“It’s challenging for most Westerners to comprehend the profound impact of organized crime on modern geopolitics. At one end, it’s street gangs and narco networks. At the other, it’s sovereign states running illicit enterprises. The line between legal and illegal has all but vanished—what matters now is control. What appears to be petty crime on one street corner is part of one of the most profitable, complex, and politically integrated systems on the planet. In some cases, entire governments have already annexed foreign economies through enterprise.… But it is too late to deal with most of Latin America militarily. Dark forces have learned what states are only beginning to grasp: commercial networks can infiltrate where armies fear to tread. The real battlefield now is cash flow.”

~ Dr. Pippa Malmgren, “Bananas, Battleships and Bitcoin: How Latam Became the Epicenter of Superpower Geopolitics”