The inexorable rise of Latin America’s drug cartels
With the global cocaine business booming as never before, organised crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities
Michael Stott in Ourique, Michael Pooler in São Paulo, Ciara Nugent in Montevideo and Christine Murray in Colima
A drug-trafficking prisoner at Altiplano maximum-security prison near Mexico City; a military helicopter patrols in Culiacán, Sinaloa state, Mexico; a worker holds coca paste in rural Colombia © FT montage/Getty/Reuters/BloombergOver the past century, the Ticuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracts of the vast rainforest.
But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before.
“Drones were flying around this area last year,” says Major Jonatas Soares, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of Ourique, about 1,100km west of the city of Manaus.
Drug traffickers, he adds, “were stopping off there, storing their cocaine and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey”.
Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash.
One of the world’s largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforest, the upper Amazon has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest-growing global market.
Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say, tonnes of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighbouring Peru and Colombia through the Amazon to Manaus and the port city of Belém for export to Europe and Africa.
Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver, or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats.
At the other end of the scale, semi-submersible craft, dubbed “narco-subs”, capable of carrying several tonnes of drugs have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia and Peru.
“Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for $300 a kilo and then selling a refined kilo for €60,000 [in Europe],” says Soares.
“That changes the life of the guy who’s trying his luck bringing it.”
The global cocaine business is booming as never before.
Europe’s drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that it has overtaken the US as the biggest cocaine market, while the narcos are now hooking new users in the Middle East and Asia.
Flush with money, Latin America’s cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities.
“We think 2024 was the most lucrative year ever for organised crime in Latin America,” says Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime, which tracks illicit activity in the region.
“This was driven principally by three criminal economies.
The first is cocaine.
Lagging not far behind that is gold . . . number three is human smuggling and human trafficking.”
Drug-related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics-producing nations of Peru, Colombia and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched.
Today, such violence has become a feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens Costa Rica and Uruguay, a nation of 3mn people sometimes hailed as the “Switzerland” of Latin America because of its relative peace and prosperity.
Organised crime “has become the main threat to the institutional stability of our nations”, says Laura Chinchilla, former president of Costa Rica and an expert on regional security.
“No Latin American country today can escape this.”
Some of the larger players are so powerful they challenge even the biggest states, forging links with long-established organised crime groups in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars of profits.
At the heart of Latin America’s vast criminal enterprises is cocaine, by far the most profitable illegal business.
“Production, seizures and use of cocaine all hit new highs in 2023, making cocaine the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market,” said the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in its latest annual report.
“Illegal production skyrocketed to 3,708 tonnes, nearly 34 per cent more than in 2022.”
In Colombia, the world’s biggest producer, cocaine production rocketed 53 per cent from 2022 to 2023.
A senator and presidential hopeful, Miguel Uribe, was shot in June at a rally in Bogotá and later died of his wounds, raising fears that the Andean nation might relapse into the cocaine-fuelled political violence which scarred it in the 1980s and 1990s.
But cocaine is only part of the picture.
Experts say Latin America’s organised crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses robust enough to absorb a cyclical downturn in one area, like a legal conglomerate.
“Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at . . . the scale of national GDPs, with none of the burdens of a state,” says Ricardo Zúniga, a former senior US state department and White House official for Latin America.
“They’re operating across borders in countries with legal systems that were built for a past age.”
This combination of illicit businesses represents what Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants, a Washington-based security research company, describes as the new model of Latin American mafias.
“They’re no longer drug-trafficking organisations,” he says.
“They will move anything that transits their area of control.
So if you need gold, they can move the gold for you.
If you need cocaine, fine.
If you want to move migrants, fine, if you need to move weapons, fine.
You have all of these new markets opening up.”
The direct costs of crime and violence in Latin America were estimated at 3.4 per cent of GDP in 2022 by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) — equal to nearly 80 per cent of the region’s entire public education budget.
