Can anything halt Latin America’s lurch to the right?
The Venezuela incursion might have strengthened populist candidates promising law and order ahead of key elections
Michael Stott in Rio de Janeiro, Ciara Nugent in Santiago and Joe Daniels in Bogotá
Colombia’s newest standard-bearer for the hard right, Abelardo de la Espriella, has pledged to wage a “crusade for the soul of the homeland” against the “communists” in government and the drug mafias and guerrillas terrorising the country.
“I will take an iron fist to crime in all its forms,” says de la Espriella, a brash 47-year-old former criminal defence lawyer, in an interview at his office on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
“Peace can only be achieved through the force of the gun and the law.”
On the campaign trail, de la Espriella has invoked God in a “moral and spiritual” battle to save his Andean nation from the “evil” of the left.
He borrows from other hard-right leaders in Latin America in more than just his message; his choice of a tiger as a symbol evokes Argentine President Javier Milei’s trademark lion, while his neatly trimmed black beard, moustache and sideburns channel El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.
Bukele is the inspiration for many rightwing challengers across the region.
His extraordinary success in transforming El Salvador from one of Latin America’s most murderous countries to one of its safest — albeit through mass incarceration and authoritarian rule — is firing up anti-establishment conservatives across the region just as it enters a major election cycle.
“I don’t remember there being a moment before where so many Latin American countries’ politics seem to be hinging on [voter concerns about crime],” says Will Freeman, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York.
“It’s because of the expansion of the major criminal markets in the region,” he adds.
“The huge increase in the size of the cocaine trade, the boom in illegal gold mining, for a time the wave of human smuggling, and the way that has seeded a lot of new gangs and criminal outfits in different parts of the region that didn’t previously have to deal with this.”
The dramatic capture of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, by US commandos in the early hours of January 3 has, if anything, reinforced the swing to the right in most of the region, pollsters say.
A survey by São Paulo-based pollsters AtlasIntel of more than 11,000 people across the region showed that 60 per cent backed the raid and only 35 per cent disapproved.
Support was strongest in Caribbean, Central American and Andean nations, while in Mexico and Brazil the margin was smaller.
“If anything, a greater focus on Venezuela hurts the Latin American left, rather than helping it,” says Andrei Roman, chief executive of AtlasIntel.
“The predominant view in Latin America is that there should be more US intervention in Venezuela so that the country can re-democratise and get back on a path to economic prosperity.”
De la Espriella and others hope that by mimicking Bukele’s mano dura (heavy hand) on crime, they can defeat incumbents and usher in a wave of Trump-friendly presidents in what some Americans call their “backyard”.
The political terrain seems fertile.
“Crime and violence is clearly the top concern of Latin Americans today,” says Jean-Christophe Salles, Latin America chief executive at pollster Ipsos.
“It is the biggest concern in almost every country.”
Some 55 per cent of Latin Americans name crime and violence as their prime worry, according to Ipsos data, against just 34 per cent worldwide.
In Chile, the figure rises to 62 per cent.
Fear of crime propelled arch-conservative José Antonio Kast to a landslide presidential election victory last month in Chile over a Communist opponent, Jeannette Jara.
His broader rightwing message had failed in two previous elections, but this time he won by focusing on pledges to erect border fortifications, deport illegal migrants and reduce crime.
Kast’s plan involves a crackdown on gangs that his team says is partly inspired by a trip he made to El Salvador last year, where he visited Bukele’s newly built giant prison, the Centre for Confinement of Terrorists (Cecot), which has capacity to hold about 40,000 inmates, many detained indefinitely.
Once he formally takes over in March, Kast plans to toughen prison conditions for gang members, “drastically” increase jail terms, halt a big wave of immigration from Venezuela that he blames for eroding law and order, and expel migrants who have entered illegally.
In a brief interview at his office in Santiago before the election, Kast gestured to a leafy street in the affluent Las Condes neighbourhood, and says that even there, his security cameras had captured carjackings.
“In the past if you went to Peru and Colombia you’d see armed guards and armoured cars, but we never had that in Chile,” he said.
“We want to get back our status as the safest country in the region.”
While Chile remains safe by Latin American standards, the murder rate has more than doubled since 2015, and previously rare crimes like kidnappings, dismemberments and violent carjackings have dominated headlines.
