Collusion, Co-Optation, or Evasion: The Politics of Drug Trafficking Violence in Central America

Why do drug traffickers sometimes decide to use violence, but other times demonstrate restraint? Building on recent work on the politics of drug violence, this article explores how Central American drug trafficking organizations’ strategies impact their use of violence. I argue that three inter-related political factors—corruption, electoral competition, and the politicization of the security apparatus—collectively determine the type of relationship between traffickers and the state that will emerge. That relationship, in turn, determines the primary strategy used by traffickers in that country. Drawing on over two years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in key transshipment points along the Caribbean coast of Central America, I show how co-optation strategies in Honduras have resulted in high levels of violence, evasion strategies in Costa Rica have produced moderate levels of violence, and collusion strategies in Nicaragua have generated the lowest levels of drug-related violence.

Review on Overview of Substance Abuse among Medical Practitioners

Substance Misuse, also known as substance abuse, is a disease marked by a harmful habit of using illicit or legal substances or medications such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or substituted amphetamines such as methamphetamine and MDMA. Drug abuse deeply impact physician's brain and behavior such that they are unable to control the use of drug to the point that it interferes with the ability to function which may harm patients and cause medical errors. The fact is, physicians can easily access various opioids and substituted amphetamines. This article review is the examination of existing published research articles on substance abuse among health care workers. This literature was reviewed using PubMed and google scholar search criteria set so that all the article could be found in English language along with certain keywords such as Health care workers, addiction, opioids, drug abuse. I gone through various articles, of which 10 articles related to study. It was found that substance abuse in medical workers were greater than general people and keeps increasing at an alarming rate. The most favored drug by health care workers is alcohol, the incidence of opioids and some nonopioids anesthetic agent abuse. Especially propofol, most commonly used by anesthetic department and emergency medicine. There is wide difference between general public and health care workers regarding drug abuse. Although Health care workers had a better prognosis but 10%-15% of health care are workers susceptible to drug violence at some point in their lives.

Blows to global crime groups will drive innovation

Significance The news follows the high-profile arrest in May of Rocco Morabito, the fugitive suspected leader of Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia, in a US-Brazilian operation. Pandemic lockdowns have catalysed supply-side innovation and new distribution arrangements in cocaine markets. Successful international operations to disrupt markets are being offset by such innovation and by accelerating drug violence. Impacts Recent ‘takedowns’ of transnational crime networks will trigger power struggles. Record European seizures of Latin American cocaine will see suppliers seek more secure shipping routes and more reliable import partners. European states will press Colombia on more development-focused responses to coca cultivation; US emphasis will remain largely coercive.

Conceptualizing Criminal Governance

In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.

Disturbing Innocence: Defamiliarizing Narco Violence through Child Protagonists in Fiesta en la madriguera and Prayers for the Stolen

This article uses a Benjaminian framework to show how the two novels studied, Fiesta en la madriguera, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, and Prayers for the Stolen, by Jennifer Clement, leverage children’s unorthodox ways of perceiving the world in order to upend habitual ways of thinking about drugs and drug violence. Tochtli, a capo’s son, and Ladydi, a poor girl from Guerrero, create disorienting visions that constitute one mode of intoxication that exposes another: the exaltation of the sovereign and autonomous self that accompanies apparently disparate activities like shopping, cocaine abuse, and drug trafficking.