drugs.” In American Health & Drug Benefits 7, number 4 (2014), pp. 216–24.

  Brown, Jon Murray and Rob Minto. “Tennis Match-Fixing: Djokovic Approached in 2007 to Throw Match.” In Financial Times, January 18, 2016. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0ae03b0a-bdd0-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf.html#axzz3z8oWcllv

  Calderón Hinojosa, Felipe. Private briefing with Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, Former President of Mexico. New York: Instituto Cervantes, November 9, 2015.

  “Canadian Soccer League Rife with Match Fixing, According to Report.” In The Star, October 15, 2015, p. 15. http://www.thestar.com/sports/soccer/2015/10/15/canadian-soccer-league-rife-with-match-fixing-according-to-report.html

  Cardash, Sharon L., Frank J. Cilluffo, and Bert B. Tussing. “Mexico and the Triple Threat.” In The Hybrid Threat: Crime, Terrorism and Insurgency in Mexico, pp. 16–18. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic Leadership, December 2011.