NCJ Number
190053
Journal
Transnational Organized Crime Volume: 4 Issue: 2 Dated: Summer 1998 Pages: 75-90
Date Published
1998
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This article highlights the paradoxical, double-edged, and even interdependent relationship between the business of smuggling and the business of trying to thwart it.
Abstract
The state-smuggler relationship is a paradoxical one, defined by irony and contradiction. The smuggler is pursued by the state, but at the same time is kept in business by the state. State-created and enforced laws provide the very opening for and high profitability of smuggling in the first place. Drug prohibition, for example, has been a major impetus for the emergence of many of the more recent crime groups. Laws and their enforcement also mean that smugglers necessarily interact symbiotically with elements of the state apparatus. Although some smugglers attempt to intimidate or violently neutralize the state, the general rule is that they must buy-off key state officials, because they cannot entirely bypass or bully them. Just as smugglers depend on the state, so too does the state depend on smugglers. This dependence takes multiple forms, including economic dependence through corruption, foreign exchange generated from smuggling and asset forfeiture, whereby the state profits from the convicted smugglers' assets. Further, anti-smuggling efforts provide employment in the enterprises that counter smuggling, and such enterprises exist and expand because smuggling is a persistent and continuing activity that is never eliminated. 49 notes