United States Institute of Peace

The drivers of organized violence break down into two main categories: 1) transnational criminal activities, largely related to drug and migrant traffickers, and 2) local gangs battling for criminal turf.  Weak rule of law, inadequate security forces and poor governance are the common underlying problems. Most Latin American nations have not invested in the institutions required to match the power of the region’s criminal organizations. Nor have they empowered their citizens to engage in their own security or to hold their elected leaders and public servants to account. In much of the hemisphere, this will be the challenge of the coming decade — and it will have major implications for U.S. interests. 

Given the direct impact on U.S. interests, particularly related to immigration, the U.S. has been involved in a decades-long struggle to strengthen the rule of law in Latin America, and extensive U.S. assistance programs have sought partnerships to directly confront criminal organizations. The results have been decidedly mixed but do offer lessons for the new Trump administration.

The U.S. will also need to seek new approaches to address its own direct role in violence, to develop new models of working with regional governments, and to develop new approaches to institution building that include the principles of peacebuilding. Ultimately, the U.S. should double down on democratic security — defined as security policies that respect due process and the rule of law while including citizens in security decision-making and execution — as the anchor for long-term peace and stability. The alternative to democratic security is the autocratic model that is tempting many countries to simply abandon the rule of law and due process and move straight to mass incarceration. 

Latin America’s Curve of Conflict

Periodic tensions stemming from border disputes, competition over resources and political differences are common, but with few exceptions, formal and informal mediation by regional actors has served to defuse intra-state conflicts around the region.

In 2023, for example, Venezuela’s threat to annex Guyana’s oil-rich Essequibo region was quickly addressed by neighboring countries, led by Brazil. The region is justifiably proud of this record of using diplomacy to prevent hostilities and resolve long-simmering disputes between nations.

Unfortunately, the absence of traditional conflict does not mean the Americas are at peace. There is still one violent internal conflict that continues to grind on, in Colombia. But the major source of this persistent violence is criminal activity, a toxic blend of transnational and local crime. Both kinds of violent crime take place amid a backdrop of the legacy of internal conflicts and inequalities that date back centuries.

Crime is not the only cause of social unrest. Venezuela and Nicaragua have been riven by crushing economic mismanagement and political repression. In Venezuela, this has led some eight million citizens to migrate, most of whom leave Venezuela for urban centers in South America and increasingly directly to the United States. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s regime is actively working to undermine U.S. interests by weaponizing mass migration and eagerly building ties with U.S. adversaries, notably Russia. The Nicaraguan state is the main source of violence in the country, reminiscent of the worst periods of repression under the military governments that once governed the region.

The churn can be felt throughout the hemisphere. Twenty-two million people in the Americas are on the move, according to the latest figures from the U.N. Refugee Agency, displaced from their places of origin by fear, poverty, climate change and other factors that combine to deprive them of hope for their own and their families’ future. The Darien region, straddling Colombia and Panama, is the scene of an unprecedented mass migration, with a record 520,000 people crossing this remote, heavily forested region in 2023 alone.

Transnational Crime Is Ever Evolving

Criminal organizations both drive displacement and profit from it. The increasingly integrated nature of criminal organizations, combined with their growing sophistication and diversification, has expanded the zone of criminal conflict while posing new challenges. Researcher Douglas Farah notes that “there are two main economic drivers of today’s new illicit economies: the changing dynamics as the global cocaine market shifts to Europe and beyond, and a massive rise in the production and consumption of synthetic drugs in the U.S. market.” He suggests the new actors, markets and products are causing fragmentation among traditional criminal groups at the same time as they drive consolidation of criminal economies through new alliances between Latin American criminal organizations and groups from Europe and Eurasia. 

Fentanyl trafficking adds a new level of urgency to this dynamic. Mexico has replaced China as the primary source of illicit fentanyl sold to U.S. consumers. It is responsible for as many as 75,000 deaths a year in the U.S.

Ports and border towns are often the hardest hit by this dynamic. In Ecuador, violence has been especially intense in and around Guayaquil, the country’s main port and largest city. Local groups aligned with competing Mexican cartels are fighting for control of the port and primacy along one of the most lucrative drug transshipment routes in the world. In Chile, another country long considered among Latin America’s safest, ports like San Antonio have become transit points for cocaine heading to Europe and synthetic drugs coming from Europe to satisfy growing local markets.  

Mexican traffickers have dominated the cocaine flows into the United States for the past two decades.  But with increasing amounts of cocaine flowing to Europe, another powerful transnational criminal organization has emerged in Brazil, known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). The PCC has extended its reach into the Southern Cone, taking control of trafficking corridors to Africa and Europe, and growing into what the U.S. Treasury calls “one of the world’s largest cocaine trafficking rings.”

And drugs are far from their only business: the PCC and other South American criminal organizations profit from illegal mining and logging, accelerating deforestation in the Amazon basin. Mexican cartels have diversified into myriad activities, including fuel theft and extorting money from avocado growers, a multibillion dollar export industry.

