Can Leveraging a Criminal-Threat Convergence Framework Transform the Fight Against Illicit Economies in the Americas? Yes—The ICAIE Protocol.
In recent days, I have had the opportunity to share my views with a number of news media and policy communities on the current security situation in Venezuela and related diplomatic considerations including President Trump’s new National Security Strategy of the United States of America (November 2025), and how the United States aims to enforce the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas.
Leveraging a Criminal-Threat Convergence Framework (The ICAIE Protocol) to augment President Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine”? Consistent with his administration’s new national security strategy (2025 NSS), President Trump has asserted that the United States wants a Western Hemisphere that “remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.”
“Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” (National Security Strategy of the United States of America November 2025)
[The ICAIE Protocol (≜ Kine-Dynamics) can be found towards the Conclusion of this Article]
Venezuela: Test Case to advancing a Criminal-Threat Convergence Framework in the Americas
In the early hours of January 3, 2026, U.S. forces under Operation Absolute Resolve captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at their home in Fort Tiuna, Caracas. Shortly thereafer, President Trump said the United States would over a managed transition in the country.
On 3 January 2026, in a U.S. Department of Justice superceding Indictment (unsealed) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleged that Maduro oversaw a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, had “leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking. That drug trafficking has enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite.”
Sections 1-4 of the superceding indictment outline a pattern of alleged crimes by Maduro and the other five defendants, including that Venezuela was a safe haven and hub of illicit trade for drug traffickers, facilitating, fostering and benefiting from drug-related systemic corruption, and partnering with narco-terrorist groups across Latin America on an array of other criminal activities including the illicit oil trade, trafficking of illegal gold, and the laundering of proceeds of crime.
The Ripple Effects of Maduro’s Power Decapitation
I do note upfront that I continue to have concerns regarding the interim government led by Maduro’s top minsters including his former Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, and other corrupt officials. Essentially, it is the same criminal Chávez-Maduro regime running the country, a fact which the Justice Department’s January 2026 superseding indictment (unsealed) against ousted Venezuelan President Maduro also highlighted.
I believe that Maduro’s ouster alone is not a perfect national security solution since the decapitation of a criminal network often leads to more criminality as power vacuums emerge, and often leads to more violence, fragmentation, and as new criminal networks compete for control and power.
I remain concerned about the potential for an array of destabilizing vectors among fragmented centers of powers including between the current Chávez-Maduro regime, criminal and terrorist groups operating in the country and other external illicit networks, malign-state influencers such as China, Cuba, and Russia.
This is why I also think that there is an urgent need for a credible timetable for free, fair, and democratic elections in Venezuela.
Among other important points that I have underscored in recent days pertaining to the current security situation in Venezuela and its crude oil reserves:
• Noted the importance of the U.S. Department of State assessing how best to reopen its mission in Caracas to ensure the United States has “eyes and ears” on the ground in the country to properly advise the President, US Congress, and allies in the region. The acting US ambassador to Colombia and diplomatic team traveled to the Venezuelan capital this morning “to conduct an initial assessment for a potential phased resumption of operations.”
• Regarding illicit oil in Venezuela, emphasized that while the United States has selectively eased some oil sanctions on Venezuela to allow for the sale and transport of its crude to global markets, the U.S. is still enforcing and seizing oil maritime tankers to control exports especially the dark fleet of tankers that are transporting sanctioned and illicit oil.
• Also regarding Venezuela’s oil wealth, it is true that much of the revenue in the past 25 years went to the corrupt Chávez-Maduro regime, and in some cases to provide financial support to Cuba. I also said that it has widely been reported that Venezuela has about 25 percent of the world’s proven crude oil reserves, 330 billion barrels; more than any other country; 4x more than Russia; 7x more than US; 10x more than China. A good amount of natural wealth exists and should be used to fund greater economic development and prosperity to help all Venezuelans. However, Venezuela’s vast oil reserves will require a significant multi-year effort and billions of dollars of investment to extract and refine very heavy crude oil in very dangerous and difficult terrain in which violent armed guerillas, criminals, and terrorist groups operate as well in Venezuela.
Insecurity Across the Americas and Non-Hemispheric Actors’ Inroads
The ICAIE Protocol: As we discuss below, ICAIE provides strategic thought leadership on criminal-threat convergence frameworks to counter illicit economies and threat networks around the world.
