Dangers to the social order

The responsibility of the State for diverse socio-cultural, economic and tax policies that affect the taxpayer’s goodwill, resting on the capacity of service and administrative dissuasion to recover it, has called me to reflection.

I have been able to identify the seriousness of this issue in the social order and the imperative need to identify and attack the management structures that alter it.

I begin by stating some effects of illegal activities that give rise to fruitless efforts to control disorder.

Causes of the deterioration

They are activities that feed vices and selfishness, wreaking havoc on society:

  • Illegality in service and public order

    United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres points out that  corruption costs the world $ 2.6 trillion a year, 5.1 % of world GDP.

    The World Atlas of Illicit Flows edited by Interpol, RHIPTO and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime in 2018, allude to more than a thousand world routes of smuggling of goods and services associated with environmental crimes, legal mining, drug trafficking, fuel trafficking, animal trafficking, and human trafficking that serve to finance conflict and terrorism.

    In the 2019 Fiscal Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC reports that the cost of tax evasion and avoidance in the region it reached 6.3% of GDP in 2017, equivalent to 335 billion dollars that impacted on the contraction of  public spending from 21.3% in 2017 to 21.1% of GDP in 2018.

    The illegal trade associated with transnational criminal activities has been quantified between 8 and 15 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

  • Drugs

    The United Nations World Drug Report published in Vienna (24/6/21) states that around 275 million people use drugs, with more than 36 million people estimated to have serious drug addiction problems.

    About half a million people died in 2019 from causes related to drug use.

  • Human trafficking

    Research by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has documented up to 225,000 victims of human trafficking, between 2003 and 2016.

    Of the identified victims, 50 per cent were trafficked for sexual exploitation and 38 per cent for forced labour, while 6 per cent were subjected to forced criminal activities and more than 1 per cent to begging. Criminal groups get about $ 3 billion a year.

  • Arms trafficking

    Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard warned the United Nations Security Council that the diversion and traffic of arms “threatens international peace and security and destroys the social fabric, promotes violence, especially against vulnerable groups and generates displacements and irregular flows of people.”

    2,436,351 people have died in armed conflict since 1989 —more than 77,320 in 2018— according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme.

    In 2017 approximately 589,000 people lost their lives violently. The regions most affected by the increase in deadly armed violence were South and Central America and the Caribbean.

  • Illegal mining

    Mijares in his” Environmental impact of mining ” explains the irreparable environmental damage to the earth’s crust and water, estimating that the use of land for mining between 1976 and 2000 is 37,000 km2; about 0.2% of the entire earth’s surface. In the United States, acid mining drainage (DAM) and other toxins from abandoned mines have contaminated 180,000 acres of reserves and lakes and 120 miles of streams and rivers.

  • Deforestation

    National Geographic points out that deforestation has wiped out 43 million hectares worldwide, destroying forests and jungles and damaging soil quality. Forests the size of Panama are lost every year.

Illicit derived benefits 

Illegally transferred values, money and monetary instruments acquired through illegal activities or captured by tax evasion circulate around the world with total impunity. (GFI, ECLAC). They evade responsibilities in the economic and tax order.

Crime thus manages to launder around 1.6 billion dollars of dirty money, according to the latest report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Black money across the globe, including from tax evasion, amounts to $ 2.1 trillion, representing 3.6% of global GDP.
James S. Henry of the Tax Justice Network estimated the wealth that remained abroad outside the control of tax authorities between $ 21 to $ 32 billion.

The International Monetary Fund concluded that developing countries lose USD 200 billion per year in revenue and that countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development lose USD 400 billion per year in revenue.

  • Vulnerability   

    Markus Meinzer seeks to identify the channels through which they circulate, prioritize them and locate the economic jurisdictions through which they pass, highlighting banking institutions as the most vulnerable channels and foreign direct investment (FDI) as the main economic channel, followed by trade and portfolio capital.

    The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reports that most work in financial centers and do not follow the routes of the drugs that originate them.

    Banking and financial secrecy makes it easier to shield the ultimate beneficiaries of asset movements.

  • Technological identification

    For Juan José Galan, technology allows fractioning transfers between different banks and institutions and executing electronic payments through intermediaries, creating an extremely complex ecosystem to monitor and control, making the traceability of financial flows overly complicated.

    Cybersecurity concepts prevail in the monitoring: firewalls (financial), user control systems, traffic flow filtering tools (monetary), behavior analysis and correlation applications (fiscal).

    Digital forensic analysis is a tool that José Delgado García defines as the set of digital procedures and techniques to identify criminal actions, whose ultimate purpose is usually the legal presentation and acceptance in a judicial process.

    Without international cooperation in a global legal framework, and internet, the techniques of big data and artificial intelligence are insufficient to segment the profile of the fraudster and its economic and commercial connections.

  • Expertise in illegality 

    Magdalena Rua Mar points out that the opacity of the international financial and tax system conceals tax shelters, social structures and instruments to hide the beneficiaries with the confidentiality and advice of experts, while the control of the States is subject to multilateral agreements.

    The outflow of illicit financial flows, she says, is possible thanks to the existence of an offshore services market that provides the financial architecture and organization necessary for the creation of the required legal structures and tax and financial planning schemes.

    International traffickers depend on professional services according to the FATF report.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR STATE POLICIES

 

The Westphalian system of international organization, conceived in 1648, promoted a one-dimensional and totalizing way of understanding and assimilating the state-centric organization of the world, says Armando González.

However, he adds, the State acts on the basis of political relations in which some hidden non-state actors act, interact, and create extra-state networks that lack control and legitimacy.

For Markus Schultze, the relationship between organized crime and political orders is explained as regular patterns of social exchange and interaction –between private and public, state and non-state actors that extend over the gap that divides the realm of legality (”legitimate world”) from the realm of criminality (“illegitimate underworld”) and influence the character, form and evolution of the political order

In this sense, we may ask:

  • Why and under what conditions organized crime acquires political power and what role violence plays in this process?

  • In what ways this” criminal power ” drives the emergence of political orders that are distinct from both liberal / democratic and traditional / patrimonial orders?

    tradicionales/patrimoniales?

Challenges

Jerome Glenn of the Millennium Project imagines a world catastrophe, among other causes, by terrorism, organized crime and diseases expected for the next fifty or one hundred years.

He expresses that half the population of the world is potentially unstable, shows a growing intolerance to unethical behaviors of proliferating ruling elites.

The challenges that involve changes in corruption, freedoms, deforestation, are transnational and require cooperation between governments, institutional organizations, corporations, universities and NGOs.

Unless our financial, economic, environmental and social behaviours improve alongside our industrial technologies, warns Jerome Glenn, the long-term future of the world is in jeopardy.

Note

The recent events that mourn the world dwarf the significance of the causes and their effects on the social order implicit in this blog, however, the hope of continuing to live reinforces the need for warning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. NETWORK OF TAX ORGANISATIONS (NTO) 1. 1st. Technical Conference
  2. World Drug Report-United Nations
  3. UNODC HUMAN TRAFFICKING REPORT 2020
  4. EL IMPACTO AMBIENTAL DE LA MINERÍA O. Mijares (Pollution)
  5. CORRUPTION, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND IMPUNITY Wilson Granja Portilla
  6. EVASION Y ELUSIÓN FISCALES, OBSTÁCULOS PARA ALCANZAR LOS OBJETIVOS DE LA AGENDA 2030: CEPAL Genaro Rodríguez Navarrete
  7. EL CONTRABANDO Y EL LAVADO DE ACTIVOS. Juan Pablo Rodríguez C / Andrés M. Castro
  8. FLUJOS FINANCIEROS ILÍCITOS, UN PROBLEMA DE ORIGEN NEOLIBERAL – Martina Cirimele para Sin Corrupción
  9. FLUJOS FINANCIEROS VINCULADOS A LA PRODUCCIÓN Y TRÁFICO DE OPIÁCEOS AFGANOS – INFORME DEL GAFI
  10. ESTIMACIÓN DE LOS FLUJOS FINANCIEROS ILÍCITOS DERIVADOS DEL NARCOTRÁFICO Y OTROS DELITOS TRANSNACIONALES – 25.10.2011 INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES ECONÓMICAS, UNAM Centro de Documentación e Información INTER t i p s 2011
  11. DUALIDAD DE LA TECNOLOGÌA FRENTE AL FRAUDE FISCAL Juan José Galan     (El País Economía)
  12. Estudio vulnerabilidad de los Flujos Financieros Ilícitos en América Latina Escrito por: Markus Meinzer
  13. LA CRIMINALIDAD ECONÓMICA  MAGDALENA RUA MAR 8, 2020
  14. ÓRDENES CRIMILEGALES: repensando el poder político del crimen organizado Markus Schultze-Kr El Estado y la globalización ante la nueva crisis internacional* Pablo Armando González Ulloa Aguirre**
  15. DESAFÍOS GLOBALES PARA LAS PRÓXIMAS DÉCADAS Jerome C. Glenn Proyecto Millenium, Washington, D.C., EE. UU
  16. DELINCUENCIA ORGANIZADA TRASNACIONAL La trata de personas: compraventa de seres humanos (unodc.org)
  17. DATA THAT KILL 2019: MAGNITUDE OF THE GLOBAL ARMS TRADE (amnesty.org)
  18. TRÁFICO ILEGAL DE ARMAS, AMENAZA DE PAZ MUNDIAL: EBRARD (eluniversal.com.mx)
  19. QUÉ ES EL ANÁLISIS FORENSE DIGITAL José Delgado García (jdgperitajesinformaticos.es)
  20. LAS ASOCIACIONES SÓLIDAS SON CLAVE PARA LUCHAR CON ÉXITO CONTRA LOS IFF | NTO
  21. DEFORESTACION – https://www.nationalgeographic.es/medio-ambiente/deforestacion

 

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