Smuggler Nation (57 page)

Similarly, compare Washington’s crackdown on the unauthorized entry of migrants to its muted response to the entry of black-market babies. Guatemalan infants, even if obtained through shady channels, have been far more welcomed than Guatemalan workers. From 1997 to 2006, the number of Guatemalan children adopted by Americans increased by some 400 percent, to more than 4,500 per year. Guatemala, long known to have the world’s worst corruption and fraud record in foreign adoptions, finally put a stop to U.S. adoptions in 2008 in an effort to curb child trafficking.

The baby smuggling problem extends well beyond Guatemala. In Cambodia, an American baby broker collected $9 million in adoption fees by arranging eight hundred adoptions of Cambodian children between 1997 and 2001. American investigators later charged that the broker was complicit in purchasing, defrauding, coercing, or stealing Cambodian children and was also complicit in fabricating child identity documents. Although buying, stealing, and trafficking children across borders—what one legal scholar has dubbed “child laundering”—is a global problem, the United States imports more infants than all other countries combined.
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The United States is also one of the world’s largest importers of smuggled antiquities, which is a relatively low priority on Washington’s anti-smuggling agenda. The United States has only implemented part of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property. And it was not until 2008 that the U.S. finally signed on to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event
of Armed Conflict. Not only was the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad part of the collateral damage from the 2003 U.S. military invasion of Iraq, but hundreds of stolen Iraqi artifacts turned up in the United States.
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Though old European imperial powers, such as England and France, acquired their vast antiquities collections through conquest and colonialism—proudly on display at the British Museum and the Louvre—American collectors in the postcolonial era have had to rely more on smuggling channels. And it is not just private collectors who have been implicated, but also leading museums such as the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For instance, Greek and Italian authorities charged Marion True, the curator of the Getty, with antiquities theft. In the aftermath of a smuggling scandal that implicated the Getty and other major U.S. museums, forty looted masterpieces were returned to Italy between 2007 and 2011.
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The United States profoundly influences not only which illicit trades are—and are not—at the top of the international anti-smuggling agenda, but also how they are policed. Washington’s approach to suppressing the trafficking of women, for example, has focused far more on criminalizing the traffic than protecting the human rights of those being trafficked. And as was the case with the “white slavery” moral panic of a century ago, the subplot of much of today’s American-led international antitrafficking campaign is an attempt to suppress prostitution more generally. The United States also continues to be the leading promoter of the supply-side-focused global drug prohibition regime, though there are signs that the international consensus is weakening.
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The State Department even hands out annual report cards grading countries on how well they’re doing in fighting human trafficking and the international drug trade.
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It is important to remind ourselves that the cross-border economic flows that the United States and other governments define as illicit in the first place has changed with shifting political winds and social norms. Through their law-making and law-enforcing authority, governments set the rules of the game even if they cannot entirely control the play and outcome. Changes in laws and the intensity with which those laws are enforced have profound effects on the incidence and profitability of smuggling. New laws turn once-legal trades into illegal
trades, resulting in a sudden and sometimes significant rise in smuggling. Indeed, a century ago much of what today preoccupies U.S. border inspectors—most notably drug trafficking, by far the largest and most profitable illicit global trade—was not even criminalized. And some of today’s illicit trades were criminalized only relatively recently. Illicit globalization is therefore not only about more expansive transnational crime but also more ambitious prohibitions.

Take, for instance, the multibillion-dollar illicit wildlife trade that has flourished in recent decades in the wake of national and international efforts to protect endangered species.
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Animal smuggling across America’s borders in earlier eras primarily meant cattle rustling and evading quarantines and tariffs; today it mostly means violating bans on the trade in endangered wildlife. This includes the poaching of tens of thousands of endangered Mexican parrots for the U.S. market (the majority of which die during capture or in transit), yet this remains a largely overlooked border smuggling problem, given all the attention on the smuggling of drugs and migrants.
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And as in the case of drugs and migrants, Mexico is both a major source country and also a key transit point for U.S.-bound illicit wildlife trafficking from all over the world.
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Wildlife trade bans are imperfect, unevenly enforced, and widely violated, yet some rare species would no doubt be extinct in their absence. At the same time, all the focus on stopping smuggling distracts from the larger threat to wildlife: habitat destruction and human encroachment.

The methods of animal smuggling today are both comical and tragic. In one incident not long ago, inspectors at Miami International Airport discovered, crammed into a single large suitcase arriving from Buenos Aires, five boa constrictors, seven rainbow boas, seven parrot snakes, two rattlesnakes, 107 Chaco tortoises, 103 red-footed tortoises, seventy-six tartaruga turtles, ninety tree frogs, twenty tarantulas, ten scorpions, twenty red tegu lizards, and a handful of other lizards.
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And this was just one suitcase belonging to a low-level smuggler from Argentina. Other animal smugglers have tried more creative schemes. At Los Angeles International Airport, a man tried to sneak in two pygmy monkeys stuffed down his pants. Somehow he had escaped notice by the flight attendants on the long trip from Asia. In another case, a man attempted to smuggle in reptiles from South Asia in his prosthetic
leg.
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Other smugglers have opted to illicitly ship via the mail service—postal workers in Los Angeles found three hundred live tarantulas in one package arriving from Germany. Investigators later claimed that the smuggler had made about $300,000 in the illicit tarantula trade.
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The flourishing illicit international wildlife trade is a particularly striking illustration of the relatively recent criminalization of a previously legal trade. But the opposite is also evident. We should recall that some of today’s licit trades were previously criminalized and considered a serious transnational crime threat. Most notably, alcohol-smuggling networks that linked the United States to international suppliers created an enormous policing challenge during the Prohibition era, and it was then eliminated with the stroke of a pen with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933. Corruption related to illicit trade has never been as serious a problem in America as it was during the Prohibition years, when it seemed as if entire police forces were bought off. At the height of Prohibition, the U.S.-Canada border was a bootlegging superhighway rivaling the smuggling role of the U.S.-Mexico border today. Similarly, much of what the United States classified as “obscene” material and considered a major smuggling problem during the purity crusades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—ranging from sexual images to racy novels to condoms—is now legal, thanks to court rulings rolling back the Comstock-era laws.

