Text: Josefina Salomón Ilustration: Jonathan Gómez
International organisations making inroads in Latin America, changes in cocaine markets giving way to the expansion of synthetic drugs, and regional groups taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of migrants. These are some of the new criminal dynamics that investigative journalist and member of the In.Visibles network of experts, Douglas Farah has identified as part of what he calls ‘the fourth transnational criminal wave’.
In a conversation with In.Visibles, he reflects on the present and future of violence and criminality in Latin America and the effectiveness of public policies.
In.Visibles (IV): What are the main changes you have identified regarding criminal dynamics in Latin America?
Douglas Farah (DF): First, the entry of groups from outside the region, including the Italian ‘Ndrangheta, the Albanian mafias, groups from Turkey. These are groups that introduce new markets and new methodologies. This is partly because the drug market has changed dramatically. In the United States, cocaine consumption has dropped by 50% while it has greatly increased in Europe and Latin America. A kilo of cocaine today is worth about US$17,000 in Miami, US$40,000 in Madrid, as much as US$70,000 in Eastern European countries, and in the region of US$250,000 in Australia. Meanwhile, in the United States, synthetic drugs, which are much more difficult to control, harder to intercept and the transactions are more complex to trace, are taking over.
A third factor has to do with irregular migration, which is used by criminal groups like the Tren de Aragua to expand.
IV: You have just visited Chile, a country where the Tren de Aragua took advantage of migratory flows to expand. What other factors make Chile an attractive country for criminal organisations?
DF: Chile offers many advantages that are attractive to criminal groups. It has very good ports, which are fundamental hubs, mainly for synthetic drugs and the precursors needed to produce them. Chile has very good access to the Pacific and an efficient road network, plus their borders are not particularly well controlled, because the country was not prepared for the kind of criminal phenomenon they are seeing now.
They also have a banking system with access to the world, they have a visa waiver with the United States, which means that if you get a Chilean passport, you can enter and leave the United States without a visa.
IV: The new criminal dynamics we have seen in Chile have sparked new outbreaks of violence, which is one of the main characteristic of organised crime in Latin America.
DF: The figures for violence in Latin America are chilling, even though this is a region that doesn’t have any active wars at the moment. This indicates that local groups have control over territory and that this is what they have to offer. So, if you are from the Albanian mafia, for example, and you want to enter Guayaquil (in Ecuador), you can’t just go in there and open an office, you have to go in with someone who can guarantee the security of the area and show you how things work. These groups are fighting on the ground for control of the most strategic routes on behalf of much larger structures. Once they take control, the violence goes down, until someone arrives who wants to dispute that control. One could almost map the routes, the way different groups take over territories, by looking at the peaks of violence.
IV: How does this type of violence affect marginalised populations?
DF: The people who live in the barrios are the most affected because in order to advance their territorial control, the groups use violence, extortion and kidnapping. Now we are seeing a lot of recruitment of younger and younger children. Before, for example, in Central America, the Mara Salvatrucha would only recruit people over the age of 15, which was still terrible, but now you see 11-year-olds with guns. When it comes to selling drugs, you see kids as young as 8, 9 or 10 being deployed as lookouts. The cultural shift that all this is going to bring about is tremendous.
IV: And when you add economic crises to all of that, communities become even more vulnerable.
DF: Yes, of course. We were recently in Guayaquil (Ecuador) and there are sectors where extortion is so widespread that many businesses are leaving. This means higher unemployment, which generates a very strong negative cycle, also related to the absence of the state. So, when people have no support and they are offered money to do something, many have no choice but to accept it.
IV: You have said that the problem with current government strategies is that they do not take these new dynamics into account. What kind of strategies could be effective?
DF: At the moment I don’t see a functional model, but pieces that could eventually be part of a wider strategy. The way Italy uses prison in a more focused way against the mafia and not like Bukele’s model of mass incarceration in El Salvador, for example, or Colombia, where the State entered communities with health, education, judges, police, to take back control of territories that had been occupied by the FARC. But these models are not easy to develop and implement and are very costly.
IV: Prisons, which in many countries play a key role in the way crime organizations operate and expand, seem to be a great focus of current strategies.
DF: In most Latin American countries, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, transnational crime organizations and local crime groups have discovered that it is safer to be inside prison than outside, which is one of the key points in this new wave we are seeing.
At the same time, when states don’t have resources, it’s very difficult for them to say: Let’s spend millions of dollars fixing the prison system.
IV: Some analysts say that a possible long-term strategy against organised crime is the regularisation of illicit drugs.
DF: All the studies I have seen over the years on drug use in all societies show that from indigenous groups in the Amazon region, to the United States, Europe and even Mongolia, there is a percentage of the population that uses drugs, which is more or less 10%. So, one can focus efforts on controlling everything or on supporting that 10% to stop using drugs, or to control this thing in a regularised way so that it does not affect the rest of the population.
So, I think we have to rethink the approach to drugs, at least for drugs that are not so strong. Because repression hasn’t worked for 50 years.
IV: I imagine that over the years you have seen examples of public policies that do work.
DF: In Medellin (Colombia), which is the place where many criminals like Pablo Escobar came from, the state made a great effort to enter certain communities with health, education and projects for young people. And there, the level of unemployment, disaffection and violence dropped dramatically. The problem is that it only lasted a few years, and although it had a big impact, it didn’t last long enough to generate permanent changes.
But the most impressive phenomenon I have seen was when I was in Africa, with the child soldiers after the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. There were a lot of boys who had been child soldiers, some as young as nine years old. Convincing the communities they came from to take them back was a really impressive thing. We are talking about boys who had violently killed their own parents, their own siblings, horrible things, and with the support of the community they managed to get out of it. For me it was the most impressive example that it is possible to deal with things much worse than marijuana use.
So, I think there are positive models to follow, but these projects have to be supported by society as a whole, they cannot be led by states alone. States simply do not have the capacity to lead on these projects alone.
IV: Finally, what is your outlook for the future?
DF: I think Latin America is headed for a very difficult period. We are between what comes across as a very attractive form of authoritarianism, I would say ideologically agnostic, with people like Bukele, Bolsonaro, Trump, Milei, whose ideology is to stay in power and, on the other hand, the rule of law. The lack of state capacity and the phenomenon brought by these new extra-regional groups of increasing and accelerating the processes that lead to corruption in the region are going to generate a very difficult future.
I believe that at some point Latin America will find models that more or less work, that meet the expectations of its population, but they will have to emerge from society itself because neither external forces nor the political classes are going to do it.
This interview has been summarised and edited for clarity.
