Why Transnational Crime Is Different in the Americas
What, if anything is unique about the transnational crime and illicit goods issues policy makers face in regard to Central and South America?
Popular television series and Hollywood films frequently portray Central and South America through images of cartels, narcotics trafficking, corruption, and violence. While these portrayals often contain elements of truth, they also tend to simplify highly complex regional realities into dramatic and sensationalized narratives that rarely capture the broader structural conditions sustaining transnational crime and illicit goods trafficking across the region.
What distinguishes transnational crime and illicit goods issues in Central and South America is the concentration and interaction of multiple reinforcing dynamics, including territorial criminal governance, institutional weakness, informal economies, globalization, militarized security responses, and strategic proximity to major narcotics markets in the United States. These dynamics are further intensified by the growing diversification and convergence of illicit markets, as criminal organizations increasingly expand into activities such as human trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, cybercrime, and illicit financial operations. Organized crime in the region often extends beyond participation in illicit markets to become a durable source of territorial control and political influence, capable of challenging state authority and shaping local economic and governance structures.
The following examples illustrate how these overlapping conditions have shaped the region’s transnational crime and illicit trafficking environment.
Territorial Criminal Governance and State Competition
In several parts of Central and South America, organized crime has evolved into systems that seek influence over territory, populations, transportation corridors, and local institutions. In Mexico, cartels have competed for control over production zones, border crossings, and strategic transit corridors connected to narcotics trafficking into the United States. Organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel developed strong local roots and influence over economic and social life in parts of the Golden Triangle, a mountainous region spanning portions of the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua that has long served as one of Mexico's principal narcotics-producing areas. Meanwhile, Los Zetas relied heavily on intimidation, territorial expansion, and extreme violence to dominate transport routes and border regions. La Familia Michoacana further demonstrated how criminal organizations can blend territorial violence with ideological messaging, social programs, and infiltration of local government and police institutions. In many cases, violence functions strategically to defend territory, secure trafficking routes, intimidate rivals, and pressure local populations and state authorities rather than serving as an end in itself (Fuerte Celis, Pérez Lujan, and Cordova Ponce 2019).
Within these systems, territory itself becomes directly tied to economic survival and organizational continuity. Drug-producing groups seek control over cultivation and storage zones, while transportation and distribution networks prioritize highways, ports, airports, and logistical corridors facilitating the movement of illicit goods. Border-oriented cartels place particular emphasis on access routes into the United States, the world’s largest narcotics market, where control over crossing points can generate enormous profits. This territorial logic helps explain why violence in Mexico historically concentrated around border states, trafficking corridors, and strategic urban centers.
These conditions transformed organized crime from a conventional law-enforcement issue into a broader governance challenge in which criminal organizations compete with the state for authority, legitimacy, and territorial control.
Weak Institutions, Corruption, and Institutional Penetration
Weak institutional capacity and governance deficiencies have created conditions that allow transnational criminal organizations to expand regionally and establish durable cross-border networks. Research on cooperation among illicit actors suggests that environments characterized by limited regulatory oversight, weak state capacity, and established trafficking infrastructures are more likely to facilitate collaboration among criminal organizations and other illicit networks. Cross-border trafficking routes, uneven law-enforcement coordination, and porous regional boundaries further increase opportunities for criminal groups operating throughout Central and South America (Perliger and Palmieri 2022).
Governance challenges have also complicated efforts to combat organized crime. In many parts of the region, corruption extends beyond isolated incidents of bribery and reflects deeper institutional weaknesses that reduce accountability and hinder effective enforcement. High-profile corruption scandals in countries such as Honduras and Guatemala exposed longstanding vulnerabilities within political, judicial, and law-enforcement institutions, contributing to declining public confidence in government and the rule of law. Similar governance challenges have enabled criminal organizations to exploit institutional gaps, maintain access to illicit markets, and strengthen their position within broader transnational trafficking networks (Schwartz 2015).
These institutional weaknesses are frequently reinforced by limited public trust, ineffective criminal justice systems, and deficiencies within policing institutions. Inadequate professional training, corruption, low compensation, prison overcrowding, and weak oversight mechanisms have often reduced the effectiveness of long-term crime-reduction initiatives.
Globalization, Informal Economies, and Urbanization
Globalization and rapid urbanization reshaped the transnational crime environment across Central and South America by increasing the movement of goods, people, capital, and information across national boundaries. Expanding trade networks, migration flows, financial integration, and urban growth strengthened regional economies while simultaneously creating new opportunities for organized crime, informal markets, and illicit trafficking networks to expand alongside legitimate economic activity.
The growth of informal economies played a particularly important role in this process. Informal economies encompass a broad range of economic activities operating outside formal regulatory and taxation systems, including unregistered labor, black-market commerce, informal transportation services, underground financial transactions, and other unofficial commercial networks. Across many Latin American cities, rapid urban expansion, uneven development, weak infrastructure, and inconsistent state presence created environments in which licit and illicit activities increasingly intersected. These conditions often provided criminal organizations with recruitment opportunities, logistical support, informal financial channels, and localized protection networks that proved difficult for governments to monitor and regulate effectively (Baisotti, 2022).