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy correctly points out, that for too long, the Western Hemisphere was not viewed as a high priority by the US Government and that enabled Non-Hemispheric players such as China – and other illicit networks – to make alarming inroads in the region through criminality, bribery and targeted geopolitical influence including by funding large infrastructure projects with predatory BRI loans. Resources also flowed to install forward-deployed intelligence and military platforms for Maduro’s Communist friends in Venezuela (and in other LATAM countries).
While I continue to have reservations on many parts of the new National Security Strategy, I do think that its renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere is welcome and will assist with dismantling illicit economies across the Americas especially in helping to counter drug cartels, transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and malign infuencers and the Anti-American disinformation campaigns by Russia and Iran, for example.
The January 2026 superceding indictment also outlines a narco-terrorism conspiracy against Maduro and his co-conspirators stemming from accusations that his criminal regime partnered with some of the more violent and dangerous drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world including Colombian armed guerrilla groups such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), Mexican cartels Sinaloa and Los Zetas and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdeA) that threatened security in the United States, across the Americas, and beyond, through the trafficking of cocaine, illegal gold, and extortion. The U.S. State Department has designated the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas and Tren de Aragua as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Criminal-Threat Convergence in the Americas (The ICAIE Protocol)
The geopolitical realities in the Americas is that we have been witnessing a global asymmetrical warfare in which narco-terrorists and threat networks are employing violence and intimidation of communities to achieve political aims and financing insecurity.
In the past year, I have expounded on the growing harms posed by the drug cartels, TCOs, and threat networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. These range from threats to the United States, Canada, and Mexico on the illegal fentanyl trade front, to South America’s cocaine illicit trafficking routes, to gangs in the Caribbean fomenting violence and chaos, and threat networks such as China, Iran, and Russia fomenting active measures and chaos across the Americas.
The cartels and some TCOs in Latin America have greater power and political influence through market diversification, networked-alliances, and coercive aggression in the region, and globally.
State power is in fact also being exercised in the shadows ruthlessly, and efficiently, across today’s crime-threat convergence realities. For example, in the Western Hemisphere, adversaries such as China have been “eating our lunch” for decades through their strategic corruption, illicit pathways, and leveraged ecosystems of criminality to weaken American strengths.
The Destabilizing Effects of Designated Narco-Terrorists and Threat Networks
Despite representing just 8% of the world’s population, the Western Hemisphere accounts for nearly one-third of global homicides, and is at the epi-center of lucrative cocaine and illegal fentanyl trade.
In the Americas, transnational criminal structures have undergone a profound, transformative reordering and restructuring.
The proliferation of criminal networks and the convergence of their illegal activities threaten our collective security.
Criminal networks in Latin America, including the Mexican cartels, Tren de Aragua, Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), and other transnational criminal organizations have also expanded and diversified.
Many cartels and TCOs already sanctioned continue to be well-resourced and outfight security forces with an arsenal of military-grade equipment and weapons in their countries including drones, armored tanks, Javelin and Stinger missiles, submersibles, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), advanced technologies, and encryption.
They also are able to finance their impunity through bribery, corrupting public officials at all levels of government, corroding rule of law institutions, and creating a climate based on fear (“plata o plomo”).
In Mexico, innocent civilians, police officers, soldiers, elected officials including Mayors and their Municipal staff, judges, investigative journalists, and even children attending Church mass or festivals are indiscriminately murdered and maimed regularly.
No one is safe in this climate of fear.
Extreme violence and strategic corruption put politicians at the mercy of the cartels across the region, and thus allowing the cartels to take control of the fundamental government structures and expand their criminal agendas.
In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, the cartels and other TCOs are not only spreading deadly violence, but are systemically diversifying their illicit portfolios in agriculture, mining, hospitality, tobacco and alcohol, and other industries.
They continue to co-opt governments at the federal, state, and local levels.
Through their corruptive influence, they now control strategic and critical infrastructure such as major ports, Free Trade Zones (FTZs), critical industries, and have penetrated market institutions.
More alarming, their criminal illicit webs and reach are now global, expanding to other regions of the world particularly Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific.
Criminal Fragmentation and Diversification
Multi-billion-dollar illicit economies across the region that have long been centered on the cocaine and narcotics trade, are expanding as criminals and other illicit networks diversify.
Illicit market competition among different criminal actors this driving the growing regional instability.
It is now an often-violent race for control of strategic infrastructure, trafficking and smuggling routes, critical spaces where the state is absent or co-opted as a partner.
