let’s imagine for a second that some of
our friends one day get together to
protest against corruption okay and
let’s imagine that when they’re
protesting the police comes by and takes
them and then all of our friends
disappear it’s scary right well that’s
exactly what happened two years ago in a
small Mexican city where 43 students
were protesting against the God that the
corruption in the government and the
police came by kidnapped them and all of
them disappeared so at this point we
don’t even know if they’re alive or not
all we know is that these two
individuals ordered the action they were
everything is shocking and scary about
this case of violence and corruption but
there is a particular characteristic
that makes this case even more difficult
to understand and is the fact that the
person who ordered the action was
actually the mayor of the city that’s
and that’s difficult to understand
because it’s not clear for as how is it
possible that a public servant in a
relevant public position is at the same
time the leader of a criminal
organization and to understand why it’s
so difficult to make sense of that
situation I want to invite you to think
on the concept of organized crime so for
a second please think what do we imagine
when we speak about organized crime
unfortunately how we imagine crime is a
lot more simplified and as I’ll show you
so this is the typical organizational
chart that journalists policymakers
enforcement agents around the world use
to define a criminal organization but
this idea of crime is too simple in fact
this is how the Mexican authorities
defined a criminal organization known as
La Familia Michoacana in 2010 but with
my research group we wanted to
understand if this was really the
structure of such a powerful criminal
group so we gathered additional
information to identify individuals and
interactions that sustained La Familia
Michoacana and the result was a lot more
complex than what we initially thought
at the beginning we were thinking about
15
full time criminals bad people isolated
from the rest of society at the
beginning we thought that La Familia
Michoacana was this closed group that
was operating at the other side of the
rest of us however the reality was that
La Familia Michoacana consisted of more
than eight hundred not only full-time
criminals by the special mayor’s and
policemen so that’s the first idea that
I want to live in your mind slave the
huge gap between the theoretical way of
understanding crime and the reality and
I think that their gap is not only wrong
but that it’s dangerous to think in
those terms why is that because when we
think in those terms in terms of the
classic criminal organizations pyramidal
structures we focus our attention as
society on the criminal leader on the
Pablo Escobar of the moment
and we assume we think that that leader
concentrates all the information and all
the power in the structure so we think
that chasing that individual is enough
for making the entire structure to
collapse and every enforcement agency
around the world usually think in those
terms however that’s not only wrong
because phenomenal structures do not
fall when you remove the peak of the
structure but it’s also wrong because in
reality there is not a single criminal
mastermind that concentrates all the
power in fact here we’re looking at La
Familia Michoacana again but we are
leaked but we are looking the soup
networks of the structure
and now we can see that this is actually
a decentralized structure that there is
not a single criminal mind that we can
remove to make the entire structure
collapse in fact if we zoom in in one of
those sub structures we are going to see
that a subnetwork is articulated into
the main web into the main network of
interactions by a public servant because
here the codes beginning with the
so this means that when we focus our
attention only on the public squad of
the moment we don’t understand all the
complexity of money and political power
sustaining that Pablos who are so this
explains and this explains why criminal
structures around the world remain
untouched despite the fact that usually
the criminal bosses are changing are
constantly changing
in fact el chapo guzman the famous chapo
guzman leader of the Sinaloa cartel
explained this to our friend Sean Penn
in the famous interview at Rolling Stone
so the chapo guzman said the day I don’t
exist drug trafficking is not going to
decrease in any way at all through
trafficking does not depend on one
and what do you think that happened when
after the interview el chapo guzman was
captured do you think that the structure
that the criminal structure collapsed do
you think that the Sinaloa cartel does
not exist anymore do you think that drug
trafficking changed in Mexico or the
entire Western Hemisphere
I can tell you the answer is not zero
change nothing happened and that’s why
that is the case because the politicians
the people with mourning the public
servants are is still operating and no
one’s paying attention to them so why is
it important to overcome this classic
idea of crime I hope it’s everything for
you now but I want to mention mention
some specific cases in which
understanding crime in classic terms in
these traditional terms is dangerous for
example let’s leave Mexico on let’s go
to Bulgaria Eastern Europe where huge
