The Mafiya and Latin America

Ancient knowledge isn’t always too old to matter. Here’s something fresh, related to the contemporary face of crime: arms and drugs. As we all know, mafias have always existed in different ways. Easy but not-so-clean money. Huge but risky rewards. In the globalized era, the Russian mafias have taken control of a large portion of the arms market, and regularly strike lucrative deals with drug dealers and smugglers. Where exactly? Latin America, mostly. And that includes my country, Colombia, alongside places like Brazil, Bolivia and Peru, where the most infamous criminal structures around drugs production were easily built in a few decades with the help of cheap and good arms.

Submarine used for drug traficking found in the Colombian rainforest

Due to the emergency politics of Perestroika developed by Gorbachev in a desperate attempt to save the Soviet Union, it became easier to access and “legalize” commercial activities with the outside world. Thus, the preexisting clandestine business of everything valuable (not just arms), grew larger each day. After the definitive fall of the Union it became even easier to move the operational centers abroad and negotiate largely. The people building this commerce became known as the New Russians, often compared with the Italian mafia of the 1920s, but worldwide.

M. Gorbachev and G.H.W. Bush in the times of Perestroika

Drug prices in the former Soviet countries, especially Russia, skyrocketed to an unthinkable level, turning the narcos’ attention towards the east. And the ongoing Colombian civil war needed better arms to sustain itself. The perfect platform for the perfect deal. Each exchange would take away thousands of tons of cocaine (and some others) to Moscow or even Kiev through the Vladivostok-Siberian route, for instance. This could happen monthly, and bring shiploads of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, and even instructions to build small submarines, to a small Atlantic port like Turbo, or even through the Pacific in places like Buenaventura. And the deals were closed with all sides of the war, from communist guerrillas like FARC to right-wing paramilitary or vigilante groups.

FARC rebels with AK-47 rifles

And we are only talking about Colombia here, let alone the rest of the continent. The Caribbean was perfect for money laundry, then Argentina and Uruguay and really every country in the continent was bombarded with all kinds of smuggling. It was crime paradise. How the operations actually worked make a topic for a whole post. Names, places, dates, amounts, and what has happened in the last two decades, might be detailed later on. In the pages of the novel Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker, you’ll find out about an intriguing story that involves all this and much more.

Main sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/03/98/russian_mafia/70095.stm

http://www.monografias.com/trabajos14/mafia-rusa/mafia-rusa.shtml

http://www.semana.com/especiales/articulo/la-conexion-colombo-rusa/35416-3

http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/us-colombia-operation-uncovers-farc-eln-links-to-russian-mafia