This is the structure i would like it to follow
🔹 2.1. Conceptualizing Drug Trafficking as a Transnational Crime
Purpose: Introduce drug trafficking as a form of transnational organized crime (TOC).
- Define TOC and discuss its characteristics: cross-border operations, high-level organization, violence, and corruption.
- Overview of global drug trade dynamics, emphasizing cocaine as the primary commodity in South America.
- Brazil as a transit and consumer country; Colombia as a production hub.
- Discuss scholarly definitions and typologies of trafficking networks (hierarchical cartels vs decentralized gangs).
📖 Key authors:
- M. Naylor (on TOC typologies)
- UNODC reports on cocaine trafficking routes
- Bruce Bagley (extensively on Latin American drug trade)
🔹 2.2. Organized Crime and the Amazon Region
Purpose: Contextualize organized crime within the geography of the Amazon.
- Overview of the Amazon’s geopolitical and logistical significance: porous borders, vast river networks, weak state presence.
- The Amazon as a natural corridor for smuggling drugs by river and air, connecting Peru/Colombia/Bolivia to Brazil and onward to Europe and Africa.
- Presence and territorial expansion of criminal organizations such as PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital), Comando Vermelho, and Colombia’s Clan del Golfo.
📖 Key sources:
- Insight Crime reports on trafficking routes
- Studies on criminal governance in the Amazon
- Brazilian academic articles (e.g., via SciELO) detailing PCC’s reach in the Amazon states
🔹 2.3. Environmental Crime in the Amazon
Purpose: Define and explore environmental crime as a growing form of organized criminal activity.
- Define environmental crime: illegal deforestation, logging, mining, wildlife trafficking.
- The synergies between environmental crime and drug trafficking: shared logistics, money laundering routes, and territorial control.
- Criminal groups often use profits from drug trafficking to fund and expand into gold mining, timber extraction, and land grabbing.
📖 Key authors/sources:
- Rob White (Green Criminology)
- Reports from WWF, EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency), and Amazon Watch
- Case studies on illegal gold mining in Brazil and Colombia connected to organized crime
🔹 2.4. Indigenous Communities and the Social Impact of Crime
Purpose: Explore the socio-environmental consequences of trafficking and environmental degradation on Amazonian populations.
- Indigenous groups as victims and resistors of drug/environmental crime.
- Consequences: land invasion, violence, health degradation, forced displacement, and cultural erosion.
- Some communities are coerced or economically incentivized into participation (e.g., cultivation, transport, or laundering).
- Theoretical lens: environmental justice and post-colonial marginalization.
📖 Key sources:
- Human Rights Watch reports on Amazon violence
- Latin American ethnographic studies
- Research on indigenous resistance and self-defense groups (Colombia/Brazil)
🔹 2.5. State Response and Law Enforcement Challenges
Purpose: Assess how Brazil and Colombia have addressed this dual problem through law enforcement and policy.
- Overview of Plan Colombia and Brazilian military-led operations like Operação Ágata and Operação Verde Brasil.
- Critiques of militarized approaches, including human rights abuses and inefficiency.
- Discussion of state corruption and complicity, especially in Amazon border zones.
- Limited capacity of local law enforcement in vast forested regions; low state presence in many territories.
📖 Key sources:
- Transparency International and academic work on narco-corruption
- UNODC policy papers
- Brazilian and Colombian governmental reports
- Criminology literature on the “securitization” of drug policy
🔹 2.6. Theoretical Frameworks
Purpose: Establish the theoretical grounding of your dissertation.
1. Green Criminology
- Explores the intersection of crime, environment, and justice.
- Challenges traditional definitions of crime to include harm to ecosystems and future generations.
- Useful in framing environmental damage from trafficking as a criminal harm, even when laws are poorly enforced.
2. Routine Activity Theory / Opportunity Theory (from criminology)
- Used to explain how weak environmental regulation, poor border security, and low law enforcement capacity create opportunities for organized crime in the Amazon.
3. State-Corporate Crime Theory
- Can help examine collusion between government actors and illegal industries, including both drug trafficking and resource extraction.
📖 Key theorists:
- Rob White (Green Criminology)
- Ronald Clarke and Marcus Felson (Routine Activity Theory)
- Kramer and Michalowski (State-Corporate Crime)
🔹 2.7. Gaps in the Literature
Purpose: Show the novelty and need for your study.
- While there is substantial research on drug trafficking or environmental crime, fewer studies examine their overlap in a sustained, case study-based way.
- Lack of comparative analysis between Brazil and Colombia specifically regarding the dual impact of drug trafficking and environmental harm in the Amazon.
- This study contributes by bridging the gap through a comparative, interdisciplinary, and case study-focusedanalysis based solely on secondary sources. For referencing, only ACADEMIC articles can be used, for example, books, journal articles, documents and dissertations. The only websites that can be used are United Nations, Europol, WorldHealth Organisation, Colombia and Brazil’s government websites. Only official institution websites can be used. Do not use magazine or news outlets. I have attached below the Harvard Referencing guide that my university uses.