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The illicit drug trade has long driven high homicide rates across Latin America and looks set to continue doing so

The production and trafficking of illegal drugs has shaped global perceptions of Latin America. As it has expanded, the drug trade has spawned illicit economies, compromised legal markets, corrupted national political processes and poisoned states’ external relations. While hard-line security responses have sometimes brought localised results, they have not pacified the region’s cartels, and, in some cases, have arguably exacerbated violence. They nevertheless look set to endure, with real solutions continuing to elude governments.

What next

A timid shift towards public health approaches by the US Biden administration has not prompted significant changes in US policy towards Latin American countries. Broad continuity in US and Latin American drug strategies is likely over the coming years. However, US President-elect Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy stance and aggressive rhetoric could exacerbate challenges if, for example, US policies on trade, aid, remittances and migration increase hardship for Latin Americans, and harsher security crackdowns within the region further fragment organised crime groups, fostering violent power struggles.

Subsidiary Impacts

Analysis

High levels of criminal violence have accompanied booming illicit drug economies across much of Latin America. Other factors including demographics, urbanisation trends, authoritarian legacies and institutional weakness have all played a part in the violence, but illicit drug markets, driven in turn by drug prohibition and punitive enforcement, have been a primary driver.

With 154,000 victims in 2021, ‘the Americas’ (both North and South) placed second, behind Africa, in the regional ranking of the UN Global Study on Homicide 2023 — the most recent such study available. However, the region’s homicide rate of 15 per 100,000 people was still the world’s highest. Eight of the ten highest national homicide rates in the world were recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Americas have some of the world’s highest murder rates

Homicide trends vary significantly both among and within countries, but at the global level, a substantial percentage of murders are related to organised crime and gang violence. In Latin America, lethal criminal violence is associated with competition for control of illegal markets and drug production, as well as with related factors such as weak rule of law, poverty, youth unemployment and easy access to firearms.

In some countries (such as El Salvador, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela), aggressive anti-gang programmes have temporarily reduced national homicide rates (see EL SALVADOR: Security improvements may not last – October 12, 2023). However, violent hot spots continue to develop even in these countries, often due to criminal dynamics and power struggles.

In 2023, InsightCrime identified five locations as top ‘homicide hotspots’ based on the most violent years between 2018 and 2022 of the most violent districts in Latin America. In four of these (Esmeraldas in Ecuador, Colima in Mexico, Amambay in Paraguay and the Capital Region in Venezuela), micro and macro drug-trafficking figured prominently; violence in Roraima, Brazil, was blamed largely on illegal gold mining.

Due partly to increases in cocaine and fentanyl production and shifting trafficking routes, countries such as Ecuador and Costa Rica, which have historically reported low homicide rates, have seen rates soar:

Costa Rican authorities have engaged in a dozen fentanyl investigations in the last two years, and the country made its first extradition to the United States on charges related to fentanyl trafficking in November 2024.

The role of ports

An enduring opioid crisis in the United States and buoyant demand for cocaine in Europe will ensure that drug control efforts remain difficult (see INTERNATIONAL: Cocaine seizures will not dent market – August 2, 2024). Drugs are moved by air, land and sea, but the ability to shift large quantities of drugs long distances by sea, and the need to import chemical precursors for synthetic opioids such as fentanyl from countries such as China (see CHINA/US: Drug control will depend on ties – July 17, 2024) and India, have cemented the importance of Latin American ports as focal points for the drug trade.

Port cities such as Limon in Costa Rica, Rosario in Argentina, Guayaquil in Ecuador and Manzanillo in Mexico have emerged as homicide hot spots.

Meanwhile, the capacity of national authorities to stem flows of illicit drugs into or out of ports is limited; of an estimated 750 million containers shipped globally each year, only 2% are inspected.

2%
Proportion of shipping containers inspected globally each year

The ingenuity and adaptability of traffickers further undermines drug control efforts. Through a variety of tactics — including changing routes and preferred ports, contaminating containers already at sea, hiding drugs in containers’ structures rather than among cargo itself, and deploying semi-submersibles — drug traffickers have been able to evade authorities and to keep drugs flowing.