Elizabeth Leyton, a stay-at-home parent who voted for Kast in central Santiago, laments that her family “no longer feels safe” to go out late.
“I want them to kick out all these criminals that have come here from other countries,” she says.
Pensioner José Luís Aguirre, 75, who also voted for Kast, is ready for mano dura policies after a big increase in crime under the outgoing leftwing government.
“Enough of human rights,” he says.
“Be tough with the people who are behaving badly.
If they shoot you, you have to shoot them back.”
Even Costa Rica, a country so peaceful that it decreed the abolition of its army in 1948, has been shaken by record levels of drug-related murders.
Ahead of elections on February 1, its outgoing president, Rodrigo Chaves, appeared with Bukele to lay a foundation stone for Costa Rica’s own version of Cecot, a $35mn maximum security jail project with capacity for 5,100 prisoners.
Laura Fernández, his chosen successor, is leading polls and promising to be even tougher on crime than her mentor.
“Laura is taking a ‘mano dura’ line against narcos,” says one person close to the government.
“She is promoting very conservative values and an anti-woke agenda.”
In Peru, which is set to go to the polls in April, leading presidential contender and former mayor of Lima Rafael López Aliaga is promising to fight what he calls “urban terrorism” with life sentences for serious crimes.
Extortion by gangs demanding regular protection money has become a big worry for Peruvians.
There were 20,705 reported cases of extortion from January last year to September, according to official figures, which is a 29 per cent increase on 2024.
In 2025 there were 2,213 murders, the highest number since 2017 when detailed data collecting began.
“There is a widespread perception in Lima that the city has become unsafe, even in affluent neighbourhoods,” says Rodolfo Rojas, who runs local consultancy Sequoia.
“What people want are results, not judges and prosecutors who guarantee rights for alleged criminals.”
Colombia, a country that has long battled Marxist guerrillas and drug cartels, is due to hold congressional elections in March and a presidential poll in May.
In the latter, de la Espriella has gained the most traction in a crowded conservative field, running at 22 per cent in a poll by Gad3 this month.
The left has united around hard-left senator Iván Cepeda, who leads most national polls and will probably face de la Espriella in a run-off.
Cepeda is the chosen candidate of incumbent leftwing President Gustavo Petro, who is barred by the constitution from seeking a second consecutive term.
De la Espriella’s history as a lawyer who defended one of Maduro’s key allies, Alex Saab, seems not to trouble his supporters.
Jorge Sarmiento, a retired police officer in the western Antioquia province, says he is “the only one who can stop the country going down the drain”.
Sarmiento adds that he worries about violence linked to drug trafficking and illegal gold mining in the region.
“A timid president won’t work here,” he concludes.
Security has now become voters’ top worry in Argentina, a country whose politics have long been dominated by economic woes.
According to polling by consultancy D’Alessio Irol, two-thirds of respondents ranked it as a top concern in December.
President Milei has cast crime as a core part of his “cultural battle” against the left-leaning Peronist movement that has dominated Argentine politics for decades.
Their policies “turned this country into a bloodbath”, the libertarian leader said in October as he announced a penal code reform which, if passed by Congress, would increase sentences for most offences.
In Mexico and Uruguay, leftwing incumbents are cracking down on violent crime to curry favour with voters.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has scrapped her mentor and predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of “hugs, not bullets” in dealing with murderous cartels, instead ordering record seizures of drugs, arrests of high-profile traffickers and expulsions of dozens of cartel bosses to the US.
Uruguay’s leftwing President Yamandú Orsi cited Bukele at a November event as “the example” to study.
“Before, the left didn’t talk about security, we talked about social harmony, because we were afraid to get tied to reactionary concepts.
I said in [my] campaign: security is a fundamental human right that we have to work on.”
In Guatemala, which borders El Salvador and has long battled drug gangs, centre-left President Bernardo Arévalo decreed a 30-day state of emergency after police were killed trying to quell riots and hostage-taking at several jails.
“The state of emergency feels like a serious shift in tone for the notoriously moderate and cautious Arévalo government,” says James Bosworth, a consultant and author of the Latin America Risk Report.
