Narcoterrorism

The intersection of drug trafficking and terrorism, describing either an organization that uses the profits of producing or trafficking a controlled substance to finance a terrorist campaign, or a group that uses violence, intimidation or extortion against drug traffickers and growers to further its own political or ideological aims. The term is generally credited to Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry, who used it in the early 1980s to describe the alliance between the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgent group, and coca growers and traffickers in Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley. Comparable documented alliances include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, financing its decades-long insurgency substantially through cocaine trafficking, and the Taliban taxing opium cultivation and trafficking in Afghanistan; in the United States, narcoterrorism is prosecuted as a distinct federal offense targeting a person who commits or conspires to commit drug trafficking knowing it will provide support to a terrorist act or organization.