Sovereignty Beyond Law

A Comparative Analysis of Criminal Para-Sovereigns

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Nothing in this article amounts to an endorsement of criminal activity of any kind.

In the last article, we analyzed three Italian criminal organizations and one Japanese. In these analyses, we concluded that they represent not mere criminality, but an adaptive response to weak sovereignty. In this article we will extend that analysis to Russia and Latin America, and we will conclude by comparing all these para-sovereign organizations, drawing out their common features, and by saying what their role might be in the years to come.

Russian Bratva

No examination of extra-legal sovereignty is complete without considering the post-Soviet Russian mafia, often referred to colloquially as the Bratva (“brotherhood”). Though less relevant to the current moment in the rich and momentarily stable West, the Russian Bratva furnishes an example of sovereign devolution in its advanced stages—and thus a vision of the future of the West if it does not reverse course, which looks increasingly unlikely with each passing day.

Russia’s experience in the 1990s is a dramatic case of state breakdown and criminal takeover. The collapse of the USSR triggered an acute period of state failure—institutions like the police, military, and judiciary were underfunded, demoralized, and often corrupt; the economy was in free-fall amid chaotic privatization; and millions of Russians suddenly found themselves in a lawless capitalist Wild West. In this environment, organized crime did not just flourish—it permeated the very structure of the new Russia.

In this chaotic environment, the Russian Bratva effectively created a mafia capitalism in which gangster-businessmen and ex-KGB operatives seized the commanding heights of the economy. By the mid-1990s, it was commonly said that Russian businesses could not survive without mafia protection.¹ Official law enforcement was so overwhelmed and compromised that many entrepreneurs felt they had little choice but to recruit their own security forces or pay off criminal groups.² A 1996 account noted an explosion of private security firms—numbering in the tens of thousands—essentially filling the role of police for hire.³ Due to police impotence, if one gangster extorted you, you had little choice but to hire another gangster group to counter them, because “the cops can’t do anything. No rules. No laws,” as a Russian mobster testified in US Congress, recounting how even celebrities and athletes resorted to mafia intervention rather than trust the authorities.⁴ In one illustrative anecdote, a Russian NHL hockey player received extortion threats; his response was to “go to a more powerful criminal group to take care of the problem,” explicitly saying that the official police were useless.⁵ Here, as in the Italian and Japanese examples—and even more transparently—criminals became the arbiters of disputes and the providers of classic state functions like security, albeit through brute force.

The governance role of Russian organized crime in the 1990s extended into contract enforcement and property rights as well. During the frenzied privatization of Soviet industry, countless deals and trades occurred in legal grey zones. Court systems were too slow or corrupt to reliably enforce contracts, so mafias stepped in as enforcers and arbitrators, creating a “protection market” parallel to the nascent legal system. In other words, rather than acting like feudal lords claiming geographic fiefdoms, the Russian crime bosses (avtoritety) acted as service providers, deeply intertwining with what should have been state-run functions.

Eventually, these networks became so embedded that one could speak of a “mafia state” in Russia. By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, many of the most successful mafiosi had transitioned into becoming businessmen or parliamentarians, and conversely, some government officials essentially ran criminal enterprises from their offices.⁶ The term “mafia state” did in fact gain currency to describe this merger of organized crime and state organs. In practice, the truth was more complex—the Kremlin under Putin re-centralized power and largely tamed the street gang wars of the 90s, but it also absorbed many criminal figures into the establishment, allowing organized crime to prosper as part of the system. High corruption meant that the distinction between a corrupt official and a mobster became largely semantic—they were often the same people. In one sensational case, a colonel in the police anti-corruption unit was found holding $123 million in cash in his apartment—thought to be the pooled funds of a network of corrupt officials, aptly called “werewolves in uniform”.⁷ This is organized crime not just capturing a local government, but penetrating core state institutions, turning them into rackets.

Organizationally, the Russian Bratva is an umbrella for myriad criminal groups rather than a single monolith. In the Soviet era, a caste of professional thieves (vory v zakone, “thieves-in-law”) formed a sort of underworld aristocracy, with a code of honour inside the Gulag prisons. After 1991, new criminal entrepreneurs emerged—often ex-military or KGB—who were less bound by the old code and more intent on making fortunes. They formed gangs named after their leaders or locales,⁸ but by the late 90s a sort of equilibrium was reached: territories were divided, and a layer of oligarchs took stable control of major industries. Whereas the Russian mafia’s governance role in the 90s was violent and visible, in the 2000s it became more institutionalized and discreet. As Putin’s government solidified, explicit gang violence on the streets subsided, but this was because the most powerful mobsters either went legit or aligned themselves with state power. By the 21st century, Russia had shifted from an anarchic mafia regime to a protected criminal system where the state provides impunity to select criminal networks in exchange for their loyalty or utility.

