Title: Narco-state - Wikipedia
Headings: Narco-state
Narco-state
Contents
Usage
Examples
Guinea-Bissau
Honduras
Lebanon
Mexico
Suriname
Syria
United Kingdom
Venezuela
See also
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Further reading
External links

Content: The overall description would consist of illegal organisations that either produce, ship or sell drugs and hold a grip on the legitimate institutions through force, bribe or blackmail. This situation can arise in different forms. For instance, Colombia, where drug lord Pablo Escobar ran the Medellín Cartel (named after his birthplace) during most of the 1970s and 1980s, producing and trafficking cocaine to the United States of America. Escobar managed to take over control of most of the police forces in Medellín and surrounding areas due to bribery, allowing him to expand his drug trafficking business. Nowadays scholars argue that the term “narco-state” is oversimplified because of the underlying networks running the drug trafficking organisations. For example, the Guadalajara cartel in Mexico, led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who managed to combine several small drug trafficking families into one overarching cartel controlling the marijuana production in the rural areas of Mexico while trafficking Colombian cocaine to the U.S.A at the same time. Over time the cocaine market expanded to Europe, leading to new routes being discovered from Colombia through Brazil or Venezuela and Western Africa. These new routes proved to be more profitable and successful than shipping from North-America and turned African states such as Nigeria, Ghana and (later on) Guinea-Bissau into actual narco-states. While cocaine was transported through Western Africa, the Taliban produced opium in the rural areas of Afghanistan using the revenues to fund their guerrilla war. Despite American and NATO efforts to impose laws on the Afghan opium production, the early 2000s incumbent Afghan governments shielded the opium trade from foreign policies as much as possible.