Members of the Rio de Janeiro Police carry out an operation in Rio de Janeiro in October. The police launched a major operation in two favelas aimed at arresting the leaders of the Red Command, the largest criminal gang in the city, and to halt its territorial expansion. File Photo by Antonio Lacerda/EPA
SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 19 (UPI) — After nearly two decades of relative stability, the advance of organized crime has reshaped security across Latin America.
The expansion of illicit economies, armed disputes over territorial control and rising violence triggered new migration flows and partly explain the region’s political shift toward right-wing governments in 2025.
According to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 39 organized crime groups are operating across Latin America.
The report said these groups have become more interconnected and sophisticated, “coordinating operations not only at the local level but also across borders and even continents.”
One of the main factors behind the expansion of criminal structures is business diversification, said organized crime specialist Hugo Contreras, who holds a doctorate in social complexity sciences and is a researcher at the School of Government at Universidad del Desarrollo.
“Organized groups stopped being just traffickers and adopted a portfolio of activities such as extortion, contract killings, smuggling, arms trafficking and human trafficking,” Contreras told UPI. “That has multiplied and diversified their sources of illicit income, as well as their territorial control and disputes.”
He said the trend has been compounded by institutional weakness, including collapsed prison systems that have turned into logistical hubs for criminal groups and judicial systems ill-prepared to confront the phenomenon.
“There has been an emergence of more aggressive and sophisticated transnational criminal gangs, with international networks, greater financial capacity and increased firepower,” Contreras said.
He added that the situation has been reinforced by “massive migration flows from different conflict regions, which these groups have exploited to conceal their members, recruit new people and expand their criminal activities into other countries.”
Pablo Carvacho, director of research and development at the Center for Justice and Society at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, shared that assessment, noting that organized crime is especially dynamic and adaptable.
“Migratory processes created space for the development of transnational illicit activities such as human trafficking and sexual or labor exploitation, particularly affecting a highly vulnerable group like migrants,” Carvacho told UPI.
“These flows served as an entry point for countries such as Chile, where criminal activity was not as developed as what we are seeing today,” he said.
The new scenario has deeply transformed internal security dynamics across the region, turning local problems into international threats that are more violent and more damaging to social and political stability, Contreras said.
Criminal organizations manage and contest territory, impose their own rules, control prisons and challenge state authority.
“This forces governments to move beyond traditional crime-control strategies and adopt comprehensive responses that combine financial intelligence, border security, international cooperation and prison reform,” he said.
Contreras said the impact varies widely across the region depending on how deeply organized crime has taken root in each country.
In 2025, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil and Haiti ranked among the world’s 10 most dangerous countries based on indicators such as mortality, risk to civilians, geographic spread of conflict and the number of armed groups, according to a conflict index published by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nongovernmental organization known as ACLED.
The report said rising violence has been a common trend across Latin America this year. However, the sharpest deterioration was recorded in those four countries.
In Mexico, the organization linked the surge in violence to factors including an internal war within the Sinaloa cartel following the July 2024 arrest in the United States of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, one of the group’s historic leaders.
In Ecuador, ACLED warned that violence levels are on track to reach record highs in 2025. It said the homicide rate could be the highest in Latin America for a third consecutive year and that gang-related violence has caused more than 3,600 deaths.
In Haiti, gangs have taken advantage of the political instability the country has faced since 2021, expanding their operations from the capital, Port-au-Prince, to other areas.
In a different political context, criminal gangs in Brazil have also fueled major clashes as they fought for territorial control in cities such as Rio de Janeiro. A large-scale police operation in that city targeting the Comando Vermelho, one of the country’s main criminal groups, left 121 people dead.
The rise in violence and organized crime has contributed to at least 10 countries in the region electing right-wing governments in the 2024-2025 period.
Carvacho said more conservative platforms “place greater emphasis on public order and the intensive use of coercive tools, with strategies based on police force, military deployment, harsher criminal penalties and territorial control.”
He said these approaches often rely on emergency measures under states of exception, with rapid executive decisions and reforms, as well as a greater willingness to strengthen ties with foreign intelligence agencies, including those of the United States.
In Carvacho’s view, containing transnational organized crime requires coordination among countries because “emergency policies alone will not stop its advance.”
He said what can truly weaken these organizations is targeting their financial assets and reducing the pool of people, including children and adolescents, vulnerable to recruitment.
“Everything else is treating the symptoms of a disease,” Carvacho said. “It is arriving late to a problem that is not about criminal law but about vulnerability and the lack of opportunities in communities excluded from society. That is where the state must act.”
