Narco States and Finfluencers

What are they? How do they occur? And why should Europe be paying attention? Paul, can you explain what a narco-state actually is?

Yeah, so there isn't an official agreed-upon definition for a narco-state, but essentially what it means is it's a country where criminals have a very deep penetration into a part of the state or control of the state.

It doesn't necessarily have to be over the entire country.

It could be over a certain part of the infrastructure, so that could be over, uh, something to do with the judicial system or something to do with the port system, for example.

And roughly how many narco-states exist in the world today under that unofficial designation?

Yeah, so it's a little bit tricky to get an exact handle on it.

It's a relatively low number.

You're probably talking somewhere in the low single digits, up to maybe a dozen.

These would be countries primarily in Latin America, in South America, and in Central America.

So you might be talking about the likes of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and then in Central America, you could be talking about the likes of Guatemala.

There's also Mexico then as well.

Now, again, going back to what we were saying earlier, these aren't necessarily countries where the entire institute of the state is dominated by narco gangs, but they're countries where part of the state, so again, that could just be the ports, for example, drug gangs have a very strong influence.

And how might that institutional infiltration by drug cartels present itself? Are there any specific examples?

Well, Myanmar, or formerly known as Burma, is probably the prime example in Asia, where the military junta effectively runs a narco-state and enables the major Asian drug gangs to distribute heroin and traffic heroin and cocaine and, and other drugs through Myanmar.

As you indicated, the narco-states have been identified primarily again by the United States as being in, uh, Central and Latin America.

And I suppose one of the states that was one of the most stable countries in, uh, South America until recently was Ecuador.

Now you're seeing the malign influence of Albanian gangs in Ecuador, where they've pretty much undermined the state and are pretty much in control of a lot of the institutions, politically have a lot of sway as well.

And, and that's a very malign influence by European gangs, primarily represented by the Albanian mafia in Ecuador.

So narcoterrorism, it's a phrase we've heard more of in 2026.

Narco-state, as you mentioned earlier, is unofficial designation.

Are the two always linked? Is narcoterrorism a natural escalation of the narco-state? How would you define their relationship with each other?

Yeah, it is the type of thing where once drug gangs have more of an influence over the state, then it's likely that you're going to see this increase in narcoterrorism.

So that's something that you've seen in the likes of Ecuador in the past two years or so, where once there's been this rise in gang-related activity with the likes of the Albanian mafia or whoever else, you can see a corresponding spike in violence.

So, you know, if you look at the likes of Ecuador, in 2024, 2025, there have been 8,-9000 deaths related to this kind of narcoterrorism activity.

So again, this is an enormous spike in violence compared to where the killings were, and that is directly related to this drug trade and this kind of narco-state.