But is it too late to turn the tide at a time when the US, long the global leader in fighting drug crime, is increasingly moving towards unilateral military action to confront the cartels, rather than joint action with the countries of the region?
Officers from Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Secretariat guard a stash of drugs seized during an operation in Asunción in July © Cesar Olmedo/ReutersTrump has designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against them, the New York Times reported this month.
It said the order provided an official basis for direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.
Spy drones are now flying over Mexico to gather information on narcos and US air and naval forces have been deployed to the southern Caribbean to step up the fight against traffickers, according to news reports.
The US state department has offered a $50mn reward for information leading to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of being one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers.
Yet Trump has focused mainly so far on the threat from Mexican trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, because it has caused the death of so many Americans — around 300,000 in the past five years.
The prospect of unilateral US military strikes on drug gangs has alarmed Latin American governments, who fear violations of national sovereignty.
“It’s really hard to be optimistic,” says Insight Crime’s McDermott.
“Love Washington or hate Washington, the US was always the only player that thought about transnational organised crime strategically and then cajoled, persuaded and occasionally bullied Latin American nations to work together.
Those days are gone.”
In the quiet, low-rise neighbourhood of Villa Española, just outside central Uruguay’s Montevideo, every few minutes young men on motorbikes zoom down the road.
Others sit on chairs outside houses, keeping watch for police.
Once or twice a week, residents say, the calm erupts into shoot-outs.
“For two years it’s been like this, happening day and night and you never know when,” says a mother of two who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.
“They drive up outside a house and shoot inside or they meet in cars on the road and let rip.
They don’t care if kids or anyone else is around.”
As organised crime dynamics have shifted across the continent, coastal Uruguay has become a transit hub for cocaine exports to Europe.
The presence of tonnes of white powder worth millions of dollars has fuelled violent turf wars between tiny local gangs in Montevideo and elsewhere, often for territories only a few blocks wide.
“In the last few years Uruguay has gone from being a port through which drugs are transported to a place where they are stored,” says Emiliano Rojido, security adviser to Uruguay’s centre-left government.
The past five years have collectively been the most violent in Uruguay’s history, as authorities failed to contain a surge in murders that began seven years ago.
There were 41 per cent more homicides in 2024 than a decade earlier.
Though officials are divided over how many murders are caused by organised crime, grisly stories flooding Uruguayan media have shaken the country’s sense of exceptionalism.
In the past 12 months, a one-year-old baby was killed when gunmen opened fire on his home, a 28-year-old drug dealer was shot dead as he played a match at a local football club, and an affluent stretch of Montevideo’s seaside rambla was stunned by a daytime gunfight.
“We are not used to seeing dismemberments or hit jobs in Uruguay, and while they aren’t the majority of cases, they are very striking for people,” Rojido says.
In Brazil, the nature of gang activity has transformed in recent years.
For a long time its drug gangs were not considered major players in the intercontinental narcotics trade, unlike the notorious cartels of other Latin nations.
Officials liked to portray their country as the victim of gangs from neighbouring nations who took advantage of its vast territory to smuggle their drugs out to other markets.
But over the past decade, two homegrown cartels with extensive international connections have come to rival those in Mexico for heft.
The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), which began in the jails of São Paulo, has operatives in 28 countries primarily involved in the drugs trade, according to a survey by the state’s prosecutors, and has forged links with Albanian and Italian mafias.
The Rio-based Comando Vermelho (CV) follows close behind. In a testament to its geographic reach, its initials are spray-painted on buildings throughout the rough jungle town of Tabatinga on the border with Colombia.
Investors and chief executives in Brazil have privately expressed alarm at the rapid growth of organised crime in a country with relatively little experience of nationally co-ordinated action against organised crime, which tends to be fought at the state level.
“Brazil has never faced a national-level cartel, and now they’re looking at one that has already very deep roots into municipal governments on the major drug routes,” says former US official Zúniga.
“And they’re integrated into the Brazilian economy.”
Traffickers are increasingly penetrating legitimate businesses to launder money; a board member of a Brazilian company tells how an acquaintance was forced to sell a sugar mill in the country’s industrial heartland to a PCC-linked operative after receiving threats.
