TCN, More than Organized Crime, Cartels, or Drug Trafficking

Abstract

Drug trafficking groups are the main agents in the scenario of hyperviolence that plagues Mexico. The words “organized crime,” “cartels,” and “drug trafficking” have been used in an imprecise or arbitrary way to define them, which leads to conceptual errors and semantic deviations or makes interventionism and criminalization feasible. Above all, these concepts fail to capture the evolution of these agents. To redefine them as Transnational Crime Networks (tcn), an academic position critical of the dominant position on security matters is assumed here and their incidence is measured at the political, economic, and social levels. The analysis describes the changes in the relationship between criminal agents and the state; the division of labor within tcns; the link between licit and illicit capital; the insertion of criminal capital in the global accumulation pattern and the consequences of their crimes.