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Book Review

Trafficking Cocaine: Colombian Drug Entrepreneurs in the Netherlands

Damián Zaitch

The Hague: Kluwer Law International

335 pages

Hardcover: 98,00 EUR, ISBN: 90-411-1882-9

Paperback: 27,00 EUR, ISBN: 90-411-1994-5

Who would have thought, prior to the publication of this book, that Colombian drug traffickers of all people can be the object of an ethnographic study. The author, Damián Zaitch, an Argentinean living in the Netherlands, has spent three years (1996-1999) in the field in the big Dutch cities of Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, and in Bogota and Cali to explore the business and social world of Colombian cocaine entrepreneurs and their network of suppliers, customers and helpers in Colombia and the Netherlands. In the course of his research he managed to interview 8 drug couriers, 10 importers, 13 distributors, 3 retailers and 10 helpers and employees of cocaine entrepreneurs. These data were supplemented by expert interviews, interviews of Colombians not involved in the drug trade, and open source material.

The Netherlands have a long tradition in the cocaine trade. Prior to the prohibition of cocaine, the Nederlandsche Cocainefabriek was the world's largest producer of this narcotic drug. In recent years, the Netherlands have been second only to Spain as the main import and wholesale distribution center for Colombian cocaine in Europe.

To varying degrees, Colombians are involved in the import, wholesale distribution and retail distribution of cocaine in the Netherlands. As Zaitch stresses, they are a small, heterogeneous and changing group, with a variety of geographical, social and ethnic origins. Many of them do not live in the Netherlands or only stay temporarily. While an estimated 12,000 Colombians permanently reside in the Netherlands, of which about 2/3 are women, many of whom work either as prostitutes or as housekeepers, they do not form a cohesive community. There are no Colombian neighborhoods and there is no ethnic economy of Colombian businesses that could provide a social support basis for cocaine traffickers.

Not surprisingly, Colombian involvement is most prominent on the import level. But Colombians, according to Damián Zaitch, are far from controlling this or any other level of the market. Nor are the Colombian cocaine traffickers who operate in the Netherlands part of well-structured “cartels”. Rather, a number of independent Colombian importers both compete and co-operate with native Dutch and Surinamese importers, and to a lesser extent with traffickers of other nationalities. Colombian importers experience conditions that promote and limit their opportunities. While they have privileged access to cocaine supply, they lack access to human resources and the local infrastructure in the Netherlands.

In his structural analysis, Zaitch comes to the conclusion that Colombian cocaine firms are informal, small, mutating and decentralized. They are more flexible than the notion of 'cartels' suggests. Some are individual enterprises, others adopt the form of temporary partnerships between two or three persons, often formed for a single project. A clear division between labor and capital is contrasted by a division of labor that is not rigid or compartmentalized in vertical lines. Despite the importance of kinship ties and the frequent use of relatives, none of these enterprises are 'family businesses'. Individuals who function as brokers play a central role in bringing about these coalitions and transactions.

Colombian drug traffickers have a reputation for violence, and as Zaitch points out, violence has indeed a permanent presence in the cocaine business. However, he maintains that there are structural limitations to the excessive use of violence. In the Netherlands, Colombian drug traffickers tend to restrict the use of physical violence and keep a low profile. Cases of kidnappings and killings occur but are rare, usually connected with rip-offs. Even groups who had clashes in Colombia have preferred to ignore each other while operating in the Netherlands.

When one wants to appraise the value of “Trafficking Cocaine”, certainly the most remarkable aspect about this book is its database. Seldom enough have organized crime researchers attempted to access “organized criminals” directly (see e.g. Johansen 1998); and where these attempts have been successful, it has been mostly either in the form of interviews with incarcerated criminals (see e.g. Reuter and Haaga 1989) or as the result of chance encounters (see e.g. Adler 1985). In his study, Damián Zaitch has taken the arduous road of systematically establishing contacts among Colombians in the hope of eventually meeting and establishing a basis of trust with those involved in the cocaine trade. The end result justifies these efforts. Zaitch presents a detailed picture of the business and social life of Colombian drug entrepreneurs and their network of suppliers, customers and helpers. Special emphasis is given to the role of violence, secrecy and trust. By stressing the embeddedness of the cocaine trade in legal economic and social structures, Zaitch arrives at a complex and multifaceted depiction of the drug trade that goes well beyond conventional perceptions. His study corroborates the findings of what may be called the critical empirical school of organized crime research in the tradition of scholars like Alan Block, Bill Chambliss, Petrus van Duyne, Gary Potter and Peter Reuter.

A critical remark has to be made about the overly self-assured manner in which Damián Zaitch brushes aside the notion of using police and judicial records, and in which he tries to distance himself from established approaches to understanding organized crime. While law enforcement documents have certainly to be treated with great caution, there is no reason to ignore them altogether, especially when at the same time media reports are accepted as a data source. After all, even the impressive number of informants Zaitch has managed to develop does not provide comprehensive and exhaustive insights into the Colombian involvement in the cocaine market in the Netherlands, so that the analysis of case files could potentially have added valuable information. Regarding the right understanding of organized crime, Damián Zaitch differentiates two approaches, an “economic-bureaucratic approach” and a “criminal network approach”. Both of these approaches he criticizes for neglecting the socio-economic context of criminal conduct, but it seems that this charge sticks more to the proponents of these approaches than to the approaches themselves, i.e. neither a focus on organizations nor on networks necessarily blocks the view for the broader context. On the contrary, especially the network approach, using the concept of multiplicity, seems to provide a tool for capturing the many dimensions of organized crime. What should be done is to construct a conceptual framework that permits to appreciate the organizational and network structures of criminal cooperation in all relevant dimensions, be they economic, social, cultural or political. Despite a very mature theoretical discussion, Damián Zaitch does not go all the way in that direction. Rather, he contents himself with using isolated concepts such as that of (post-Fordist) labor relations or that of ethnic economy.

In sum, “Trafficking Cocaine” is a detailed, analytically mature and empirically well-founded study of the Colombian involvement in the drug trade in the Netherlands. There are not many good books on organized crime, but this is certainly one of them.

References:

Adler, Patricia, Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography of an Upper-Level Drug Dealing and Smuggling Community, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Johansen, Per Ole, Smuggling Alcohol: Organized Crime the Norwegian Style, in Institutt For Kriminologi Universitetet I Oslo (ed.), Årsrapport 1998, Oslo, Norway: Universitetet I Oslo, 1998, 1-11.

Reuter, Peter, and John Haaga, The Organization of High-Level Drug Markets: An Exploratory Study, Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1989.

Klaus von Lampe

© 2003  ECPR Standing Group Organised Crime