Urban Gangs Use Violence to Compete for Territorial Control

But as much as transnational criminal organizations drive violence and instability, there has been a worse dynamic in some countries as local criminal gangs fight over territorial control to facilitate kidnapping and local extortion.

Brazilian researcher Robert Muggah points out that within the space of two generations Latin America went from being a profoundly rural society, with just 40% of the population in the 1950s living in cities, to 82% today. Muggah believes this has led to a rapid “informalization and peripheralization” of a population that is now living on the margins of government services and societal inclusion. 

Capturing both transnational organized criminal activity and gangs, analysts Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt use the term “criminal governance” to describe how “in the course of the 1980’s new and violent non-state actors emerged into the urban landscape ... aspiring to become a regular element with prestige and negotiating power in the economy and society.” 

Transnational criminal organizations and gangs can penetrate society through direct influence in the executive, security forces, mass media and elections, and through interference with social movements.  This has turned into a particularly insidious challenge in Haiti. Criminal gangs long aligned with certain political and business elites are now becoming a political force in their own right. Since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenal Moïse, gangs have taken over most of the capital in an effort to control the country’s lucrative kidnapping industry, killing thousands in the fight for territory and displacing more than a million people. The gangs have all but replaced the police as the sole authority in many areas.

El Salvador faced a less complete but still comprehensive challenge that led it to take a harsh response by clamping down with a state of exception and implementing a policy of mass incarceration. Honduras has had a similar but more localized and less universal challenge and has responded in a more measured way. And Guatemala, which lies along drug trafficking routes, face additional pressure from sophisticated and well-funded organized criminal organizations that have deeply contaminated local and national politics.

The U.S. contributes to many of these dynamics: It is the largest regional market for illegal drugs in the hemisphere and the largest source of illegal firearms. Criminals also use the U.S. financial system to launder their proceeds, despite the expenditure of significant resources to keep illicit profits out. Many Latin Americans see U.S. drug demand and weapons trafficking as the underlying cause of the violence they endure.

Institutions Can’t Keep Up

Few police, judicial or prison systems in the Americas have fared well against these forces of disorder. Traditionally, law enforcement and justice institutions in the region have been under-funded, over-burdened and often riven with corruption. Prison systems have become overcrowded recruiting grounds for gangs and other criminal groups. Citizen frustration with crime and impunity often translates into popular support for “mano dura” (iron fist) policies, which may reduce crime in the short-term but only by sacrificing human rights and due process of law.

Some of this lies in the region’s transition to democracy, which came in an impressive wave in the 1980s and 90s. Countries transitioning from autocracy into democracy suffer more violent crime than either autocracies or well-established democracies. Many countries understandably put strict limits on their new democratic security forces, often taking the military out of security altogether and not strengthening the police enough to dismantle criminal organizations. States spent little to make overcrowded prisons safe or secure, allowing gangs to take control.

Judicial systems often fared even worse, with a lack of investment and sustained reforms that would allow them the tools and human capacity to enforce laws. There was also often a trend of elite capture, whereby they were deliberately kept weak by influential members of society who sought to protect their interests. For example, in the midst of a criminal takeover of much of the country, El Salvador had one of the lowest tax burdens in the world.  

Transitions to democracy also came with high levels of corruption, related to weak justice systems and corruptible political systems that were easily infiltrated and could be bought off with the excessive resources and intimidating threats of violence by criminal gangs. Citizens became disillusioned with democracy as a result with the wide swath of corruption that extends into government, media, law enforcement and even social movements.

Some governments have experimented with reforms, at times surging resources to security and judicial institutions. But there are few examples of sustained success. Under the Mérida Initiative, launched in 2008, the United States spent more than $3 billion to fund judicial and law enforcement reforms in Mexico. But under former President Manuel López Obrador, many of these efforts were reversed or neglected. Homicides in Mexico remain at historically high levels while drug smuggling — especially of fentanyl — continues to soar.   

Colombia was the one bright spot for U.S. assistance — about $12 billion under Plan Colombia and later strategies — and demonstrated greater success in sustaining security sector and judicial reforms. Many cities, such as Medellín, which in the 1990s was among the world’s most dangerous cities, now have crime rates comparable to or lower than U.S. cities. But Colombia’s success against urban crime did not extend to the countryside and armed groups still operate in many regions, displacing tens of thousands. Comprehensive improvements in justice and security remain elusive, even after decades of concerted effort. 

Building strong institutions will require a long-term and sustained new strategy for the countries involved, and a new way of looking at assistance for the United States and others who want to be helpful. 

Building Strong States from the Top and Bottom

A common frustration in afflicted countries and from their international supporters is reflected in the refrain “haven’t we been at this for decades now?” Well, one could answer, kind of, but inconsistently and often with the wrong model. And generally, with little attention to the various successes in the hemisphere or to the half of the hemisphere that has largely avoided high levels of conflict and violence to begin with.

