Illicit: The implications of illegal trade

NYT: "Gone are the days when Mexico’s drug war was an abstraction for most people, something they lamented over the morning papers as if it were unfolding far away."

As I take a break from my reading of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim this pops up on the NYT.

I was in the middle of the chapter on the drug trade, reading an example on Mexico City. A construction company owner tried to uncover the root cause for high turnover for his drivers. He realized that a single border crossing with a load of narcotics could earn the driver nearly a year's salary! He got interested in the financing of such runs and soon hit his drivers up for a piece of the profits, since "it was only fair that he share." He continued to act as a financier and concluded that the construction business was more dangerous to his personal safety. He felt that, as a low-level actor, neither the government nor the high-profile drug bosses would get him. It seems this NYT article has uncovered a worsening of the situation in Tijuana for innocent civilians and families.

Point: High profile criminals are only the tip of the iceberg. "The diffusion of the drug business into the fiber of local and global economic life is harder to fathom, let alone combat. It is this pervasive global mainstreaming of the business that the fight against drugs is up against today." p.67

Point: Last paragraph of the NY Times article reminds me of the reaction to the recent Kunming bus bombings last month. Two women at my yoga class embodied this polarized response. One woman was shaking her head, planning to keep off the public buses. The other woman just laughed: "What are you gonna do? Life has to go on."

Note: The book, Illicit, could have used some of the ethnographic touches that make this article vivid. While I am only just getting into it, I wish Naim could have done a bit more storytelling. The writing style is a bit laborious, but the evidence and argument are truly fascinating. The Chinese translation is translated, notably, into traditional characters that are only used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. I wonder if you can find it on the mainland...