Speaking during a forum on contraband organized by the American Chamber of Commerce of the Dominican Republic (Amcham) earlier this week, Venezuelan speaker Moises Naim stated that drug trafficking is the most harmful form of contraband. He said it has taken the Latin American region to levels of “specific coexistence with death.” During his talk, he described a Dante-esque scenario where “with 8% of the world population, the region accounts for 31% of the world’s homicides in the world every year.”
Naim added that illegal trade also affects the economy in areas such as the rum and cigarette industries, which are affected by the growing contraband in, and falsification of, their products.
Referring to drug trafficking, he said that, “the government has not got enough resources to deal with this. It cannot deal with everything at once, all the time, because this is the current strategy, and it is not working.”
Acknowledging that his observations might be highly criticized, he asked: “What do you prefer? For the police to pursue the people who smoke marijuana or the people who are transporting tons of heroin?”
He referred readers to his book “Illicit” written 10 years ago, where he tackles three deeply held beliefs related to human trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering and the falsification and copying of products. The first is the belief that among the causes of contraband “there was nothing new under the sun,” because it has existed since biblical times.” He answered, “This is a lie.” He pointed out that contraband used to take place between neighboring countries, “and now it has been globalized, which makes us all neighbors.” For this reason, Nigerian drug traffickers operate in Thailand, the Russian mafia operates in New York and Colombian cartels are operating in Haiti.
The speaker also rejected the idea that contraband is essentially a police problem and the problem of borders and that it is caused by poverty, inequality, ignorance and immorality. “The principal impulse of contraband is the difference in prices between A and B. This is neither cultural nor country-specific; it is part of the human condition,” he said.
He also challenged the notion that contraband is a “victimless crime” because there are now counterfeit contraband products that can kill people. He pointed to a case in Nigeria where children’s cough syrup contained glycerin but it was a copied product, and then instead of glycerin, it contained a cheaper substitute, which instead of being a medicine was a product for industrial use, and affected the central nervous system, and destroyed the liver and the kidneys. 84 babies have died from consuming the contraband product. Naim said he used examples far removed from the Dominican Republic, in a deliberate effort to show that contraband is now a global problem.