“If the Brazilian state does not change its stance in relation to the growth of the PCC, we could become a narco-state,” says Lincoln Gakiya, the São Paulo state prosecutor leading the fight against the cartel.
In May, a US delegation travelled to Brasília to warn the leftwing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva about the negative consequences if the US were to designate the PCC and the CV as foreign terrorist organisations, according to a person familiar with the talks.
These include financial sanctions on individuals or companies dealing with the groups.
“Did the Brazilians get it?
They really didn’t,” says the person.
Brazil’s justice ministry insists that combating organised crime is “one of its greatest commitments”.
The department says its enforcement actions so far this year had confiscated R$4.1bn ($755mn) from criminals but did not comment on a possible US designation of the PCC and the CV.
Should Brazil fail to check the cartels, Mexico shows what the future might look like.
Its organised crime groups, led by the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG), operate with impunity in around a third of the country’s territory, according to an assessment by the head of US Northern Command.
Drug bosses have unleashed a bloodbath.
Around 45,000 people a year are killed or disappeared, mostly presumed dead.
By comparison the entire European Union, with a population nearly three and a half times greater, recorded fewer than 4,000 murders in 2023.
Prisoners wanted in the US for ties to drug-trafficking groups are led aboard a plane at Toluca airport on the outskirts of Mexico City this month © Gabinete de Seguridad de Mexico/ReutersOnce a peaceful Pacific beach destination, the Mexican state of Colima had the highest homicide rate of any state in the country for eight of the past nine years and is on track to top the ranking again this year.
It also has the highest number of mass graves per capita in the country, many in the rolling green hills at the edge of the state.
Colima state is home to one of Mexico’s largest ports, Manzanillo, which handles 40 per cent of the country’s maritime container traffic and is a key entry point for Chinese chemicals used to make fentanyl.
That has made it a battleground for the Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG.
“What cartels want is to control the port,” says local crime reporter Roberto Macías Cruz.
To achieve this, crime gangs send their “warriors” to come out and fight, he adds.
This fits a pattern across the region, experts say.
“Ports have become very important because you can’t move tonnes of cocaine from Brazil to western Europe by flying small aircraft like you could to the United States,” says IBI’s Farah.
Citizens across Latin America are demanding answers to the problem.
Some 52 per cent of people in Latin America’s six biggest nations named crime and violence as their top worry, according to an Ipsos poll in July, far ahead of traditional worries such as unemployment or poverty.
Chinchilla says the frustration is leading to two extremes of policy in the region: one which “simply prescribes more jail for everyone” and the other which “just adapts to new forms of criminal governance . . . because attacking it would generate violence”.
In Colombia, where leftwing President Gustavo Petro introduced a policy of “total peace” with armed groups, critics say the government has in effect abandoned large tracts of the country to drug mafias and dissident guerrilla armies.
Petro personally favours legalising cocaine.
He claimed last February that the highly addictive drug, which was involved in the deaths of 29,449 Americans in 2023, was “no worse than whisky”.
If offered in shops “it would sell like wine”.
At the other end of the spectrum is El Salvador.
Hard-right President Nayib Bukele has alarmed rights activists but delighted admirers across the Americas with a ruthless crackdown on gang crime that has put around 1.6 per cent of the adult population behind bars.
Ecuador’s conservative president Daniel Noboa is trying to copy some of Bukele’s methods and Bukele-style politicians are running for election across the region.
Within Latin America, ideological divisions and personal animosity make collaboration between presidents almost impossible, though regional development banks such as the IDB and the CAF have promoted security initiatives and research on policies to tackle organised crime.
“The big challenge to states is to come up with non-repressive, institutional . . . frameworks within democracies as opposed to the Bukele model, where you just put everybody in prison and hope they all die,” says IBI’s Farah.
“But that’s a longer-term process than a lot of countries are going to want to engage in.
They just don’t have the time and resources and political will.”
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