As stressed earlier, these criminal groups consolidate their control through fear and brutality to accumulate greater power and wealth.
For example, the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) has expanded and diversified its economic profile across the Americas now includes a growing dominance in the illicit trafficking of fake medicines and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, a multi-billion illicit industry which endangers the public health and safety of citizens across the Western Hemisphere.
In Mexico alone, some reports have found that 60 percent of commercially sold pharmaceuticals are falsified, counterfeited, expired, or stolen. Some pills are even laced with deadly fentanyl and highly addictive meth.
The counterfeit medicines are sold online, in the informal economy, and in professional brick-and-mortar pharmacies, where CJNG liaisons coerce pharmacists and storekeepers to sell and store them alongside real medicine.
Confiscated fake medicines have included treatments for HIV, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, and obesity.
The CJNG and other cartels are seeking dominance in Central America and stretching their illicit empires into South America with newer alliances, where they can control more illicit markets, ports, and governance structures through bribery and intimidation.
From a trans-regional perspective, the fragmenting and realigning of organized crime operations across borders has also seen the rise of Eastern European, Chinese, Turkish, Italian and Balkan syndicates vying for market share in Latin America, and; reciprocally, increased illicit business by the cartels, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), and other Latin criminal networks in lucrative markets in Europe and overseas.
Costa Rica represents a newer prime expansion area for these criminals, due to its large international ports, lightly monitored coastline, lack of strong law enforcement entities, easy access to the dollarized international financial system, and geographic proximity to the deeply criminalized Ortega regime in Nicaragua, creating a nexus among different global illicit markets including illegal gold trade.
Expansions by CJNG and other TCOs in the Americas is putting these groups in contact with Chinese triads and Eurasian criminals, especially in the ports and money laundering havens. Italian organized crime, in particular groups with ties to the ‘Ndran-gheta, are also expanding their presence in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay to open new drug trafficking routes to Europe.
In many cases, one-time ideological opponents are no longer enemies, but potential partners who can provide or purchase specific criminal services and financial rewards.
Take for example MS-13, which now operates in Mexico, concentrated in Tijuana and other key border areas.
The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), based in São Paulo, has expanded is operation to Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Africa and Europe.
The Tren de Aragua has operations in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Central America.
These groups are building alliances that could allow them to expand their operations in unprecedented ways in the global drug trade, illicit economies, and armed conflicts and insecurity in the hemisphere, and in other parts of the world.
These newer hybrids are rapidly amassing formal political power and seeking new alliances with each other and with other state and non-state armed actors to achieve their goals of becoming major political forces embedded in the state.
Ecuador, once among the most peaceful countries in Latin America, faces an existential threat from an array of criminal groups.
In 2023, leading presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was brazenly assassinated by Ecuadorian gang Los Lobos, believed to be aligned with Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation cartel. This created chaos in political circles and power struggles among criminal gangs, which in 2024 set off coordinated riots in prisons and an even greater wave of violence across the country.
A rival gang, the Choneros, backed by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, called for peace in a statement apparently issued from Mexico City. But the reality is that both gangs, with roots in the prison system, continue fighting for criminal supremacy. Aligned with other transnational organizations, these gangs are creating more violence, waves of murders, and turf wars over territory for drug trafficking and predatory crimes such racketeering, kidnapping, extortion, and money laundering, making the nation the most violent in the hemisphere.
But the collapse of Ecuador’s rule of law is another manifestation of the impunity, diversification, expansion, and joint ventures among today’s leading TCOs.
In addition to the increasing presence of the Chinese triads, Ecuador also has to deal with external threats posed by the Albanian, Italian, and other Eurasian mafias in trans-Atlantic cocaine-smuggling routes to European demand markets.
In the past decade or so, Chile — a regional hub for international commerce, trade, and finance — has severely been impacted by criminal market penetration. This includes the growth of non-Chilean criminal groups such as the Tren de Aragua in Chile, increasing Chinese triads and money laundering networks, the expansion of local criminal gangs and rising violence from territorial disputes among multiple national and international criminal structures fighting over the growing number of lucrative illicit markets.
Today, Chile is now flooded with an array of illicit goods and contraband, either manufactured illegally within the country, or smuggled through its efficient by poorly secured ports, or across borders from surrounding hubs of illicit trade in the Southern Cone of South America (“Southern Cone”). Because Chile is also a country with a high standard of living but with rapidly growing migration communities –particularly Venezuelans – Chile also offers multiple comparative and competitive advantages to transnational criminal organizations including those embedded in the diaspora settlements, which have pushed Chile to a tipping security point.