Traffickers are targeting ports in Latin America and increasingly in Europe with corrupt practices, intimidation and violence. In 2022, EU customs authorities seized 500 tonnes of drugs, more than 50% of which was cocaine.

Extraditions and high-profile convictions

While European countries have often prioritised cooperation with Latin American countries on intercepting drug shipments, successive US governments have focused on pressing their Latin American counterparts to impose harsher drug policies and on securing extraditions and convictions of suspects.

As drug-related crises and narco-scandals have proliferated throughout the region, US pressure for action on drugs — long focused heavily on Colombia, Mexico and a few Central American countries — has broadened.

Drug crises have tainted national governments, leaving them more vulnerable to domestic instability and diplomatic conflicts. In recent years, the number of Latin American officials who have been denounced, arrested, extradited and prosecuted in the United States over ties to the illegal drug trade has steadily increased, with some notable, high-ranking figures receiving jail time:

  • On October 16, 2024, Mexico’s former Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna was sentenced by a US judge to 38 years’ imprisonment and fined USD2mn for accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel and facilitating the distribution of cocaine.
  • In delivering his sentence, District Judge Brian M Cogan claimed that “no one, regardless of their position or influence, is above the law”. Prosecutor Breon Peace and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) administrator Anne Milgram echoed that sentiment, saying that the sentence conveyed a clear message “to corrupt leaders around the world who use their positions of power to help the cartel(s)”.
  • Garcia Luna’s sentencing followed that of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez (2014-22) in June (see HONDURAS: Trial will not prompt clean-up of politics – March 27, 2024 and see HONDURAS: Anti-corruption progress may remain slow – June 28, 2024). He had been extradited to the United States on charges of conspiracy to traffic arms and 400 tonnes of cocaine, and was sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment.

Such convictions demonstrate judicial efficacy and provide governments and security authorities with high-profile success stories with which they can bolster their public support. However, they do little to address the causes and drivers of the drug problem.

Meanwhile, arrests, extraditions and convictions of high-profile cartel figures — such as former Sinaloa Cartel leaders Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, most recently convicted by a US court in 2019 (see MEXICO: El Chapo arrest will not improve security – January 21, 2016), and Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, arrested in Texas in July alongside El Chapo’s son Joaquin Guzman Lopez — risk destabilising criminal organisations, fostering power struggles and exacerbating violence (see MEXICO: El Mayo arrest could have major repercussions – July 26, 2024 and see MEXICO: Cartel blows will exacerbate Sinaloa violence – August 30, 2024).

The strategy of pursuing high-profile individuals nevertheless looks set to continue, with arrest warrants and indictments still in place and new political scandals emerging:

  • The publication by think tank InsightCrime in September of a 2013 video implicating Honduran President Xiomara Castro’s husband, former President Manuel Zelaya (2006-09), and his brother Carlos, a presidential adviser, in accepting cartel bribes unleashed a crisis in Tegucigalpa. The release of the footage coincided with Castro ending a long-running extradition treaty with the United States (see HONDURAS: Drug scandal will hit election and US ties – September 24, 2024).
  • Since 2020, the US indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and 15 military officials on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption and drug trafficking has highlighted alleged links between authorities from Venezuela and Honduras.
  • Authorities from Ecuador, including top generals, have also been accused of drug trafficking by US authorities.

The case of Ecuador

Ecuador has in recent years become a cocaine trafficking hub through which, according to some estimates, 60% of global cocaine traffic now flows. This may be attributable partly to the expulsion of US troops from the Manta military base in 2009, as Plan Colombia targeted coca cultivation and cocaine production north of the border, leaving Ecuador vulnerable to penetration by relocating drug cartels.

