Overview
I’m working on a Political Science question and need guidance to help me study.
we have tried to make sure that we understand the differences between criminal and terrorist organizations. However, the nexus of the two could be an interesting aspect to look into. Criminal and terrorist organizations can closely cooperate and, at times, they have. For this response, try to explore some some aspects of this partnership and provide some factual examples.
an example from another student: (it has to be a different source/topic)
Source: The Library of Congress Article: Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America Link (Links to an external site.) Author: Rex Hudson
Criminal groups and terrorist organizations have increasingly become a matter of concern for many nations around the globe. Both turn particularly dangerous once they find a common shared interest that stimulates cooperation for substantial material, political, and territorial dominance gains. The nexus occurrence is not exclusive to the Middle Eastern and North African region, but it is also present in the South American Tri-Border Area (TBA), that is, where the territories of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet.
Islamic radical groups including Egypt’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Al-Jihad, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and al-Muqawamah have partnered with ruling local armed criminal groups and drug smuggling gangs to use the TBA for fund-raising, drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering, plotting, and other activities in support of their organizations. One of the most known active groups being Al Qaeda’s which has not only partnered with indigenous crime gangs but also with corrupted officials and even Chinese and Russian mafias. Their documented joint ventures are linked to trafficking of arms, drugs, and uranium, as well as money laundering to cite a few examples.
The main beneficiaries of these criminal-terrorist engagements are mostly Chinese, Korean, Lebanese, and Taiwanese mafias. The thriving business of importing counterfeit Compact Disks (CDs) and CD-ROMs from Asia is associated to wide crime networks in their respective countries of origin. The Hong Kong Mafia is particularly active in large-scale smuggling of pirated products from continental China to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay and keeps strong ties with Hizballah in the TBA.
Furthermore, movement of unidentified Chinese mafias in the zone seeking to expand into Argentina in order to establish themselves into the duty-free zone of San Luis Province have also been reported. At least two Chinese mafia groups in the TBA, the Sung-I and Ming families, engage in illegal operations with the Egyptian al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya radical Islamic organization.