From Narco Cartels to Criminal Networks: The Structural Transformation of Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean
Latin America and the Caribbean’s major criminal groups can no longer be understood simply as regional drug trafficking organizations moving cocaine through global markets. That image belongs to an earlier phase. Today, several of these organizations exercise territorial authority, generate revenue from both licit and illicit economies, and shape political life from the ground up. Across the region, they are expanding into strategic sectors, exploiting regulatory weaknesses, and transforming new financial technologies into instruments of concealment and control.
The criminal landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean has entered a more complex and dangerous phase. Cocaine production has reached record levels, and Mexican, Brazilian, Colombian, and Ecuadorian criminal organizations have become deeply embedded in global logistics networks, including major European ports such as Antwerp, Hamburg, Le Havre, Rotterdam, and Valencia. Their resilience no longer depends on violence alone. It rests on the protective systems they build around themselves, the revenue streams they control, and the local authority they accumulate where the state is predatory, selective, or absent.
This is as much a governance problem as it is a security problem. Criminal groups are not simply attacking the state from the outside. In many places, they operate through the everyday machinery of public authority, turning institutional weaknesses into strategic advantages and public office into a source of protection. This constitutes a core element of criminal governance, enabling criminal organizations to absorb law-enforcement pressure, recover from territorial losses, and survive the removal or replacement of their leaders.
In this article, we identify six major transformations. First, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted criminal supply chains in the short term but deepened poverty, weakened state capacity, and expanded informal economies in ways that accelerated criminal expansion once restrictions were lifted. Second, criminal groups diversified their revenue streams across an increasingly wide range of sectors and supply chains. Third, criminal logistics became globalized. Fourth, state responses across the region increasingly favored militarized emergency models capable of reducing visible violence in the short term while leaving criminal finance, corruption, and illicit governance structures largely intact. Fifth, organized crime’s corrosive effect on democratic institutions intensified through the capture of electoral, judicial, municipal, and security institutions. Sixth, a tougher U.S. security posture reshaped the hemisphere through terrorist designations, lethal maritime strikes, coercive diplomacy, deeper operational partnerships, and pressure on governments viewed as insufficiently aligned with Washington’s counter-narcotics and migration-control priorities.
Read the publication
Learn more about this topic in the following studies: Between Borders and States: Illegal Mining and Mercury Trafficking in the Amazon, Amazon Climate Security: Challenges amid the Expansion of Illicit Economies and State Weakness in the Caquetá–Japurá and Puré–Puruê Corridor, and Under the Radar: Territorial and Regulatory Security Risks in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon
