On September, 23, 2003, Senator Hillary Clinton was interviewed for the great PBS program Wide Angle on the topic of human trafficking (2003, folks, that was 5 years ago, ok... and yes, that was the year of the beginning of the war in Iraq but that was not the only thing going on in the world. I, for one, am glad somebody was paying attention to these other crucial issues even though I disagree with her - heck, ANYONE's vote for the war). Let me excerpt a few chosen quote (full transcript at the link above, so YES, I'm picking and choosing).

"Hillary Clinton: Well. Jamie, the fact that this is a modern-day form of slavery was shocking to me. When I realized, because of my travels and exposure as First Lady, how prevalent it was, I determined that we should do something about it. I went to Beijing to the UN Conference on Women in September of 1995, and spoke out against a long series of abuses that were human rights violations of women's rights and among those, of course, was trafficking. And then, in the time after the conference, when it did become an item that was of higher interest on the national and international agenda, we followed up. In 1996, I went with my husband to Thailand for a state visit. I went to the north where I met with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], trying to help young girls who had been sold by their families into prostitution, trafficked into the brothels, mostly in Bangkok.

Jamie Rubin: So they were sex slaves, these girls.

Hillary Clinton: They were. They were 10, 11, 12 years old. I remember going to a hospice and meeting a 12-year-old girl who had become very sick because of AIDS, had been thrown out of the brothel, had found her way back to her family, who didn't want her, and ended up in this hospice for dying teenagers and adolescents. And both I and my staff, led by Melanne Verveer, who was responsible for the work on issues like this, began talking about it with everyone we could find in the White House and the State Department. In 1997, we began something called Vital Voices, and we brought together women from the former Soviet Union in Vienna. And what I found was that it was a huge problem, not just in a country in Asia, like Thailand, but also in Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet Union. And then the administration, under my husband's leadership and under Secretary Albright's leadership, really made this a high priority, which led to our involvement in international conferences with the Secretary of State, the President, and other high officials, raising this with governments around the world."

But but but... as First Lady, all she did was organize tea parties!! You know what? That's what I call leadership, damn it (Disclaimer: I know such an interview will be full of self-serving statements but the very fact that she knows what she is talking about is evident... below, you'll find my own writing on the subject... she hits all the crucial points in this!).

Note to trolls: yes, 1996 was also the year she traveled to Bosnia... no it's not inconsistent... a year has 365 days, so you can actually go to different places in one year (I know, ain't that incredible??).

And here is one for the skeptic feminists:

"When Madeline Albright became Secretary of State -- after the announcement and when she was confirmed -- I went over to the State Department. And we had a joint meeting where we talked about women's rights as being really important to American foreign policy -- and not as some kind of marginal luxury that maybe when we didn't have something better to think about we could worry about. Because where women have rights, as we have found in Afghanistan, and in many other parts of the world, the countries are more likely to be stable, they are more likely to be pro-democracy."

YES, I want a President who understands the gendered nature of social issues such as trafficking. Human trafficking sounds gender neutral but the reality is that criminal networks are masculine organization. The victims of human trafficking are largely women. It is absurd to design policies that are gender neutral when the targeted population "just happens" to belong to one gender: women. So what did Hillary do exactly? In the interview, she emphasizes that during WJC's administration she did NOT work on the law enforcement side of things. Instead, she started the Vital Voices initiative after Beijing (you can read about their accomplishments - and recognition of HRC's leadership) at their website, but the general goal is to raise awareness.

And here again, Hillary shows, to someone like me who constantly writes and works on globalization, that she's got the more detailed, nuanced and consistent view of the phenomenon:

"It's the dark underbelly of globalization. Now that we can move goods and people with such ease all over the world, it is very hard to know what it is that we are transporting, where it's supposed to end up. This is true for human beings, it's true for drugs, it's true for weapons, it's true for terrorism, it is something we have to come to grips with. I think we should be looking at trafficking, not only as an evil, in and of itself, that the world has to combat, but as part of some of the problems that we face because of globalization. Who would have thought, before September 11th, that hijackers could use credit cards, modern commercial airplanes, and box cutters to wreak such havoc? I really think it's time for the world community to come together internationally and start setting out rules for the 21st century."

Here again, this is a horribly long post, so, most of it is below the fold but I am trying to convey here that here is someone who, again, displays leadership where, in my view, it matters: on problems that have global ramifications. She does so with passion and intelligence (huh? Who knew you could have both?), approaches the issue of trafficking with compassion without losing sight of the national / global policy implications.

To paraphrase the song, the world needs Hillary.

A major source of tensions specifically related to globalization is the emergence and alliance of organized criminal networks. My focus here is on the characteristics that make such organizations a source of global instability. Organized criminal organizations have the following traits:

• They are profit-oriented: their goal is to make money by supplying illegal goods (such as drugs, weapons, human organs, prostitutes or sex slaves) through criminal means (such extortion, protection, corruption, murder or money-laundering).

• Most have high longevity: some criminal organizations have existed for decades if not for centuries.

• They are organized so as to facilitate criminal activities, such as non-hierarchical and flexible networks.

• They all use violence at every level of their trade: against competitors, customers, suppliers, officials and even their own member as a form of social control.

• They engage in corruption of government and corporate officials as well as law enforcement agents In the context of globalization, not only have traditional criminal networks, such as the Italian Mafia or the Japanese Yakuza adapted to the new political and economic conditions, but new criminal organizations have emerged precisely as a product of globalization capitalizing on the profitability and high demands for new illegal commodities on a global scale.

In her research on global sex trafficking, Kathryn Farr (2005) offers the following typology of organized crime groups.

According to Farr, the Russian mafia had long been a part of the Soviet state, capitalizing on a corrupt political structure and a scarcity of goods that generated a black market. When the communist state finally collapsed, the Russian mafia found itself in a position to benefit tremendously from the chaotic transition to capitalism. It was able to take control of large segments of the Russian economy: it accounts for approximately 40% of the Russian economy and controls around 50,000 businesses and numerous financial institutions and banks involved in joint ventures with foreign investors. One of its major activities is extortion whereby 70 to 80% of Russian businesses pay protection money.

Most of the 12,000 identified criminal groups are involved in sex trafficking, money laundering, weapon and drug smuggling. As any profitable enterprise would do, the Russian mafia developed ties with other criminal groups (Italian mafia, Japanese Yakuza, Chinese triads) but also with revolutionary groups (such as the Colombian FARC, a group defined as terrorist by the Colombian government and which is heavily involved in the production of cocaine).

Whereas other established organized crime groups have suffered losses at the hands of law enforcement (US and Italian mafias, the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia), the Russian mafia has benefited from the weakness and corruption of the Russian state and is able to operate in almost complete impunity and extend its reach on a global scale.

The Japanese Yakuza have existed since the 17th century and count approximately 5,000 groups across Japan. They operate mostly in Japan with ramifications throughout Asia, Australia and Europe. They are involved in drugs and weapons smuggling as well as money-laundering and extortion but they are major providers of sex slaves and prostitutes throughout Asia as well as prime organizers of sex tours.

The Chinese Triads also came into existence in the 17th century as secret societies. They operate as loosely organized structures in conjunction with Chinese gangs (also known as “Tongs”). The Triads are also heavily involved in the sex trafficking and prostitution on a global scale as well as illegal immigrant smuggling. They own massage parlors, escort services and night clubs in most Western countries. These groups are also involved in bride abductions: the kidnapping of young women and girls to be married to men living in areas where brides are not available due to a shortage of girls.

The Italian-American mafia, also known as La Cosa Nostra (“our thing” in Italian, LCN) has been in existence since the early 1900s, created by Italian immigrants, mostly from Sicily. This organization, initially composed of five major families, was the first one to be labeled “mafia” and became part of the popular imagination through Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather, and the series of films based on it. The complex structure of LCN has been uncovered by US-Italian joint investigations that led to hundreds of arrests in the 1980s and 1990s. These investigations also revealed the deep mafia infiltration of the Italian dominant political party, up to seven-time Prime Minister Andreotti. Today, the FBI estimates that LCN has approximately 25,000 members worldwide. Although less powerful than in the glory days post-World War II, Cosa Nostra is still involved in murder, extortion, drug trafficking, corruption, gambling, infiltration of legitimate businesses, labor racketeering, loan sharking, prostitution, pornography, and tax fraud schemes.

For many years, the Medellin and Cali cartels from Colombia were incredibly powerful organizations on the global criminal stage. The Medellin cartel was headed by the infamous Pablo Escobar who became one of the richest men in the world and who once described cocaine as “the Third World’s atomic bomb” (Robinson, 2000). The Medellin cartel was instrumental in developing smuggling routes for their cocaine to Europe and the United States. When the United States government demanded that Escobar be extradited for drug smuggling, he offered to pay the Colombian national debt (and was not extradited). The Medellin cartel is also infamous for the level of violence it exacted: the cartel is responsible for the assassination of four Colombian presidential candidates, a Supreme Court judge and more than twenty lower-court judges. At its height, the Medellin cartel controlled 80% of the world’s cocaine traffic. The cartel’s demise would come in 1993 after an all-out war with US Delta forces and Colombian Special force and the shooting death of Escobar.

