Linked Stories: Circuits and Flow of Operations of Organized Crime in Contemporary Brazil.

This proposal is based on partial results from a research in progress whose object is the chain and the flow of operations that move illicit drug trafficking from the production operations in the Andean countries to the distribution operations to the Brazilian consumer market. It aims to identify its main stages, the scope of its expansion, the local and scale social processes that they trigger, their social consequences (the institutional dislocations that these processes provoke) and their political consequences (the conflicts they establish and the corresponding power relations). The main focus, therefore, is the emerging crime economy with drug trafficking. The empirical sources of information include reports from government organizations (national, regional and local) as well as from international and nongovernmental organizations and national press reports. The analysis plan foresees to reconstruct the chain of operations in a temporal perspective (synchronic and diachronic). In empirical terms, the paper will focus on trafficking routes in Latin America towards Brazil and its local effects, such as the flourishing or decay of cities, impacts on public security policies, evolution of crime rates, especially homicides, drug and armaments seizures.