Criminal businessmen, commodity frontiers and the Colombian state

Abstract

This article presents three micro-stories of Colombian businessmen of the criminal type who operated in commodity frontiers, known for the presence of intense public violence. In today's globalization, the Colombian economy made the transition from "coffee and industry" to "cocaine and services". Some authoritarian and modernizing policies of the Colombian State, mainly Uribe¿s Defense and Democratic Security Policy, DDSP, 2002- 2010, have been central in the formation of a thick network of crime, business, public violence and politics as usual. Our micro historic analyzes are based mainly on judicial cases that shed light on links at various levels: (a) the growing supranationality of drug trafficking and money laundering crimes; (b) the drug trafficking substrate in the appearance of the new commodity frontiers; (c) drug trafficking as a model of a business training school particularly in Colombia's internal frontiers and (d) the fundamental link between the local and the global in the perspective of organized crime and businesses.