Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The international weekly magazine InSight Crime reviewed 2024 concerning organized crime in Latin America and its most relevant activities. The research yielded a surprising (and not so surprising) conclusion: organized crime became involved in the politics of its countries as never before.
The magazine concluded that organized crime represents a real and growing danger to democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its involvement in numerous electoral and political processes throughout the region confirmed this.
According to Insight Crime, some criminal groups directly threatened candidates to force them to withdraw their candidacy or murder them without warning. They also murdered public officials. These actions impeded the expression and free will of the citizens who went to the polls. In other cases, criminal networks operated to corrupt polling station officials or obstructed the development of the processes to ensure the victory of candidates sympathetic to their purposes.
In Haiti, criminal groups forced the Prime Minister to resign and took control of the entire electoral machinery to dictate the final results.
In Ecuador, the country faced a situation of dual power: the power of criminal elements and the power of the President and the State. The criminals sought to assassinate mayors, judges, prosecutors, and councilors to intimidate the State in its decision-making.
In Venezuela, President Maduro used his alliance with criminal networks to intimidate voters ahead of the July 2024 presidential election. After the election, he used the same criminal elements to suppress protests against electoral fraud.
In Guatemala, criminal networks used the country’s federal prosecutor’s office to overturn the election of the winning candidate. After the elections, these same illegal structures have continued to try to overturn the election result.
In Mexico, the electoral process was shrouded in a festival of violence perpetrated by criminal actors. To maintain their networks of political support and sustain their illicit activities, criminal elements murdered, attacked, and threatened dozens of candidates and public officials during the course of the process. A criminal commando even stopped the vehicle carrying the winning candidate in the election, engaging her in conversation in an attempt to confirm agreements.
A few days after President Sheinbaum took office in Mexico, a newly elected mayor was beheaded to remind people that agreements are kept, on pain of suffering the consequences.
In the months following the 2024 electoral processes, several countries have been shaken by criminal violence linked to internal political processes. In Chile, concern about criminal activities is now the main concern of its citizens, and it has to do with the presence of the Venezuelan-inspired Aragua Train in Chilean territory.
In Argentina, President Milei has proposed fighting crime with the army on the streets, with a discourse very similar to the one López Obrador used to justify the militarization of Mexico.
Uruguay’s political forces have reached a consensus on the use of repression to combat the country’s growing criminal activity.
El Salvador is already famous for the extra-legal use of law enforcement to subjugate the criminal elements of the Mara Salvatrucha in their country, with a full range of human rights violations.
Two presidents in the region were involved in accusations of having a direct relationship with criminal elements in their respective countries. One is President Xiomara Castro of Honduras, after the publication of a narco-video involving her family in drug trafficking deals.
The second case is that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador when it was published that US authorities had investigated whether his campaigns had received money from drug trafficking.
If we add to all this the recent accusation by President Petro of Colombia involving the ELN guerrillas with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, the picture is complete.
Drug trafficking operates politically throughout Latin America to impose itself, and the danger to democracy and the rule of law is confirmed. Democrats must act accordingly.
@rpascoep
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