But the biggest test of whether conservatives can ride the crime wave to oust leftwing incumbents will come in Brazil, which holds presidential and congressional elections in October.
Latin America’s biggest nation may prove an exception, says Christopher da Cunha Bueno Garman, Americas managing director at the political risk consultancy Eurasia.
Crime is a top concern but voters also cite poverty and healthcare — traditional strengths of the left — as major worries, Garman notes.
The leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has relatively high approval ratings of around 46 per cent and is a seasoned campaigner, while the right is squabbling over who to pick as candidate following the conviction of former president Jair Bolsonaro on charges of plotting a coup.
“I think it’s a mistake to conclude that because we’re seeing a rightward shift in the region, Brazil is next,” Garman says.
“Lula is a modest favourite to win.”
While the perception of insecurity has grown during Lula’s third term, “you’ve had a 15 to 17 per cent increase in real income in Brazil under the Lula administration and unemployment is at historic lows,” Garman adds.
“So there are reasons to think Brazil won’t follow the rightward shift.”
Regardless of how many Latin American countries turn to rightwing would-be saviours to tackle violent crime, experts caution that the battle against well-financed, well-organised and well-armed mafias is unlikely to be won by mano dura policies alone.
Bukele’s success in El Salvador was aided by the country’s small size, his huge majority in Congress and the fact that the main crime problem was related to gangs rather than drugs.
“Any time a president achieves an 85 per cent approval rating and sustains it for several years you’re going to see copycats,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard University and co-author of the book How Democracies Die.
“You’re going to see people either wishing for a Bukele in their country or portraying themselves as the next Bukele — but actually doing that always, always proves very difficult.”
In Rio de Janeiro, where urban violence is so endemic that crime experts compare it to a war zone, the state’s military police killed 420 civilians in the first 11 months of 2025, including 117 in one day during an operation against suspected drug traffickers.
The bloodbath made headlines around the world, but a poll afterwards showed that most Rio residents backed the police.
The same poll found that 43 per cent of them had personally witnessed an armed robbery in the past three months.
But Robert Muggah, a public security expert who lives in Rio, is critical of the security policies of the city’s rightwing governor, Cláudio Castro.
The city’s problems, Muggah says, stem from a failure “to provide a coherent long-term set of strategies to deal with this challenge”.
“So what we get are these sporadic, hyper-aggressive, militarised, police-led responses, which provide a short-term sugar high for the governor and his support base but do very little to resolve what is an intractable set of challenges,” he adds.
An analysis of official data by Muggah’s team suggests that the security forces will be responsible for nearly a third of all violent deaths in Rio this year.
Such concerns are echoed in Colombia.
Analysts there say that while several conservatives, including de la Espriella, are positioning themselves as tough on crime, they have not come up with convincing solutions.
“None of the candidates, at least thus far, has presented solid or substantive plans about how to deal with insecurity, says Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy programme director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group.
“What we have at the moment is sort of this gut inclination towards a harder approach.”
Organised crime is also infecting politics across the region.
Mexico has one of the world’s highest tolls of political assassinations, mainly at municipal level.
Some 37 candidates were murdered before 2024’s general election, according to security consultancy Integralia.
Mexico’s security minister said a man arrested on suspicion of ordering the killing of Carlos Manzo, the popular mayor of Uruapan in Michoacán province, had links to the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Manzo had previously spoken out against cartel violence.
Muggah says organised crime is “penetrating from below by infiltrating our local politics and influencing the candidates who are selected, or the ways in which voters are voting”, adding that crime mafias are also penetrating more markets, both legal and illicit, and rapidly adopting new technologies.
CFR’s Freeman says he is alarmed at “how crime is becoming a part of electoral politics . . . it’s actually becoming a tool that candidates use, especially at the local level, to win”.
He cites the example of a focus group for a candidate running in a large city in the interior of São Paulo state.
If voters were told the candidate was linked to the PCC, one of Brazil’s biggest drug cartels, it increased support.
“The reason was that voters believed this person would be better at guaranteeing order.”
Freeman’s disturbing conclusion is that some of those who say they are very concerned about crime and violence “might not necessarily oppose a crime-backed candidate”.
“They would just want a very competent one.”
Additional reporting by Jude Webber in Dublin and John Bartlett in Santiago
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