The Price of Protection: Exploring How Transnational Drug Traffickers Influence Politics

Continually confronted with myriad threats, transnational drug-trafficking organizations (TDTOs) employ different strategies to mitigate risk. In this article, we focus on the political consequences of these risk-mitigation strategies, and offer a theoretical framework through which to understand them. We start from the premise that TDTOs are not inherently political actors. Nonetheless, as illegal enterprises with access to considerable financial resources, TDTOs are (if often inadvertently) capable of shaping politics in important ways if and when they invest in protection, provided by both state and nonstate actors. When these trafficking groups invest in protection, they are capable, firstly, of determining who is able to access political power and, secondly, of affecting how political power is exercised, reshaping the institutions used to govern society—though above all at the subnational level. We provide illustrative evidence for our framework from the Colombian city of Medellín.