Illicit Trafficking in Mali: Local Impacts of Global Criminal and Terrorist Networks

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The trade in illicit goods through these channels relied heavily on informal agreements to bypass official customs systems. Smugglers paid a series of tributes and bribes to pass their goods through a complicated network of tribal and government-ruled areas, for both protection and to bypass government bodies. These networks, developed in the 1970s, provided the foundation for the development of higher-profit enterprises in the 1990s and 2000s, predominantly for the trafficking of arms and, most importantly, narcotics.

It is believed that cocaine first entered these networks in 2002, after South American wholesalers began using West African ports as an intermediate step in reaching consumers in Europe. “According to UNODC, Colombian drug traffickers first began routing large quantities of cocaine via West Africa around 2002. Countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Mali provided an ideal transshipment point for narcotics bound for Europe.” (Keefe, 26) The beginning of these shipments led to the rise of organized criminal syndicates in coastal regions and states such as Nigeria and Ghana, and gained the attention of international bodies and policymakers concentrating on crime. “As a result, many analyses of organized crime and drug trafficking in West Africa have focused on the structure and sophistication of these groups, and the extent to which they are challenging more ‘traditional’ mafias for primacy in markets outside of Africa.” (Keefe, 27) In Mali, however, the influence of these organized crime syndicates is less direct, and can be overstated in these discussions.

The tribal and ethnic control over illicit traffic routes, and the lack of a developed domestic market for consumption of narcotics, has kept Mali as a ‘transit state’ along narcotic distribution routes, rather than a more direct home to major organized crime syndicates. “The people who profit from drug trafficking in Mali are, first and foremost, middlemen. Many of the narcotics traffickers who operate there, including the most high-profile, are not plugged into or even knowledgeable of the rest of the supply chain.” (Tinti, 18) In other words, the role of Malian traffickers, which is an important and lucrative one, is to arrange the secure transport of these drugs across the deserts of northern Mali and to hand it off for transit elsewhere beyond its borders, rather than being involved directly with either South American suppliers or European distributors. This arrangement is ideal for all involved in the system, as it is effective in allocating incentives and spreading risk according to the political, economic, and security realities of each region along the route. For the wholesalers in South America, their high profit margin isn’t dependent upon the product reaching the end consumers in Europe or Egypt; their earnings are derived from the initial sale that sends the drugs to West African ports, and their involvement (and risk) often end there. Likewise, for traffickers in Mali, their profit is derived from moving the narcotics through their territories, one step closer to consumers in foreign markets. The drugs that flow through Mali typically enter Africa through coastal hubs in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mauritania, and travel north and east through Mali – usually into Algeria and onward through Libya into Egypt. Northern Mali, given its governance deficit and vast ungoverned desert areas, remains a key hub along this route.

Once narcotics have entered northern Mali, the majority of the product is transported across the desert in small convoys of Toyota 4x4s and other trucks. The convoys, which are almost always armed, feature vehicles that have been modified to have extra tank capacity and are equipped with modern GPS navigation and satellite phones. Traffickers have installed remote fuel depots throughout the Sahara, affording a large diversity of routes and the capability to meet in remote locations, avoiding towns and cities altogether. The journey is still a dangerous one, however, and requires planning, know-how, and local knowledge. The networks and contacts required to navigate checkpoints, borders, and community hubs are invaluable to the operation. “As one alleged trafficker explained, all these regions boast the requisite ‘infrastructure’ for trafficking to thrive – weak states, vast ungoverned swaths of territory, open borders, complicit governments, and established networks.” (Anderson, 7) Egypt is most often the destination for these drugs, as it is in close proximity to other consumer markets in Israel and Lebanon, and is “an access point to several criminal networks trafficking to Europe, the greater Middle East and Asia.” (Tinti, 12) These routes through Mali were largely unaffected by the collapse of the Malian state and the takeover of northern Mali by Islamic extremist in 2012, as well as the French-led military intervention and re-establishment of the elected government in 2013; as will be shown, trafficking had become so well-embedded within the region that economic and security arrangements were quickly re-calibrated to whatever new state, tribal, or political structures presented themselves.

Impact of Illicit Trafficking in Mali

The illicit trafficking networks that were first re-established in Mali during the 1970s were primarily run by Arab and Tuareg businessman and smugglers, and reflected these communities in that they were organized along tribal and clan structures. These structures, though not explicitly part of Malian law, “form the basis of informal economic, political, and security arrangement and account for underlying attitudes and animosities between various groups in northern Mali.” (Kodjo, 22) The influx of money that came from trafficking in higher-profit goods such as cocaine had an immense impact on the traditional balances of power in the region; it altered the pre-existing political and security landscape, exacerbating tensions both within and across groups.

By the early 2000s, the influx of cash from narcotics trafficking had begun to affect communities in northern Mali. Younger Arabs and Tuaregs from traditionally poor communities were suddenly able to engage in high-cost activities such as buying new fleets of vehicles and establishing their own transport companies, and laundering their money through large purchases of property and large quantities of livestock throughout the region. This distorted both local markets and long-standing inter-communal relationships. When the traditionally nomadic Arab and Berber communities of northern Mali began purchasing livestock in major rural markets, it not only disrupted the economy of these regions, but it also “messed up the economic ecosystem between the Songhai [agriculturalists]

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