criminal structures that involved public
servants kidnap women to sell them to
breach European countries to force them
into sexual work let’s go to Africa
where huge criminal structures enslaved
children to force them to extract called
the same mineral that then ends up in
our cell phones and our laptops in fact
those children are also forced
to participate in malicious and
something very similar happens in
Colombia where the luxury of gold begins
with an extraction that destroys the
environment and that actually poisoned
the poor farmers involved in that
destruction because they use mercury the
entire day and the same happens with
rhinos because there is a criminal
market for the rhino horn powder some
people in China and Vietnam think that
the rhino horn powder has medicine
powers so they sometimes pay even more
for rhino horn powder than for gold and
that explains why criminal structures
are killing and destroying the entire
Rhino species although rhino horn has
not him your own nails in half as
Richard Branson reminds us and the same
happens with Pangolin a beautifully
small animal that most of us don’t even
know about but is the most traffic
mammal in the world because there is
also a market for its skin in Vietnam
and shine as you can imagine at this
point I could keep just listen and
listen cases of huge criminal structures
and that’s why the second idea that I
want to live in or in your minds today
is that in order to confront all these
problems all these forms of traffic we
need to understand criminal structures
criminal understanding criminal
structures is ground zero for this
battle so I hope that you are asking
yourselves
what to do what shall we do well the
first and most important task is to talk
and to expose these structures because
now that you recognize the gap now you
know that the iceberg remains unchanged
so we need to put light on those regions
on those areas when bankers famous
people politicians keep providing money
and power for the political order
criminal structures because fighting
fighting rhino horn trafficking is not
only about being a cop in the Kruger
National Park in South Africa fighting
crime is also about exposing these
structures exposing these famous and
powerful people to facilitate that with
my research group we have been working
during the last years designing some
tools that I want to share with you
today the first one today for the first
time in public I want to present the
global observatory of transnational
criminal networks and initiative in
which we invited journalists research
institutes scholars and activists from
Brazil South Africa Senegal Spain from
around the world to come this cause this
problem and to expose networks of crime
and corruption so I won’t invite you to
engage in this discussion criminal
networks that org and there you’re also
going to find this tool which is a
massive visualization for observing and
understanding that runs national
movement of traffic resources but we
need more data we need more information
we need to process more cases and that’s
why I want to invite you today to engage
in this in this battle and this fight as
another tool that I want to share with
you I want to tell you about this
documentaries in which vortex the
research group that I direct word
researching to understand eight criminal
markets from around the world to support
the production of eight films about this
criminal criminal markets so I want to
invite you because this November these
films are going to be released so you
can use them as a tool to boost this
discussion with the right money you can
fusion presents why did you want to talk
to me
the farha diet takes you on a global
journey we’ve walked into a trafficking
house the buyers I gave him the money
in return I got his kid the sellers
really rich the one inside
billion-dollar black markets hiding in
plain sight it sounds to me like
legalized trafficking the traffickers
premieres November 13th on fusion
unfortunately with the right money you
can buy anything but now all of us here
know that this is not only about the
buyer and the seller now we know that
always there is a criminal market that
involves great wages part-time criminals
people playing between the legal and the
legal sectors of society so I want to
invite you to participate in this
discussion to have an active role
because as I just told you we need more
data we need to understand the
complexity of criminal structures from
around the world and fortunately no
one’s paying attention to this issue
because every second that we don’t care
about this it’s a second and we we
condemn millions of people especially
children to the darkness of corruption
and crime don’t get me wrong because my
my idea today is not to get you to
depressed in fact I need you to have
hopup about this because I know that the
world is actually doing great I know
that we as humans we have amazing tools
we have amazing technology we have
amazing economic resources and actually
peaceful regions around the
word however in several countries across
Latin America especially Central America
Eastern Europe and West Africa things
are not going that well and that’s why
we need to participate in this because
every second that we don’t do it we lose
human lives and that’s something that we
you [Music]