Attachments
More than 50 years into the “war on drugs”, trade in illicit narcotics continues to flourish in Latin America, often leaving mayhem in its wake. Experience suggests that a mix of approaches, including smarter policing and enhanced social policy, is the best remedy.
What’s new? Violence stemming from the drug trade plagues Latin America, despite decades of law enforcement campaigns involving police and the military. Criminal groups have risen in number, spread to previously unaffected countries and diversified their rackets. Competition among these groups for drug profits drives much of the violence afflicting these societies.
Why does it matter? The U.S. is again demanding military-led offensives against criminal groups in the region, yet evidence from past crackdowns suggests that they have served to reconfigure supply routes, spur more complex criminal networks, accelerate efforts to corrupt state officials and generate spikes of violence that harm the most vulnerable.
What should be done? Latin America should learn from its successes and failures. Better policing, economic alternatives to crime, restrictions on gun flows and, under specific conditions, negotiations with illegal groups should all play a role. Foreign states should recognise that it is counterproductive to demand tougher controls when they worsen violence.
Executive Summary
Over half a century on from the declaration of a “war on drugs”, Latin America is struggling to manage the eruption of violence tied to the narcotics trade. Though drug-related organised crime has brought notorious peaks of violence in the past, above all in Colombia and Mexico, never has it spread so wide, and rarely has it penetrated so deeply into states and communities. Criminal groups have splintered, multiplied and diversified, adding lethal synthetics like fentanyl to the traditional plant-based supply of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, as well as moving into new rackets like extortion. Where communities are poor and unprotected, criminal groups act as employers and overlords; where state officials are present, they coerce and corrupt them. With Washington pushing for a fresh military-led crackdown on drug cartels, perhaps involving U.S. forces, Latin American leaders face difficult decisions. Despite the pressure to comply, experience suggests that a balance of improved policing, alternative livelihoods, gun control and, under specific conditions, negotiations would be more effective in reducing violence.
The map of the drug trade in Latin America has been transformed in the decades since supply routes from the Andes to the U.S. first emerged. Demand for narcotics outside the region remains at record highs, with newer markets booming – particularly for cocaine in Europe and fentanyl in the U.S. At the same time, waves of U.S.-backed law enforcement, based on capture and extradition of crime bosses (known as kingpins), drug seizures and forced eradication have revolutionised the supply chain. Although Colombia and Mexico remain at the heart of the drug business, a main route to the U.S. and Europe runs down the Pacific, passing through countries that were largely untouched by illicit trafficking such as Costa Rica and Ecuador. Each of these has seen rates of violence rise sharply; in 2024, Ecuador was South America’s most violent nation. Across the region, surges of bloodshed have marked the new hubs of a fast-shifting, hyper-violent drug trade.
Understanding how this rolling crime wave came about is fundamental to arresting it. Drug-related organised crime has adapted to the threat posed by law enforcement by becoming more flexible and resilient. In place of hierarchical syndicates that could be dismantled once their leaders were identified, the trade increasingly functions through networks of providers who subcontract each step of the route to lower tiers of operators. High-level financiers engage sophisticated international traffickers, who oversee drug exports to user markets. These in turn partner with national and local crime groups to meet the orders. National groups manage production or ensure safe passage of the drug along a particular trafficking corridor. At the local level, urban gangs are contracted by larger criminal allies for small-scale logistical services like smuggling drugs through ports.
All the layers of these networks have learned that capturing state officials is a business asset. Using a mix of threats and payoffs, they target police officers, judges, prosecutors and politicians who can ensure that business runs smoothly, without the risk of arrest or seizure of shipments. Likewise, prisons in some of Latin America’s roughest settings are run by inmates, who manage their criminal enterprises behind bars and carry out vendettas against rivals inside and outside.
If profits in this business tend to flow upward, violence festers at the base. Conventional wisdom about illicit markets would suggest that fighting is a sign of instability and disruption. But violence appears to be a stable feature – and in fact a product of – the way drug trafficking operates in Latin America. The highest echelons of the drug business feature a few players who take care to conceal their connections to the trade. At the local level, where small outfits and gangs vie for control, competition to win the trust of larger criminal allies and enter the drug supply chain is usually fierce. Gangs are often paid in drugs and arms, which they then use to extract more revenue from terrified communities, including through small-scale drug retail, extortion and kidnapping. As rival groups seek to defend their territory from attack, invisible urban front lines emerge between them: civilians who dare to cross these in some of the region’s worst-hit communities, such as Durán in Ecuador or Buenaventura in Colombia, face violent retribution.
Even so, organised crime’s sway over poor communities is not just a function of intimidation. In many poor communities, households exhausted their reserves to survive months of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, while cuts in welfare systems formerly funded by the commodity boom left a deep economic hole. Organised crime offers an alternative to disheartened young people, who join in the hopes of earning income, status and power in their communities. Veneration of local outlaws has become commonplace among teenagers in myriad hard-up communities.
There is no one remedy for Latin America’s sprawling criminal ecosystem, though experience offers evidence of what has not worked. Military crackdowns and high-level captures provide short-term victories, but time and again fuel new waves of violence and generate reconfigurations of the drug business that are more resistant to law enforcement. Latin American states, which have long followed Washington’s lead in the “war on drugs”, will need to rethink these conventional tools to limit drug supply with an eye to which approaches reduce – rather than exacerbate – harm to civilians. The right policy is likely a mix of interventions. These include strengthening investigations, protecting security forces from corruption, improving community policing and reforming prisons. States must also address the acute social distress that criminal groups prey upon to recruit. In specific cases, governments may also consider talks with criminal groups to stem the worst violence and peel off young members who want a fresh start.
Latin America’s established role in the drug trade, entrenched inequalities and institutional weaknesses mean it will likely continue to suffer from criminal activity feeding high global drug demand. In a cruel irony, greater law enforcement, more seizures and stronger prohibition tend to raise the price of drugs – and hence boost the profits for traffickers. The region needs strategies to reduce violence and international partners who are committed not only to stopping drugs from reaching the market, but also to mitigating the fallout. While everyone agrees that organised crime is a scourge to combat, the cost of drug enforcement should not continue to be paid in civilian lives.