QUOTES COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GUADALAJARA

On February 2, 2012, CHDS conducted a video teleconference with Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled “Transnational Organized Crime and Illicit Networks” presented by CHDS Professor Celina Realuyo. The event was co-hosted by the State of Jalisco’s Citizen’s Council on Public Safety and the Virtual University of the University of Guadalajara (UDG).

Through a multi-point virtual connection, approximately 200 people located across six sites were able to connect to the video teleconference. Participants ranged from local, state, and federal government officials from the states of Jalisco and Sinaloa to students from the University of Guadalajara, as well as local citizens. In addition, approximately 100 people were able to stream the conference from their personal computers via a link hosted through the UDG webpage.

In-person attendees at the University of Guadalajara

Javier Carrasco Rueda, Technical Secretary of the Citizen’s Council on Public Security, commented that we are living in an era of great global movements, including illicit ones, which challenge governments and societies in the face of the obsolete conception with which these movements or “wars” are confronted.

Carrasco Rueda sees that this challenge “is centered on the fact that the networks that manage these illegal trades are not limited by national borders, nor by ingrained conceptions of sovereignty, which gives them an advantage to operate through actions that transcend countries and these do not respond with that vision of globality”, he commented that “it is evident that criminal organizations have shown an important power but they are not invulnerable to the actions of the rule of law.”

He also said that attacking them means a meticulous, carefully coordinated and implemented work that requires an integral and systemic knowledge where intelligence plays an irreducible role, where, if there are no changes in attitude and in the ways in which criminal organizations are approached, little can be done to face the advantages they have exploited over the institutional networks in charge of confronting them, especially in the case of the link between intelligence and operation.