Fighting Cross Border Cartels

This book is the first detailed treatment of the approaches taken to enforce competition laws against cross-border cartels (CBCs) from the perspective of young and small competition authorities (more than 70% of the total number of authorities worldwide). No other legal or inter-disciplinary scholarship exists in the market that deals with the issue of a taxonomy of CBCs combined with young/small competition authorities' problems. The book looks at the extent of the harms caused by CBCs and issues associated with tackling them at a transnational level. It explains why past solutions to problems with cooperation have failed and proposes novel ideas on how to improve cooperation and coordination in certain types of CBC investigations (transnational and regional CBCs). The proposals are based on primary-source information and observations made by the author as part of his work in the UN, and interviews with leading enforcers from young, small, old and large jurisdictions. Young/small competition authorities, competition lawyers and economists, scholars and students within the fields of competition law and international law, and those interested in international cooperation and coordination in the area of cartel enforcement in emerging markets will greatly benefit from this book. It is clearly structured and extensively referenced, providing a valuable guide to the topic.

Having followed Mexico's cartels for years, border security expert Sylvia Longmire takes us deep into the heart of their world to witness a dangerous underground that will do whatever it takes to deliver drugs to a willing audience of American consumers. The cartels have grown increasingly bold in recent years, building submarines to move up the coast of Central America and digging elaborate tunnels that both move drugs north and carry cash and U.S. high-powered assault weapons back to fuel the drug war. Channeling her long experience working on border issues, Longmire brings to life the very real threat of Mexican cartels operating not just along the southwest border, but deep inside every corner of the United States. She also offers real solutions to the critical problems facing Mexico and the United States, including programs to deter youth in Mexico from joining the cartels and changing drug laws on both sides of the border.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

“An eye-opening and riveting account of how guns make it into the black market and into the hands of criminals and drug lords.”--Adam Winkler From the author of El Narco and winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, a searing investigation into the enormous black market for firearms, essential to cartels and gangs in the drug trade and contributing to the epidemic of mass shootings. The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico's powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren't often connected in our heated discussions of gun control-but they should be. In Ioan Grillo's groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth. Grillo travels to gun manufacturers, strolls the aisles of gun shows and gun shops, talks to federal agents who have infiltrated biker gangs, hangs out on Baltimore street corners, and visits the ATF gun tracing center in West Virginia. Along the way, he details the many ways that legal guns can cross over into the black market and into the hands of criminals, fueling violence here and south of the border. Simple legislative measures would help close these loopholes, but America's powerful gun lobby is uncompromising in its defense of the hallowed Second Amendment. Perhaps, however, if guns were seen not as symbols of freedom, but as key accessories in our epidemics of addiction, the conversation would shift. Blood Gun Money is that conversation shifter.

Drawing together a variety of perspectives, this accessible yet comprehensive Research Handbook provides an in-depth analysis of the most significant issues pertaining to the legal regulation of cartels. An interdisciplinary team of respected experts explores the theoretical, legal, economic, political, and comparative discourse surrounding cartel regulation.

This book examines the legislative patchwork surrounding access to the European Commission's cartel case files. Recent legislative changes have increased the value of the files and have also highlighted the inherent tension between a number of competing interests affecting their accessibility. The Commission is undoubtedly caught between a rock and a hard place, charged with the task to ensure due process, transparency and effectiveness while at the same time promoting both public and private enforcement of the EU competition rules. The author considers how best to ensure a proper balance between the legitimate, but often diverging interests of parties, third parties and national competition authorities in these cases. The book provides a unique and comprehensive presentation of the EU legislation and case law surrounding access to the Commission's cartel case files. The author examines the question of accessibility from three different perspectives: that of the parties under investigation, cartel victims, and national competition authorities. The author also considers the EU leniency system and whether any legislative changes could make the attractiveness of the system less dependent on the possibilities of cartel victims to access the evidence contained in the Commission's case files.

This book sheds new light on the potential application of EU law to situations arising outside EU territory, and its consequences. In today’s globalized world, EU law and the ECJ’s decisions have been calling for exceptions and defining new connecting elements that make the traditional approach of EU law, based on the territoriality principle, less straightforward. This is the case with e.g. the effects doctrine in the context of EU competition law, as was fully recognized after the ECJ’s Intel case. Moreover, recently approved rules concerning the EU’s internal market, EU environmental law and EU data protection law have made it more difficult to define the application of EU law in terms of a pure link to the territoriality principle. The book examines these and other problems from the perspectives of various branches of EU economic law. With regard to EU competition law it presents, among others, studies on the evolution of the effects doctrine in the US and the EU; extraterritoriality of competition law; global cartels; merger control; state aid and cooperation between NCAs. Furthermore, it includes several studies concerning extraterritorial issues in trade relations between the EU and China; EU screening regulation of foreign direct investments; EU trade agreements; EU investment law and EU financial services. The twenty-one contributing authors are internationally respected experts on EU law.

This book addresses the impact of EU law beyond its own borders, the use of law as a powerful instrument of EU external action, and some of the normative challenges this poses. The phenomenon of EU law operating beyond its borders, which may be termed its 'global reach', includes the extraterritorial application of EU law, territorial extension, and the so-called 'Brussels Effect' resulting from unilateral legislative and regulatory action, but also includes the impact of the EU's bilateral relationships, and its engagement with multilateral fora and the negotiation of international legal instruments. The book maps this phenomenon across a range of policy fields, including the environment, the internet and data protection, banking and financial markets, competition policy, and migration. It argues that in looking beyond the undoubtedly important instrumental function of law we can start to identify the ways in which law shapes the EU's external identity and its relations with other legal regimes, both enabling and constraining the EU's external action.

"Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary."

The riveting and suspenseful account of two young FBI agents in a pursuit of a drug cartel's most fearsome leader, Miguel Treviño Drugs, money, cartels: this is what FBI rookie Scott Lawson expected when he was sent to the border town of Laredo, but instead he’s deskbound writing intelligence reports about the drug war. Then, one day, Lawson is asked to check out an anonymous tip: a horse was sold at an Oklahoma auction house for a record-topping price, and the buyer was Miguel Treviño, one of the leaders of the Zetas, Mexico's most brutal drug cartel. The source suggested that Treviño was laundering money through American quarter horse racing. If this was true, it offered a rookie like Lawson the perfect opportunity to infiltrate the cartel. Lawson teams up with a more experienced agent, Alma Perez, and, taking on impossible odds, sets out to take down one of the world’s most fearsome drug lords. In Bloodlines, Emmy and National Magazine Award-winning journalist Melissa del Bosque follows Lawson and Perez's harrowing attempt to dismantle a cartel leader’s American racing dynasty built on extortion and blood money. With extensive access to investigative evidence and in-depth interviews with key players, del Bosque turns more than three years of research and her decades of reporting on Mexico and the border into a gripping narrative about greed and corruption. Bloodlines offers us an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Zetas and US federal agencies, and opens a new vista onto the changing nature of the drug war and its global expansion.