The Crime and State Terrorism Nexus: How Organized Crime Appropriates Counterinsurgency Violence

Studies on the connections between organized crime and terrorism tend to focus on non-state armed groups, and on the convergence of violent tactics. This article demonstrates that such a focus can overlook welldocumented connections between state terrorism and organized crime. Particularly in post-Cold War Latin America, criminal groups recruit violence specialists from military and paramilitary units with histories of using indiscriminate violence and other forms of terrorism during counterinsurgency campaigns. Through this recruitment process, tactics of state terrorism are appropriated into the repertoires of criminal groups. This article demonstrates this process with a case study of the Zetas in Mexico, which was the first group in the country to actively recruit soldiers with counterinsurgency training. By doing so, the group caused a paradigm shift in criminal operations in the country, leading to the widespread adoption of terrorist tactics. This case study highlights the need for scholars of terrorism and organized crime to bring state terrorism back in, and to more thoroughly examine the points of contact between state and non-state terrorism.