NCJ Number
107705
Journal
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin Volume: 56 Issue: 11 Dated: special issue (October 1987) Pages: 24-27
Date Published
1987
Length
4 pages
Annotation
Narcoterrorism, the involvement of terrorist organizations and insurgent groups in drug trafficking, has become a problem with international implications.
Abstract
In Third World countries, traffickers, terrorists, and insurgents may cooperate to a limited extent and are alleged to use funds obtained from drug trafficking to exert military, political, and economic pressure against the countries in which they operate. In the United States, contacts between terrorist groups and traffickers appear to be the result of the clandestine nature and criminal activities of both types of groups rather than more formal relationships. Although an anti-Castro group was known to have collected money for a drug trafficker in the early 1980's, no recent cases of such cooperation are known. Two recent cases, one involving the Provisional Irish Republican Army and a known trafficker and the other involving the sale of narcotics to finance an assassination attempt, illustrate how each group used the criminal networks of the other to fulfill their own specific objectives.