Do Not Confuse Terrorism With Organized Crime
Organized crime and terrorism have some similarities. However, we are talking about different phenomena. On the one hand, organized crime is understood as a way of committing crimes. These crimes require a certain level of planning and the joint and coordinated participation of several individuals.
For its part, terrorism is a form of violent struggle. The violence used by terrorism is used against civilians and seeks to achieve political ends. Thus, terrorism tries to confuse, frighten or irritate a population or its rulers; capture the attention of international public opinion; sow doubts about the legitimacy of a political regime; provoke internal conflicts in threatened societies; mobilize sympathizers of the cause defended by the terrorists, etc.
What do they seek?
The main objective of organized crime is profit. Criminal organizations seek to get money, the more the merrier. Terrorism, on the other hand, seeks political ends, such as changing a system, gaining independence, or some kind of political or religious advantage.
However, there are also similarities, terrorist organizations need money to finance the armed struggle. For example, buying weapons, recruiting and propaganda, preparing and carrying out attacks, etc. And organized crime can condition politics and the functioning of public institutions.
On the other hand, the influence in the political sphere is different. Organized crime seeks to take advantage, but not to change the established order. Terrorism, on the other hand, has been aimed at transforming or destabilizing existing institutions or forcing their representatives to adopt decisions and measures contrary to their principles and interests.
Frequency of criminal activity
In short, both terrorism and organized crime seek to profit financially and influence political activities. The big difference is that, while for organized crime profit is the final goal, for terrorism the ultimate goal is political. Even so, both are engaged in criminal activities.
On the other hand, organized crime acts more frequently than terrorism. That is, there are more criminal organizations than terrorist groups committing crimes. This is because organized crime is more willing to sacrifice its security in order to get more funding. On the contrary, carrying out terrorist attacks does not usually provide financing, but rather the opposite, it requires large sums of money. Therefore, terrorist groups often prefer security to action.
Use of violence
One final difference between organized crime and terrorism is in the way they use violence. The effectiveness of a terrorist attack depends on its impact reaching a large audience. Few people are attacked to intimidate many. Therefore, the more spectacular an attack is, the more people it will reach, since it needs to receive maximum attention and publicity. However, if the attack takes a lot of lives it can be counterproductive, since instead of gaining followers, it would get rejection.
For its part, organized crime seeks anonymity. Criminals aspire to carry out their crimes without being identified so as not to jeopardize their criminal careers. For this reason, the violence often practiced by organized crime groups tends to elude all publicity. At least they don’t deliberately seek it out.
In sum, although terrorism and organized crime share certain features, they also present decisive differences. In particular, although they share some objectives, the final objective they seek is different. Organized crime seeks to profit economically and terrorism a change at the political level. In addition, organized crime activity is more frequent and violence is usually anonymous, while terrorism seeks to make the violence visible.
