Plan Colombia

Holly Berman has an article at The Revealer today about John Dear's book Put Down Your Sword. It's got one of those paragraphs in it where its list elements and conjunctions are tangled enough to make reading it a chore. She leans in for the chop too many times, etc.

Here's what she says: they often get books for review that nobody reads because they already agree with whatever they say and think it would be a waste of time to read them. In spite of the presence of a blurb by (say) Desmond Tutu. And I might be projecting unfairly here, but I suspect that Desmond Tutu didn't read the book in question either.

I hate blurbs. I suspect they're read much more carefully than their written, and they're rarely written by the person whose name accompanies them.

But beyond all that, there's subject of the soundbite Berman quotes from Dear: "the future of Iraq is Colombia." Berman goes on to say that Plan Columbia is being suggested as the pattern for drug interdiction in Mexico. She doesn't really close the loop (shouldn't she be talking about "Plan Iraq?") but goes on to talk about Plan Colombia. As far as I can tell, she's just pushing a book, fanning some flames, and then plugging another book.

I had never heard of Plan Colombia before I read McMafia. I've never been to Colombia, but I was disturbed to read about how in the name of drug interdiction the United States was spending money on both sides of what Glenny described as a turf war between different organized crime organizations. It sounded just hellish.

And then there's this: "In Colombia, The Catholic Church is fighting on both sides." I've heard this before, too. In fact I think Glenny touches on it: different organized crime organizations are patrons of different parts of the Catholic Church, etc. What a mess.

McMafia: whence the yakuza?

I needed three weeks or so to finish Misha Glenny's book McMafia, partly because I got really busy and partly because it didn't make the trip to Seoul. I'm an Accidental Tourist kind of traveler; I prefer to take just a carry-on (a cheap shapeless twenty-four-inch duffle bag from Target) and a laptop bag, so very little goes with me, and I tend to abandon anything I finish reading while on the road. I paid for McMafia in GBP, so it was really expensive, and I wasn't about to dump it.

Anyway, McMafia is just packed; it goes places I've never been, and it's not just a chronicle of mindless violence: Glenny occasionally tries to identify proximate causes for particular crime waves; because he's mostly a tourist himself, these analyses typically come from other published sources.

His explanation of the origins of the yakuza is fascinating: in the postwar period the Japanese government restricted the number of lawyers; I don't recall how they did this, but the result was that the concentration of lawyers in the general population was roughly one-third that of the United States or the European Union. Nearly all of them went to work in Tokyo for large corporations (according to this New York Times article, half the lawyers are in Tokyo, leaving one per thirty thousand in the rest of Japan), leaving a shortage of qualified workers to handle legal tasks across Japan. Some of these tasks fell to notary publics and accountants, but others, such as debt collection, fell to other people.

And that's where the yakuza came in; they served as collection agencies in a culture where saving face (one's own and one's debtors') necessarily required an intermediary.

In a part of the book where Glenny deals with Russia and Eastern Europe he suggests that organized crime often fills a gap in an economy during large-scale changes; in Russia's case, between the planned economy of the Soviet Union and the market economy of the future. I'd be willing to bet that the average perpetrator doesn't see himself that way.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gangsters Without Borders
• Review: McMafia by Misha Glenny
• recent and upcoming (hmmm)
  
• Telegraph reviews book about global spread of organized crime
• Russian organised crime is now a global brand
• Cash crop
• Review: McMedia by Misha Glenny and Boss of Bosses by Claire Longrigg