The Cali cartel, led by the Orejuela brothers, was always more sophisticated and discrete than the Medellin cartel but no less violent. It benefited from the end of the rival cartel to reorganize cocaine trafficking in more flexible mini-cartels that generated billions of dollars in profits. However, stricter law enforcement and the emergence of new cartels have reduced its hold on the cocaine market.

The political, social and economic changes brought about by globalization have affected the shape of organized crime so that not only have established networks shifted their activities and modes of organizations but also global instability has made possible the emergence of new criminal networks on the global stages. These networks focused their efforts on illegal activities that would be low-risk and very lucrative: mainly, sex trafficking and prostitution.

In the 1990s, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the liberalization of former communist countries in Eastern Europe produced weak states where organized criminal organizations could flourish. For instance, Albanian criminal groups, once scattered and disorganized, became a hub for all types of trafficking from the East to Western Europe, especially prostitution and sex trafficking but also illegal immigrants. These groups took advantage of their geographical position, right across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, the main destination for their trafficked “goods.” Albanian groups are known for their violence and ruthlessness. Their main mode of “recruitment” into prostitution and sex trafficking is through abduction so much so that, in parts of Albania, parents keep their girls from school as schools are a prime place of abduction.

Similarly, the breakup of Yugoslavia into different republics, such as Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina, has given rise to ethnically-specific organized crime groups. These groups target particularly the massive refugee camps where there is a large pool of potential victims available. Also, since revolutionary groups were very active in former Yugoslavia, the black market for illegal weapons was very profitable for criminal groups. The deals are that revolutionary groups abduct women in refugee camps, turn them over to organized crime groups that process them into prostitution whereas organized crime groups repay revolutionaries with weapons and whatever else they might need to wage war.

At one point or another, we have all received spam emails offering us vast sums of money if we let small amounts be deposited on our bank accounts for a while. These emails generally come from supposed Nigerian officials. They actually the latest transnational financial scams for Nigerian organized crime groups, a low-cost, virtually risk-free activity. Nigerian and other West African groups have long been involved in drug trafficking as well as sex trafficking mostly for the French and Belgian prostitution markets.

As the Medellin and Cali cartels lost their hold on the traffic of cocaine, they were replaced by smaller, more decentralized groups from Mexico and Latin America, all initially involved in drug trafficking and money laundering, as well as prostitution rings in Florida, as in the case of the large Cadena Mexican gang.

In other words, every region of the world has seen the rise of new organized crime networks establishing their platform of activities in their area of origin but quickly linking with each other and with older criminal organizations in areas of operation where risks were lower and profits higher, such as sex trafficking. All these groups benefited from the increased importance of global flows.

Manuel Castells (1998) states that drug trafficking still remains the preferred money-maker for organized crime syndicates. However, most organizations have diversified their activities as they connected with each other on the global marketplace.

There is, of course, a legal weapon trade, where companies from the United States and Western Europe are the main suppliers. The illegal trade in weapons derives from the fact that some countries and organizations are barred from acquiring them. Some countries, such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, or Serbia, are under arms embargo whereby the international community makes it illegal for companies and other countries to sell weapons as part of sanctions for alleged violation of international law or non-compliance with United Nations Resolutions. In other cases, groups involved in civil wars (such as rebel groups in Sierra Leone, or revolutionary groups in Colombia) as well as terrorist groups cannot openly buy weapons on the legal market and have to resort to illegal means and acquire weapons from the black market.

Black market in weapons is amply supplied largely thanks to the use military buildup of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. When the USSR collapsed, weapon stocks were not properly handled and monitored and ended up creating a huge black market, so much that the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle is the weapon of choice in African civil war because it is light and has almost no recoil (and therefore can be used by children), never jams and is very cheap. Anti-personnel mines are still being produced by 13 countries (including the United States) and used in various conflicts around the globe. Unexploded landmines remain in the ground long after a conflict is over and continue to main civilians (approximately 15 to 20,000 casualties each year). The Russian mafia as well as criminal organizations from the former republics of the Soviet Union was instrumental in gaining control of USSR stocks and turning them into a lucrative trade by selling to embargoed nations as well as rebel and terrorist groups.

Although the bulk of weapon trafficking is in light and small arms (such as AK-47s), most Western governments are concerned about the trafficking of nuclear material that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. Here again, such fear has been triggered by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the lack of surveillance of nuclear installations as well as the financial desperation of Russian scientists working there.