Urbanization further intensified these dynamics. Major cities such as Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, and Buenos Aires became increasingly integrated into global economic systems while continuing to experience significant social inequality, fragmented development, and expanding informal settlements. Criminal organizations benefited from access to transportation infrastructure, ports, trade corridors, financial systems, and international commercial networks while embedding themselves within local economies and communities. In this sense, the same processes that facilitated economic growth and regional integration also expanded opportunities for transnational criminal activity, creating policy environments in which governments must simultaneously promote economic openness while addressing complex governance and security challenges.
Militarization and the Limits of Security-Centered Responses
Faced with persistent violence, expanding criminal organizations, and growing public demands for security, many governments across Central and South America adopted “iron fist” (mano dura) approaches emphasizing militarized policing, harsher sentencing practices, and expanded incarceration. These strategies sought to reassert state control through aggressive enforcement measures and visible demonstrations of security capacity. While such policies often generated short-term political support, they frequently produced limited institutional improvements and placed additional strain on already overburdened criminal justice systems (Cafferata and Scartascini 2021).
The growing influence of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) illustrates how criminal organizations adapted to intensified security environments by expanding regionally, diversifying operations, and adopting increasingly militarized tactics. Originally concentrated in Brazil, the PCC expanded aggressively into Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina while competing for control over trafficking routes previously associated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The organization carried out heavily armed operations using assault rifles, explosives, armored vehicles, and coordinated attacks resembling paramilitary-style operations rather than conventional organized crime activity (Farah and Babineau 2019).
In Paraguay, the PCC's expansion was linked to increasingly violent attacks, including the so-called "robbery of the century" in Ciudad del Este, where heavily armed operatives conducted diversionary assaults while targeting armored transport operations. Similar patterns emerged following the demobilization of the FARC in Colombia, where fragmentation and competition over trafficking routes created opportunities for new criminal actors to expand territorially rather than significantly reducing illicit activity overall (Farah and Babineau 2019). These developments demonstrate how security-centered approaches often pressure criminal organizations to adapt, fragment, and militarize rather than fully dismantling the broader illicit systems that sustain them.
Regional Convergence and Policy Complexity
The transnational crime environment across Central and South America increasingly reflects the regional convergence of interconnected criminal systems rather than isolated national-level problems. Over the past decade, organizations expanded beyond traditional strongholds such as Mexico and Colombia into countries including Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, and Argentina. Ecuador, for example, emerged as a major cocaine transit hub where organizations such as Los Choneros and Los Lobos compete violently for territorial control while cooperating with Mexican cartels. At the same time, weak border enforcement, expanding trafficking infrastructure, and regional criminal cooperation increasingly linked local criminal environments into broader transnational systems (Polga-Hecimovich 2025).
These developments illustrate how organized crime in parts of Latin America frequently functions simultaneously as a security threat, governance challenge, economic system, and transnational political problem rather than simply a conventional criminal issue.
Conclusion
The transnational crime landscape across parts of Central and South America presents policymakers with a unique combination of challenges shaped by corruption, informal economies, regional smuggling routes, uneven state presence, and competition for control of strategically important territory. Criminal enterprises in this region function within interconnected systems that span political, economic, and social spheres while continuously adapting to enforcement efforts and changing market conditions.
In many parts of the region, organized crime has become a durable feature of the local landscape. Trafficking organizations move across borders, expand into new illicit markets, cultivate political protection, and establish influence within communities where state authority is limited or inconsistent. Efforts that disrupt one trafficking route, criminal group, or revenue stream are often followed by adaptation, displacement, or replacement. This persistence helps explain why the region continues to present such difficult policy challenges despite decades of enforcement campaigns. Long-term progress depends on stronger institutions, reduced corruption, regional cooperation, and efforts aimed at addressing the conditions that allow illicit economies to endure.
References
Baisotti, P. (Ed.). (2022). New global cities in Latin America and Asia: Welcome to the twenty-first century. University of Michigan Press.
Cafferata, F. G., & Scartascini, C. (2021). Combating crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. In What public policies do citizens want? Inter-American Development Bank.
Farah, D., & Babineau, K. (2019). A strategic overview of Latin America: Identifying new convergence centers, forgotten territories, and vital hubs for transnational organized crime (Strategic Perspectives No. 28). Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University Press.
Fuerte Celis, M. del P., Pérez Lujan, E., & Cordova Ponce, R. (2019). Organized crime, violence, and territorial dispute in Mexico (2007–2011). Trends in Organized Crime, 22, 188–209.
Perliger, A., & Palmieri, M. (2022). Mapping connections and cooperation between terrorist and criminal entities. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 45(5–6), 335–347.
Polga-Hecimovich, J. (2025, July 22). Organized crime and security in Latin America. GIS Reports Online.
Schwartz, R. A. (2015, December 11). Confronting government corruption in Guatemala and Honduras. Scholars Strategy Network.