Whack-a-mole Drug War: Rhetorical Rise of the Transnational Crime Organizations

A perceptive warning about how government labeling serves propaganda purposes to promote further miltarization of the drug war.

Border Lines: Rhetorical Rise of the Transnational Crime Organizations: "Over the past few years the federal agencies involved in border and illegal-drug control operations, as well as participating state agencies, have increasingly adopted the term Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) to refer to Mexican groups involved in drug trafficking.
TCO is now used interchangeably with Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO). ...

The increased use of TCOs instead of DTOs reflects increased alarm about the intensity and spread of drug-related violence in Mexico not any measurable increase of DTO presence in the United States....

... there are political and strategic dangers of adopting TCOs as the accepted designation for the DTOs, including:

• Deemphasizing of the centrality of drugs will have the effect of reducing the focus on drug prohibition as the central causal factor in drug-related crime and violence.
• Identifying the DTOs as transnational organizations may stoke the largely based alarmism – coming almost exclusively from the political right – that the same organizations, like the Zetas, that are responsible for the horrific violence in Mexico and Central America have a substantial organizational presence and command structure north of the border ...
• The transition from DTO to TCO as the common descriptor tends to bolster the credibility of those who falsely claim that these organizations are strengthening and expanding their influence in the United States – although it is undoubtedly the case that the Mexican DTOs are doing just that in Central America.
• The new use of TCO is routinely accompanied by the phrase “transnational threat,” giving new weight to analysis that identifies the DTOs as constituting a national security threat to the United States – leading to unconstructive and misdirected responses that miss the essential criminal -- not political or ideological -- character of the drug trafficking groups."