Ecuador has become a major cocaine trafficking hub
Between 2021 and the latter half of 2023, Ecuador’s police seized more than 500 tonnes of cocaine, and experts now estimate that 700-800 tonnes of cocaine are dispatched annually from Ecuador.The rise and empowerment of local gangs partly derives from links with international criminal organisations, but also from flawed and erratic security policies. Under former President Rafael Correa’s 2007-17 administration, for example, amnesties were enacted and pacification strategies pursued, but these were soon followed by hard-line incarceration programmes that saw the prison population quadruple to some 40,000 inmates, facilitating gang recruitment.

Between 2021 and October 2023, more than a dozen massacres were reported in prisons around Ecuador as jails emerged as command centres for criminal activities.

The ‘Metastasis’ corruption probe by the Attorney General’s Office has shone a light on far-reaching corruption involving organised crime, the judiciary, the security forces and the prison services.

The murder of 2023 presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio is also thought to have been planned in a prison. Villavicencio — a former investigative journalist and legislator — was killed at a campaign rally in August 2023 soon after he had denounced cartel death threats.

Villavicencio had long decried the presence of Mexican cartels in Ecuador, criticised the closure of the Manta military base (hinting at pay-offs from foreign drug-trafficking organisations) and pledged to adopt a hard line on drug traffickers and their political allies. In November 2022, his efforts to push the National Assembly to investigate the role of drug money in presidential campaigns since 2007 succeeded.

The eventual winner of Ecuador’s 2023 election — President Daniel Noboa — declared a state of “internal armed conflict” shortly after taking office, and welcomed a high-level US military and counter-narcotics delegation and donations of equipment (see ECUADOR: Security crisis will deepen – January 19, 2024).

The deployment of 22,000 troops and plans to build mega-prisons helped boost Noboa’s approval rating but have failed to restore stability (see ECUADOR: Drug challenges could erode Noboa support – August 5, 2024).

Latin American international drug relations

The harmful regional impact of drug trafficking and organised crime has also been evident in other trends linking Latin American illicit violent economies. Across the region, recruitment of contract killers and experts on military technology — some seemingly with links to Colombian military, paramilitary and guerrilla organisations — has become more apparent:

  • In Ecuador, it appears that a group of Colombian killers were contracted to carry out Villavicencio’s murder. Six of them were subsequently killed in the Litoral prison in Guayaquil.
  • Paraguayan counternarcotics prosecutor Marcelo Pecci was killed in Isla Baru, Colombia in 2022. Sebastian Marset, the alleged head of the First Uruguayan Cartel, has been named as a possible instigator (see PARAGUAY: Organised crime will remain entrenched – December 22, 2023).

In a video subsequently released by Marset in August 2023, criminal connections linking Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Colombia surfaced.

Marset’s allegations of having bought protection from top police officials in Bolivia, including the head of the Special Counternarcotics Force, prompted Bolivian President Luis Arce to acknowledge publicly the political penetration of drug trafficking and the risk of institutional capture.

Arce is among numerous Latin American heads of state to have called for greater international cooperation in addressing drug trafficking. Others, such as Colombian President Gustavo Petro, have again spoken in favour of health- and welfare-based approaches, decriminalisation and regulation, though such approaches remain controversial in many jurisdictions and are unlikely to gain much traction with the incoming US administration.

Beyond the Americas, the European Ports Alliance — a multilateral initiative aimed at helping to fund and improve security and customs practises and boosting cooperation and information-sharing among law enforcement agencies in the EU — was adopted in October 2023. This forms part of a broader ‘EU Roadmap to fight drug trafficking and organised crime’ that promotes enhanced cooperation with authorities in Latin America and elsewhere. As helpful as this initiative may be in reducing cocaine flows into Europe, however, its impact on violence trends in Latin America will be minimal.

Newly elected Lebanese President Joseph Aoun arrives at the presidential palace, January 9, 2025 (Fadel Itani/AFP/Getty Images)

Authored by:

Jill Hedges

Dr Jill Hedges

Deputy Director & Senior Analyst,
Latin America

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