Panama continues to serve as a central logistics hub for multi-continental criminal organizations. Its role came into further focus in November 2022, when a multi-jurisdictional task force arrested 49 people in Dubai, Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all with alleged ties to a transnational-networked ‘Super Cartel’.
Defendants were allegedly coordinating a massive drug trafficking operation out of Panama with support from leading cartels in Ireland, Italy, Dubai, Bosnia, the Netherlands, and Morocco.
Panama’s Atlantic port and free trade zone (FTZ) of Colón is also a logistical hub notorious for illicit trade, corruption, drugs, illicit tobacco products, gangs, violence, and money laundering, as are other ports and FTZs in the Americas such as the mega-port of Peru’s Chancay, Brazil’s Santos or TBA and the port of Vancouver.
Of equal concern in Panama, China had leveraged bribery of government officials in the recent past to win concession rights to control the port of Colón and other critical infrastructure along the Panama Canal for commercial and military purposes.
President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have rightly put Panama on notice of the concerns by the US over the corrosive capital from, and malign influence of, China that helps to expand its global trade logistics and illicit economies.
Why is Panama so important to US national security? Because it is a global trade hub through which 40 percent of all US maritime container shipping passes, valued at almost $300 billion. It is also a strategic military navigable waterway and chokepoint.
Through American diplomatic pressure with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, Panama has agreed to exit China’s Belt and Road Initiative and is providing greater oversight in two of the Chinese-controlled canal-side ports.
The security environment in the Caribbean is also worsening, with record levels of criminality and violence, especially as gangs become more fragmented, and as they fight over turf, lucrative illicit markets, power and political influence.
In fact, the Caribbean today is flooded not only with drugs and illicit goods but with too many guns and too much dirty money, with too many innocent bystanders caught in the middle of drug trafficking, cross-border illegal trade, and gunslinging criminals.
In recent years, following U.S. law enforcement crackdowns in Mexico and Central America, and during/after the COVID 19 pandemic, illicit drugs spiked again in the Caribbean (and Canada). Now according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at least 25 percent or more are flowing through the Caribbean Sea through shipping containers, speed boats, and planes.
After a period of such robust law enforcement actions, criminal gangs in Jamaica, for example, have continued to fight one another over power, territory, and drug routes, extortion, money laundering, and have formed alliances with other regional and international cartels and TCOs, resulting in increased levels of organized crime.
Trinidad and Tobago, due to its strategic location in the Caribbean (11km from Venezuela), is exploited as major transit hub for cocaine and contraband, and has experienced one of the highest rates of gang homicides in the region.
In the Dominican Republic, Latin drug cartels have leveraged the country’s infrastructure to coordinate cocaine shipments to Europe and the United States.
Haiti has been captured by criminal gangs and today is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
Non-Hemispheric Illicit Pathways and Active Measures in the Americas
As mentioned above, just like the cartels in Mexico wield great influence over the largest seaports in Mexico including Lázaro Cárdenas, Manzanillo, and Veracruz, from where they can launch their smuggling operations on an array of counterfeits and other contraband, China now owns or controls over 40 of the biggest ports in Latin America. This allows the Chinese triads to also conduct extensive illegal activity in the area.
With the $1.3 billion investment by PRC state owned COSCO Shipping in Chancay, Peru, with more than $2.2 billion more to be injected in the next three phases of the port construction over the next six years, this has become the PRC’s most important strategic port acquisition in Latin America and one of the crown jewels of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Chancay is part of a concerted effort by the PRC to not only expand its dominance of global trade, but is likely to become a preferred hub of illicit trade.
BRI projects, particularly ports, are sourced for being hubs of criminality for Asian triads and cartels alike for cocaine trafficking, trade in counterfeits, trade-based money laundering, strategic corruption and malign influence operations.
In the current tariff wars, we have heard much about transshipment points that are exploited to evade tariffs.
Criminal groups maneuver skillfully within potential tariff-induced chaos, arbitraging price differentials across markets, and developing alliances with other criminals to develop new trafficking and smuggling routes including offshoring and trans-shipments operations.
As the prices of authentic goods rise, so does demand for counterfeits.
Counterfeiters and savvy exporting countries have learned sophisticated tactics and means to outmaneuver tariffs, such as via transshipping, a logistical process by which a country ships their products through a third country so that the product will mask its true origin and look like it’s coming from the third country, thereby evading duties or tariffs.