At this point we must ask, do gangsters run Russia, or does Russia run the gangsters? We are back to our old example of the Western Roman Empire again. By the 5th century, the Roman state had transitioned from repelling barbarian tribes to integrating and managing them as semi-autonomous military partners. These groups, such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Franks, were granted land, subsidies, and legal privileges in exchange for military service and nominal loyalty. Just as Russia today arguably manages but no longer dominates its embedded criminal networks, so too did Rome find itself dependent on—and eventually subordinated to—the warlords it had once thought to co-opt. At some point the term criminal no longer even applies meaningfully—what counts as criminality has now shifted to exclude the operations of the Bratva, and they find themselves not only de facto but de jure part of the sovereign apparatus.

In terms of geography, Russian organized crime rapidly globalized following the Soviet collapse. By the 2000s, Russian mafia networks were active across Europe, North America, Israel, and beyond, engaging in everything from drug and arms trafficking to massive financial crimes. For example, in Spain during the 2000s, Russian mafia cells laundered huge sums in real estate, prompting Spanish prosecutors to characterize Russia as a mafia state exporting corruption.⁹ The interplay of foreign and domestic influence culminated in events like the Magnitsky affair and other scandals, where organized crime, business, and state repression intersect.¹⁰

Russia exemplifies the extreme end of mafia integration, where a once-failed state becomes so infiltrated by organized crime that it re-stabilizes as a legitimate system. In Putin’s Russia, the murders are fewer and more targeted, but the informal extraction of wealth by networks of officials continues. And here we see that the parallel system of rule identified in Sicilian villages a century ago can also manifest in the state apparatus of a nuclear-armed world power. The scale differs, but the pattern remains—where public institutions weaken, private violence entrepreneurs take over, either by replacing the state (Russia in the 90s) or by reconstituting it (Russia in the 2000s).

Latin American Cartels

Latin America provides some of the clearest modern cases of non-state actors seizing quasi-sovereign authority, especially through the use of drug cartels. In countries like Colombia and Mexico, drug cartels have grown from trafficking organizations into de facto governors of territories—even insurgent forces that rival state control. The reasons, again, lie in state dysfunction.

An ideal example is Colombia’s Medellín Cartel under Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. Escobar was not only a cocaine kingpin but an aspiring parallel ruler. With the Colombian state struggling against guerrillas and plagued by corruption, Escobar built his own mini-welfare state in his home base of Medellín.

Escobar famously constructed housing for the poor,¹¹ and built soccer fields and churches, winning a reputation as “Robin Hood Paisa” among the locals. In 1982, Escobar even got himself elected to Congress by leveraging his narco-funded philanthropy and popularity. While his political career was short-lived, this demonstrated that a cartel leader could gain a form of electoral mandate through providing what the formal state did not. Escobar reigned with terror, but the loyalty he commanded in barrios of Medellín was real, based on a mixture of fear and gratitude. He turned parts of the city into what he called “shields” (escudos) where the community would protect him from the authorities, because he protected them from the state and from yet worse elements of society.

In recent years, Mexican cartels have gone even further in establishing parallel governance. Mexico’s powerful cartels such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) control extensive territories and have penetrated state institutions via corruption. In areas where government presence is weak—such as remote rural communities or urban slums—cartels become the law.

In the case of the Sinaloa Cartel, it goes beyond maintaining order to actively step in to perform government-like services. For instance, it has provided protection to local businesses against common crime and even against government intrusion, essentially acting as a shield for the community in the manner of Escobar. In the resort city of Acapulco, when kidnapping gangs unaffiliated with Sinaloa were snatching businessmen, the Sinaloa Cartel solved cases of kidnapping, apprehended the alleged kidnappers, and handed them over to authorities, projecting itself as an enforcer of justice.¹² In another area, Sinaloa operatives approached Mexico’s fishing regulators to offer to enforce fishing licenses and quotas—something the under-resourced agency was failing to do—in exchange for monopoly rights over certain fisheries,¹³ in effect offering to keep others out where environmental law enforcement could not. And indeed, Sinaloa is known to regulate illegal fishing to prevent depletion,¹⁴ acting with more foresight than the official agencies.

In a clear parallel to Japan’s Yakuza, in parts of Baja California Sur, municipal police themselves refer residents’ complaints about theft to the cartel’s lookouts (halcones) to resolve, tacitly acknowledging the cartel’s role as the effective police force.¹⁵ The legal authorities directing citizens to the illegal authority for help is a clear marker that sovereignty has been reconstituted under the narcos. A Mexican citizen in a cartel-dominated town might go to the cartel if their car is stolen, expecting the cartel to find and punish the thief. This parallels how peasants in 19th-century Sicily might go to a mafioso if their mule was stolen—because the mafioso, not the courts, would get results.

