TRANSNATIONAL DRUG TRAFFICKING AND ITS IMPACTS ON THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON IN LIGHT OF RISK SOCIETY

Abstract

This article analyzes transnational drug trafficking and its impacts on the Brazilian Amazon in light of Ulrich Beck's Risk Society and of Transnational Law as conceived by Jessup, Paulo Márcio Cruz, Joana Stelzer, and Zenildo Bodnar. Using a hypothetico-deductive method and an interdisciplinary bibliographic and documentary review, it argues that late modernity industrialized risk, amplifying it, above all in peripheral societies, through the criminal instrumentalization of globalization itself. The study examines Brazil's transformation from transit route into the world's second-largest cocaine consumer market, and the Amazon's conversion from corridor of passage into a territory of strategic consolidation of drug trafficking, through the entrenchment of transnational criminal factions and organizations. It shows that riverine and traditional populations are instrumentalized as transport labor, trapped in trafficking and drug use and subjected to multiple forms of violence, in grave violation of their ways of being and living. Because it operates through a transversal web that knows no borders, trafficking cannot be confronted by isolated state sovereignty. It concludes that a transnational response is needed, articulated beyond the State and capable of collapsing the entire chain, together with Harm Reduction and the rebuilding of the social fabric.