In today’s tariff rows, counterfeiters are increasingly using Southeast Asia and nearshoring in the Americas as relay points, rerouting goods “Made in China” through third trans-shipment countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and Central America, and relabeling them as “Made in _______ [Not China].”
Chinese intermediaries even advertise these services openly, offering to help manufacturers circumvent restrictions by altering documents and disguising shipping routes.
This is why I believe that the legislative bill introduced by Senators Cassidy and Whitehouse, the Containing and Limiting the Extensive Abuse Noticed in Free Trade Zones Act (CLEAN FTZ), is critically important in protecting our national security and trade security alike, as well as the Container Security Initiative (CSI), and trade-transparency units (TTUs) to counter illegal trade across some of today’s risky free trade zones and ports around the world exploited by criminals and opportunistic government adversaies.
It is not an understatement to say that in many parts of Latin America a perfect storm is brewing. A growing climate of insecurity and economic opportunities are being leveraged by China, Russia, and Iran through predatory activities and criminalities to finance greater insecurity and chaos in the region.
China’s involvement in expanding illicit economies in the Americas has had a triple whammy effect:
- increases tremendous illicit wealth for its ruling CCP elite;
- hurts U.S. national security, American competitiveness, and innovation; and
- finances China’s global ambitions to become the predominant superpower by 2049 in a multi-polar world.
On the crime convergence front, China leverages ecosystems of criminality through its state-owned enterprises, banks, and manufacturers to become the world’s largest player in almost every major sector of transnational crime.
Several trillion US dollars in illicit proceeds every year are generated from predicate offenses for money laundering that touch China’s jurisdiction and markets (through underground banking where all traceability ends), and are often used to finance China’s authoritarian regime and the PLA’s modernization.
China continues to steal Americans’ personal identifiable information (PII), trade secrets, and intellectual property that finance its foreign malign influence campaigns against the United States.
China also has helped Russia, Iran, and others evade international sanctions, including on oil exports.
In summary: Regarding China’s corruptive influence in the Western Hemisphere whether it is fentanyl, counterfeits, or money laundering for narco-terrorists and other criminal networks, illegal trade or replacing the dollars as the world currency, if it harms the United States and the West, China will continue to use all of its national instruments to weaken us, while achieving President Xi’s 2049 strategic goals.
Finally, if we look at Canada in recent years, it has become a forward operational hub for Chinese money laundering and CCP police stations in North America.
Based on extensive investigative reporting, we now know that there is a nexus of PRC Intelligence Services operators converging with local Chinese triads in cities, often Fujian crime networks, and coercive practices of diasporic communities, through the United Front Work Department (UFWD) working to foment insecurity, and clandestinely fund influence and election interference.
In fact, China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017 calls on Chinese individuals, companies, and organizations to act as citizen-spies for national security purposes.
These PLA ground stations, and network of civilian space and satellite programs in the Americas, have the potential to expand Beijing’s global military surveillance and defense capabilities in the southern hemisphere and in areas close to the United States.
Through economic coercion, China is also buying islands across the Caribbean (e.g., in Antigua and Barbuda), building special economic zones, and likely planning to use these commercial outposts for military purposes and geopolitical gains by:
- Corrupting or quelching any PRC opposition;
- co-opting democratic institutions/policies;
- disincentivizing US support including DOD/US military; and
- replacing co-opted regimes with friendly PRC networks and proxies.
Examining the archipelago of illicit pathways of the BRI investments globally can also help to visualize the global expansion of illicit economies and strategic intelligence overlays betwen China’s commercial expansion and forward military operations across Latin America, for example. In fact, the BRI global footprint, which is weaponized as an IW strategy as well (like fentanyl), tracks some of the biggest criminalized routes known for corruption, money laundering, and illicit trade in the Americas as well.
Finally, it is equally troubling that Russian criminal networks and intelligence agencies are selling some of the more advanced surveillance technologies to state and non-state criminal actors in Latin America, greatly enhancing their ability to monitor and attack political enemies, law enforcement, journalists, human rights workers and anyone else they perceive as a threat.
