How drug trafficking is (and isn’t) to blame for violence in Latin America

IN 2018 LATIN AMERICA was home to 8% of the world’s population but 37% of its murders. Lockdowns at the start of the covid-19 pandemic briefly pushed homicides down in much of the region, but they quickly rebounded. Most countries in Latin America saw a rise in murders in 2021, according to data published last week by InSight Crime, a site that covers organised crime. Many are quick to blame the violence on the machinations of drug gangs. One high-profile example is the assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, by Colombian mercenaries in July 2021. According to the New York Times Mr Moïse had been planning to hand over a list of suspected drug traffickers to the United States government. To what extent is international drug trafficking to blame for violent crime in Latin America?

The explosion in drug trafficking can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s, first in Colombia and then in Mexico. Within two decades, the cocaine trade in Colombia evolved from a cottage industry to a business which netted Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel $4bn a year. At the same time, homicide rates in the city of Medellín, in north-west Colombia, rose from 44 per 100,000 people in 1979 to 388 in 1991. A “war on drugs” pitted organised-crime lords against security forces and spread the narcotics trade into new areas. Violence increasingly became concentrated on choke points along trafficking routes to the United States, the world’s biggest drug market. As power shifted to Mexican gangs, the border town of Ciudad Juárez became their bloodiest battleground. A study in 2011 estimated that gangs that controlled the drug trade in Central America, the land bridge that connects the cocaine-producing South to the North, were involved in a quarter of all Latin American homicides.

Drug violence is often concentrated in strategic areas. In 2020 Amambay, a Paraguayan department on an important trafficking route, accounted for just 2.4% of the country’s population, but over a quarter of its murders. But increasingly the biggest traffickers are expanding into new parts of the region. Mexican and Brazilian gangs are extending into safer South American countries not previously known for transit routes, such as Chile, where homicide rates rose by nearly 50% between 2016 and 2020. This trend has accelerated during the pandemic. Drug traffickers have proven resilient, but have had to diversify their supply chains, finding new routes around closed borders and new ports to ship drugs from.

Not all the violence is driven by transnational traffickers, however. Much of it originates closer to home. Ecuador was quick to blame Mexicans for its 2,100 gang-related killings in 2021, more than double the number in 2020 and accounting for almost 90% of the country’s violent deaths. Yet the surge in killings seems to have been triggered by the splintering of Los Choneros, Ecuador’s biggest gang, and the ensuing struggle to control the domestic drugs market. The economic fallout from the pandemic is also increasing youth unemployment and inequality and worsening government services—all things known to increase violent crime.

The more powerful a trafficking gang becomes, the less it needs or wants to resort to violence. Killing disrupts business and attracts attention from police. Most sophisticated Mexican gangs now send emissaries abroad with business cards, not bullets. Alliances can quell violence too. El Salvador’s once sky-high murder rate has fallen in recent years, following a truce between its two biggest gangs. Many suspect that the pact is backed by the government. Drug traffickers are to blame for much of Latin America’s violence. But sometimes they conclude that peace is better for business.

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