Narco-state

Narco-state, also called narco-capitalism or narco-economy, is a political and economic term applied to countries where all legitimate institutions become penetrated by the power and wealth of the illegal drug trade. The term was first used to describe Bolivia following the 1980 coup of Luis García Meza which was seen to be primarily financed with the help of narcotics traffickers. The term is often seen by critics as ambiguous because of the differentiation between narco-states. The overall description would consist of illegal organisations that either produce, ship or sell drugs and hold a grip on the legitimate institutions through force, bribery or blackmail. This situation can arise in different forms. For instance, Colombia, where drug lord Pablo Escobar ran the Medellín Cartel (named after his birthplace) during most of the 1970s and 1980s, producing and trafficking cocaine to the United States of America. Escobar managed to take over control of most of the police forces in Medellín and surrounding areas through bribery and coercion, allowing him to expand his drug trafficking business. Currently, scholars argue that the term "narco-state" is oversimplified because of the underlying networks running the drug trafficking organisations. For example, the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico, led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who managed to combine several small drug trafficking families into one overarching cartel, controlling the marijuana production in the rural areas of Mexico, while trafficking Colombian cocaine to the US at the same time. Over time, the cocaine market expanded to Europe, leading to new routes being discovered from Colombia through Brazil or Venezuela and Western Africa. These new routes proved to be more profitable and successful than shipping from North America and turned African states such as Nigeria, Ghana, and later on Guinea-Bissau into actual narco-states. While cocaine was transported through Western Africa, the Taliban...