Iran established its beachhead in Latin America through Venezuela through the early support of Hugo Chávez for its military’s irregular warfare campaigns, and for the Iranian Hezbollah Threat Network operatives and surrogates to expand their clandestine operations, fund raising through criminality, and malign influence activities across Latin America. In the past two decades, Iran, through its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force employed subversive active measures through its embassies, terrorist proxies, and criminal networks in Latin America, and with support from it allies in Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries; and to fund operational platforms and disinformation campaigns against the United States and its democratic allies, at times coordinated with China and Russia.
Conclusion
For better or worse, the reality of the US Operation Absolute Resolve under the aegis of the 2025 NSS has transformed the regional security landscape in the Americas especially if there are free, fair and democratic elections in Venezuela in the near future, and accountability for the criminal Chávez-Maduro regime.
At the same time, given the growing criminal threat convergence across the Americas, the 2025 NSS should be harnessed within a rule-of-law framework towards greater full spectrum approaches, leveraging all instruments of American power over criminal adversaries with both persistent and precise intelligence to assist our warfighters and law enforcement operators to disrupt and dismantle hemispheric illicit networks that harms U.S. national interests.
The United States’ robust 2025 NSS approach can help to attack the lethal convergence of drug cartels, narco-terrorist groups, and threat networks, especially those engaged in the deadly cocaine and fentanyl trade that continues to kill tens of thousands of people every year across the United States, Canada, and other countries.
We must also put greater pressure on Non-Hemispheric nations including China and other antagonistic states that have expanded illicit economies, illicit finance, and malign influence across the Americas including Chinese Money Laundering Networks (CMLNs).
Everything is connected in threat convergence security landscapes and a global criminal underworld.
The ICAIE Protocol (≜ Kine-Dynamics): In an emerging multi-polar world where threat networks do not respect rules, norms, breaking their cycle of corruptive influence and the economic power within ecosystems of criminality requires more anticipatory protocols and robust enforcement, especially those bad actors that are exploiting Boyd’s OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, and act — faster than law enforcement and security agencies.
This is especially true where bad actors and threat networks recognize that international reactions to their criminal actions and malign operations require more energies for the defenders of justice, democracy, and the rule of law to dislodge, disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their illicit activities, maneuvers, criminal market offensives, and deliberately driven chaos within the ecosystems of criminality and corruption.
Transnational criminal organizations and threat networks alike have perfected the following strategic dark art: act first and faster than countervailing law enforcement and security forces when undertaking their criminality and subversive activities across illicit economies.
Using this modus operandi, these bad actors and threat networks are expanding illicit empires, infiltrating industries, and penetrating power governance structures through coercive corruption, illicit trade, laundering dirty money, and achieving market dominance through aggression, violence, and the control of territories, state and local institutions, ports, global supply chains, and digital spaces.
Action beats reaction.
This entails more robust threat horizon measures including:
- integrating threat intelligence overlays and the full dimensions of threat convergence in national security responses so that we can better anticipate changing threat environments, and to protect shared global interests from TCOs and other threat networks; and
- sharing threat intelligence across sectors in timely manner to mitigate harms, and help generate future capabilities and operations towards optimal success is also very important.
This further requires not only testing good game-changing policy ideas, but also developing more innovative multi-dimensional approaches and holistic, whole-of-society frameworks before the bad guys act on their criminalities and seize new market share or do more damage.
As we innovate new possibilities within crime-threat convergence protocols, we can craft a force-multiplying trajectory that may lead exponentially to further discoveries and pathfinding actions (effective solutions that can be implemented and expanded), help us to better navigate today’s chaos, manage change tomorrow, and bring enduring peace to multi-dimensional security challenges and illicit vectors.
If we break the corruptive influence and economic and financial wherewithal, we can begin a process to render bad actors and threat networks less powerful by depriving them of their wealth, infrastructure, logistics, and safe havens.
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In sum: In advancing the President’s 2025 NSS and his Executive Orders against designated Mexican cartels and TCOs, I hope that the administration develops more coordinated capabilities and resources across the inter-agency, strengthens cooperation with allied governments, and with other regional and international partners, and helps bring leveraged cross-border public-private partnerships to the fight.
If pursued more pragmatically by the United States, American diplomacy can help to galvanize greater collective energies to counter the growing power of the drug cartels, violent gangs, and insurgent groups across the region, including those expanding their illicit empires in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean through illegal gold mining, money laundering, and the trafficking of narcotics, counterfeits, illicit tobacco, humans and firearms; while similarly mitigating the illicit harms posed by Non-Hemispheric threat networks that ushers in and inspires greater prosperity, security, and democracy dividends in the Americas, and beyond.