A fresh orientation could help to enhance security in key countries, to re-tool America’s security assistance architecture, and to be better prepared to assist when opportunities present themselves, like in Guatemala which has recently transitioned to a more open government.

On the host-country side there are top down and bottom up issues to be worked. The key issues from the top down are:

1. The need for a whole-of-government approach. While there are limits to the changes U.S. assistance can elicit in a sovereign country, small amounts of assistance can be decisive when partner countries have the will to change their system. During the years of Plan Colombia, U.S. security assistance modeled and reinforced with successive Colombian governments the importance of a whole-of-government approach, which all agencies worked closely together under unified direction to implement a common strategy. All hands need to be fully on deck for anything to succeed.   
2. Public-private partnerships are vital. One of the immobilized partners in security restoration is the private sector, whose resources and societal impact can be crucial especially at the city level in restoring and maintaining security. In Haiti, for example, the business class has been sitting out the security crisis, hoping not to get involved, even as it employs security personnel in numbers that dwarf the government’s security forces. Business leaders can be helpful in efforts to establish a culture of lawfulness, to funding security initiatives, and to supporting political reforms that bolster judicial and security force improvements.   
3. Special attention needs to be paid to corruption, especially as it relates to judicial systems.  Between the money available to bribe and the persistent threat of violence, it is no wonder former Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso once publicly commented that his justice system ends in Miami, implying that extradition to the U.S. was the only way to obtain convictions.
4. Security forces need to tier their force structure better, with community-oriented police placed as the most immediate front-line responders. These first responders should be empowered to quickly turn to higher levels of investigative capacity and compulsion when they have outrun their justifiably modest capacity. The higher levels of police need better training, leadership, equipment and mobility to outmatch gangs and drug traffickers. There is also a special need in many countries for a rural force that can keep the peace outside urban areas and deliver security to places where state presence is low. 
5. The role of the military should also be taken into account. Mexico and other countries have been turning to the military as the front line of defense for controlling crime but a better role would probably be for the armed forces to be situated at the high end of security, when the other civilian forces have been outmatched and need backup, or for security of key infrastructure or government presence locations.     

Top-down reforms are necessary but insufficient, however. Latin America suffers from deeply rooted inequalities and pervasive mistrust of state institutions seen as protecting elite interests, not public welfare. Several issues present themselves from the bottom up: 

1. Citizens need to be involved in their own security. Citizens’ lack of agency in justice and security is a pervasive problem in transitional states, even as they bear the brunt of the resultant crime and violence. They need a voice and a vote in how security is provided and how effective it is.  USIP has pioneered a method to bring state officials, community leaders and citizens together to work out the roots of their problems and cooperatively rebuild security. The dialogue process achieves not only those immediate solutions, but it also builds a lasting foundation for trust and future cooperation among citizens, police and other state institutions. 
2. Dialogues should be a part of a larger peacebuilding strategy.  To be most effective these dialogues should be part of a larger strategy that draws from the principles of peacebuilding to break out of the current bloody impasse so many countries in the hemisphere are experiencing and consider things such as transitional or restorative justice to draw away younger gang member, and truces or cease-fires to allow non-kinetic ways for criminal groups to come in from the cold. A sustainable peacebuilding strategy requires strong partnerships among international, national and local actors, including civil society. 
3. Citizens will need to be patient but insistent as they demand new models from leaders amid a robust debate. Their first insistence should be for a well-thought-out and clear strategy that is transparently and openly debated and articulated. Civic participation and empowerment are fundamental to breaking Latin America’s seemingly unending cycles of violence. International backers will also need patience as this complex process plays out.

An Indirect but Decisive Role for the United States

On the U.S. side there is also a compelling need for patience, with a better targeting of the areas where U.S. assistance can have the greatest impact. Individual sanctions and visa revocations are also helpful in cutting ties between criminals and elite actors but should be used cautiously and with a certain level of transparency. The U.S. can also do more to confront its own role in the provision of guns and allowances for money laundering and asset hiding and confront regional government’s reasonable complaints that U.S. consumption is ultimately the heart of much of the problem. 

Given how far many countries still have to go on institutional reforms — and accepting the U.S. role in the need for such reforms — consistently delivered, long-term direct assistance is needed to build tiered security forces that can confront a wide range of threats and to develop effective judicial systems. Prisons also need special attention in assistance programs, often neglected because of optics, but vital to overall success.

The needs are great, and the burden must be carried out by host countries, but the U.S. can be helpful at filling the gaps, leveraging technology, developing especially superior leaders and special skills, and supporting high-end vetted units. Unity of effort internally and externally will be the key to ultimate success. 

Ricardo Zuniga is a founding partner of Dinámica Americas. He was a career member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Service, serving for 30 years in multiple roles, including as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. He was previously a senior advisor for USIP’s Latin America Program.