If these historical episodes are any guide, it is worth contemplating that illicit trade today may be licit trade tomorrow. Take the case of marijuana, by far the most popular illicit drug in America. Enforcing marijuana prohibition takes up much of the time and energy of U.S. border agents; the vast majority of border drug busts involve relatively small marijuana seizures. Marijuana law violations are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of U.S. arrests every year, more than for all other illicit drugs combined. According to an October 2011 Gallup poll, a record 50 percent of Americans favor legalizing pot, which is up from 12 percent in 1969, when the first Gallup poll on the subject was conducted. A 2010 Gallup survey found that 70 percent of Americans favored making it possible for doctors to prescribe marijuana for pain and suffering. The proliferation of “medical marijuana” in some states reflects this softening public attitude; there are reportedly more marijuana dispensaries in California than Starbucks coffee shops.
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Even the
television evangelist Pat Robertson has called for legalizing marijuana.
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If hard economic times and shrinking budgets persist, state leaders may become increasingly tempted by the prospect of new revenue generated by taxing marijuana. It is worth recalling that the Great Depression dealt the final deathblow to alcohol prohibition, when politicians suddenly became more eager to tax booze than to police it.

And just as illicit trade today may be licit trade tomorrow, the American historical experience reminds us that the opposite is also conceivable: licit trade may become illicit. Just as few people during the eighteenth century could have imagined a global prohibition on the slave trade, so too is it difficult to imagine an entirely legitimate trade today being banned. Consider the case of tobacco. Full prohibition seems like a remote possibility in the immediate future. Yet tobacco use in America is increasingly stigmatized and causes far more deaths every year than all illegal drugs combined. Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable deaths in dozens of countries. Regardless of the legal fate of tobacco, it is important to recall that many of the illicit trades that preoccupy U.S. law enforcers today were legal a century ago—and therefore looking ahead, it is not difficult to imagine that some trades that will be prohibited a century from now are legal today.

The Technology Factor

A dominant theme in standard narratives of illicit globalization is the crime-enabling role of new technologies, such as the Internet.
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This is certainly important. But it is also simply the latest—and not necessarily the most significant—chapter in an old story. Law enforcement officials in the United States and elsewhere have long bemoaned the crime-facilitating effects of new technologies, and they have repeatedly used this as a justification to expand their policing powers and reach.
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It is far from evident that recent technological innovations have had a more transformative impact upon illicit commerce than in earlier eras, and indeed the impact may be considerably less. Consider the profound effect of the steamship, the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane in enhancing cross-border mobility and communication, both licit and illicit.
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These technologies proliferated long before globalization even became a buzzword.
And it is important to realize that rarely do new technologies actually create new crimes. Rather, they simply provide a new means to commit old crimes—such as theft and vandalism, in the case of the Internet.

Technology is also double-edged, not just challenging but also aiding governments. It is certainly not a one-way street in which law evaders always have the edge and an ever-increasing technological advantage. Consider how the development of photography and fingerprinting revolutionized criminal investigations and long-distance police cooperation.
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Photography and other technological innovations have long played a key role in the development of government-issued travel documents, including the introduction of the modern passport (which was not required to enter the United States until World War I).
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The invention of the telephone enabled faster and more efficient communication between smugglers, but as we saw during the Prohibition years, this also created the opening to justify a controversial new law enforcement weapon: wiretapping. And the growing use of the automobile for bootlegging provided the legal rationale to give American police the power to stop and search vehicles without a warrant. In more recent years, computers have certainly aided licit and illicit business alike, but this has created an opportunity and rationale for more invasive law enforcement: American border inspectors are now allowed to search not only luggage but also laptops and other electronic storage devices, raising yet another concern about the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections (protections created by the country’s founders with fresh memories of the hated searches carried out by British customs agents).
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Similarly, the proliferation of GPS tracking devices facilitates both legal and illegal trade, but they also provide a new method of surveillance; their use to monitor and track suspect vehicles without a warrant is the latest test for the courts of the prohibition against unreasonable searches.
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The role of new technologies in enabling law enforcement is, if anything, growing, with the United States at the forefront of this trend. Even as new technologies facilitate illicit border crossings, these advances also greatly increase government tracking and surveillance capabilities. New communication and transportation technologies have also dramatically lowered the costs and increased the intensity of transgovernmental law
enforcement networks, allowing American authorities to interact with their foreign counterparts more rapidly and frequently. In short, we greatly understate the degree to which the same technological transformations that have facilitated the globalization of crime also facilitate the globalization of crime control.