Cartels also heavily invest in public relations and social services to win hearts and minds. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, several Mexican cartels made headlines by distributing “branded” aid packages of food and supplies to impoverished communities. For example, in Guadalajara, the family of imprisoned Sinaloa boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán handed out boxes of groceries and sanitizer emblazoned with El Chapo’s likeness.¹⁶ In another region, the CJNG delivered boxes labeled “From your friends, CJNG – COVID-19 support,” with gunmen making sure their charitable act was well photographed.¹⁷ These Robin Hood-esque gestures were not ad hoc; they extend a long tradition of cartels supplying fiestas, healthcare, and infrastructure in neglected communities. For decades, Sinaloa’s leadership has funnelled money into paving roads, building churches, funding local festivals and schools, and paying medical bills for villagers.¹⁸

Loyalty and patronage like this are a two-way street—local people may hide cartel members from the army, warn them of patrols, or vote for politicians who are cartel-friendly, because the parallel government of the cartel has treated them better than the distant state. The Mexican President has publicly acknowledged and denounced these practices, pleading that “this isn’t helpful […] What helps is them stopping their bad deeds”, aware that cartels use charity to entrench their power.¹⁹ But for poor residents, a box of food today from a cartel might speak louder than promises of future safety from a government that has historically overlooked them.

In terms of structure and reach, Latin American cartels vary. Early cartels (Medellín, Cali) were relatively centralized around a patron; modern ones like Sinaloa are more federated networks of semi-independent “factions” united by allegiance and profit-sharing. CJNG and others are more hierarchical militarized groups. Almost all, however, maintain armed wings akin to private armies, and intelligence networks, and engage in battles with government forces or rival cartels that can resemble warfare.

Geographically, these cartels are transnational by the nature of the drug trade. Mexican cartels dominate drug import and distribution in the United States, with Sinaloa and CJNG having operations in dozens of US states. The Sinaloa Cartel, for instance, operates in at least 47 countries worldwide, leveraging global narcotics supply lines and markets.²⁰ They forge alliances with Italian mafias to ship cocaine to Europe, source precursor chemicals from China, and launder money through offshore havens—essentially behaving like a multinational corporation.

And yet, the core sovereignty-building of the cartels happens on home turf: in nearly half of Mexico’s states, particularly along strategic corridors, cartels hold “strongholds” where they exercise substantial control.²¹ Some regions of Mexico today are effectively under dual sovereignty: the official government administrates in name, but the cartel’s rule is the reality on the ground. For example, in parts of Michoacán or Guerrero, cartels impose curfews, collect taxes (extortion “fees”), regulate local economies (deciding who can harvest timber or minerals), and even run their own quasi-courts to settle community disputes.²² Such areas sometimes earn the label “zonas liberadas” (liberated zones) or “narcostate” enclaves.

One stark indicator of cartel power is their ability to directly confront the state militarily and force the state’s hand. A notorious incident occurred in Culiacán, Sinaloa in 2019: Mexican security forces captured Ovidio Guzmán (El Chapo’s son), but hundreds of Sinaloa Cartel gunmen besieged the city in response, taking soldiers hostage and terrorizing civilians.²³ The government ultimately released Ovidio to avoid further bloodshed—a public admission that the cartel’s coercive power trumped the state’s in that moment. This was a dramatic assertion of de facto sovereignty by the cartel: it could wage war and negotiate terms with the government as an equal (or superior) force—in Schmitt’s terms, the cartel decided the exception to the rule of law, and though indicted for federal crimes, the cartel effectively annulled that indictment.²⁴ Such events echo how warlords negotiate with a weak central government.

Latin America’s cartels embody the phenomenon of criminal insurgency—that is, criminal groups behaving like alternative governments. They establish control over territory and population, challenge the state’s monopoly on force, and seek legitimacy (through both fear and favour) from the governed. Like classic insurgents, some even have political or ideological facets,²⁵ the major difference being that their primary aim is profit—yet to secure profit, they find themselves having to govern. And as we have seen, govern they do—from adjudicating disputes to distributing aid. Ultimately, the rise of these narco-sovereignties stems from state neglect and public desperation: where the state is absent or illegitimate, the cartels can appear as providers and protectors, however violent. The result is a reconfiguration of sovereignty, with non-state actors sharing or usurping core functions of the state in parts of Latin America.

A Comparative Analysis

Across the cases examined—from the Mafias of Italy and Japan’s Yakuza to Russia’s Bratva and Latin American cartels—a common pattern emerges: organized crime flourishes as a form of alternative governance when official institutions fail to meet community needs. These groups, however different in culture and structure, converge on the role of parallel sovereigns. They accumulate the classic components of sovereignty: a monopoly on violence in their domains, the extraction of revenue, the promulgation of norms, and the provision of protection and services.

We can draw out several thematic connections between these organizations.