Human trafficking is now the third most lucrative venture for organized crime (after drugs and weapons, human trafficking generates approximately $12 billion a year) and covers different types of enterprises such as illegal immigrant smuggling as well as sex trafficking. As we have seen, globally, large numbers of people live in desperate poverty under oppressive political systems. Such conditions constitute the major factors that push people to emigrate. At the same time, most destination countries (United States and Western Europe) have tightened their immigration requirements, making it more difficult for immigrants to enter and remain in a country legally or obtain political refugee status.

Faced with such conditions, a large number of people have to resort to illegal immigration and place their fate in the hands of criminal smuggling networks for vast sums of money. The United States and Europe receive approximately 700,000 illegal immigrants every year. These immigrants constitute a very profitable business for dozens of criminal groups who often demand that they repay their smuggling fee by working for them in the destination country. In this sense, illegal immigrants smuggling constitutes a new form of slavery. Furthermore, it is a very low-risk activity: if smuggled immigrants are caught by the authorities, they are deported and the smuggling network is often left intact or smugglers receive a slap on the wrist.

Human trafficking also covers the trafficking of women and children to feed prostitution rings and the sex industry. According to Victor Malarek (2003), there have been four waves of trafficked women:

1. the first wave took place in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Asian women, from Thailand and the Philippines;

2. the second wave took place in the early 1980s and was composed mainly of African women from Ghana and Nigeria;

3. the third wave happened in the mid to late-1980s and was composed mainly of women from Latin America, such as Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic;

4. the fourth and current wave is composed of women from Central and Eastern Europe. Under full conditions of globalization, this fourth wage occurs at a speed and in proportion never seen before: every year, approximately 175,000 women from the former Soviet republics are trafficked into the sex trade. Ten years ago, the fourth wage had barely started. Today, these women constitute 25% of the global sex trade. Of course, this entire industry is under the control of various organized crime syndicates collaborating with each other, making the sex trade a truly global venture whereby women from peripheral areas are trafficked through transnational criminal networks and end up as prostitutes in core countries.

This map (from The Future Group) illustrates the global flows of trafficked humans to the United States.

As medical technology progresses, transplant surgeries have become more reliable. As a result, the demand for organs has grown. However, there is a shortage of available organs for transplant. As always in such situations of high demand and low supply, in correlation with restrictive laws (it is illegal in most countries to sell one’s organs), criminal organizations step in and provide the scarce goods for very high fees: brokers charge between $100,000 to $200,000 to organize a transplant (Nullis-Kapp, 2004).

Most “donors” (not everybody voluntarily relinquishes organs, coercion may be involved) live in deep poverty in semi-peripheral or peripheral areas, mainly in Latin American countries (such as Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Honduras and Mexico). The buyers live in wealthy Western countries (mostly, Switzerland, Germany, or Italy) or wealthy individuals in semi-peripheral countries (South Africa). Criminal organizations establish the connections between seller and buyer by finding the organs: they may pay a few thousand dollars in the best of cases, or demand organs as repayment of debt; alternatively, organs may be stolen from cadavers in morgues. As for sex trafficking, there has been an increase in organs originating in the former USSR as the Russian Mafia looks to diversify its activities.

Money laundering is the set of financial transactions dedicated to hide the source and destination of proceeds from illegal activities and to reinvest them into legitimate business. Since the goal of criminal organizations is to generate profits from their illegal ventures, money laundering is at the heart of global crime. Money laundering is the connection between the criminal, underground economy and global capitalism. As Manuel Castells (1998) describes, there are three stages involved in money laundering:

1. The placement of the illegal proceeds into the financial system through banks or other financial institutions. Often, criminal organizations use banks located in countries that exercise banking secrecy (they do not disclose financial information to investigators), such as Aruba, the Cayman Islands or Luxemburg.

2. The second stage is called “layering,” that is, to detach the funds from their illegal source. This can be done by swapping currency (illegal proceeds in US dollars are converted into Euros) or by investing the money into stocks. Thanks to the liberalization of global financial markets, it is easy to transfer vast sums of money all over the world, several times over within seconds.

3. The third stage is call “integration,” that is, the introduction of the laundered money back into the legitimate economy through various investments. The majority of criminal organizations described above engages directly in money laundering or hire the services of other criminal syndicates to do it.

The changes outlined above regarding war global criminal networks are a reflection of changes brought about by globalization, organizationally, economically, and politically. The reconfiguration from top-down, rigid organizations into flexible networks by legitimate and criminal organizations alike is an adaptation to the growing influence of global flows.