The Caribbean’s geographic location and countless islands make it a crucial transshipment route for drugs heading to Europe and North America.
Weak governance, endemic corruption, and the influx of illegal firearms have fostered high rates of violence and gang-related crime, while also strengthening organized crime’s roots in the region.
Geography
The Caribbean Sea’s location at the crossroads of North and South America positions it perfectly to play a major role in drug transshipment to both the United States and Europe.
Its countless small, uninhabited islands and cays stretching across more than 1 million square miles are ideal hideouts and stash spots for traffickers of all types.
History
During the 1980s, the Caribbean Sea was the preferred route for Latin America’s drug traffickers, with 75% of all US-bound cocaine transiting through the region, according to a UNODC report. Ensuing US anti-narcotic operations in the Caribbean pushed traffickers towards Central America, which became the primary transit corridor to the United States. By 2010, the proportion of US-bound cocaine traversing the Caribbean dropped below 10%.
However, there have been indications since the early 2010s that the Caribbean route is re-emerging. In 2013, cocaine flow to the United States via the Caribbean reportedly reached its highest levels in a decade. Drug interdiction efforts in Mexico and Central America — including various US-led initiatives — may be behind this shift back to the Caribbean route. In 2020, the US Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that around 24% of all cocaine movement in the Western Hemisphere passed through the Caribbean Sea.
Today, large amounts of cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs transit through the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dutch Caribbean.
The primary methods used by traffickers include shipping drugs in commercial containers, on luxury craft or “go-fast” boats, on private planes, and through commercial flights using human couriers.
Trafficking in the region is facilitated by long coastlines that are difficult to patrol, a flurry of commercial maritime and air traffic that helps conceal illicit cargo, and widespread government and security force corruption.
The remote Caribbean coastlines of mainland countries — such as Central America’s Mosquitia region — are key drug dispatch or transshipment points due to their limited infrastructure and state presence.
While drug production in the region is mostly limited to small-scale marijuana cultivation, Jamaican marijuana has historically flowed to the United States in large quantities.
In addition to the cocaine trade, gang conflicts fueled by illegal firearms have spurred high levels of violence in the Caribbean. There are hundreds of thousands of illegal firearms circulating in the region, many of US origin. In Haiti alone, there are likely at least 270,000 illicit firearms in circulation.
In addition, in places such as the Dominican Republic, drug trafficking organizations pay local groups for their services in narcotics and firearms, feeding a domestic micro-trafficking market and clashes between groups looking to control the trade.
Money laundering is also a prominent criminal activity. The Caribbean is home to a number of tax havens — including the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands — that are exploited by criminals to hide illicit proceeds.
Forced labor and sexual exploitation are severe problems in many Caribbean countries, and victims are trafficked both within the region and beyond.
Criminal Groups
Colombian and Mexican transnational criminal organizations are involved in drug trafficking through the Caribbean, often collaborating with local groups.
Colombian traffickers have historically worked closely with Dominican groups and Jamaican groups. Mexican organizations arrange the shipment of cocaine from Colombia through the Caribbean to the coastal state of Quintana Roo. The Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel have been involved in trafficking in the Dominican Republic in the past as well, but the current influence of Mexican groups in the country is unclear.
Venezuelan trafficking networks have also asserted their control over gold trafficking and contraband in the Dutch Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago.
Today, the Dominican Republic hosts perhaps the most sophisticated drug trafficking groups of any Caribbean nation. Dominican groups collaborate with Colombians and Europeans to coordinate cocaine shipments to Europe and the United States. Historically, Jamaican traffickers have overseen transnational drug flows, although their influence may not be as strong as it once was.
On a local level, Caribbean street gangs are closely linked to the region’s high homicide rates. While most street gangs engage in robberies, extortion, and drug dealing, some have been recruited to serve as middlemen in the international drug trade, receiving cargo to their shores and organizing its shipment on to other nations.
Gangs in the Caribbean have come to exert social control and co-opt the state in a variety of ways. In countries like Jamaica and Haiti, for example, government sectors have established political alliances with local gangs to compensate for the state’s abandonment of certain communities. Trinidad and Tobago’s gangs also perform key social functions, with gang leaders dubbing themselves “community leaders” and controlling job allocation through public works contracts.
Haiti’s gang situation is the Caribbean’s most dire, with gangs controlling the majority of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Gangs have taken advantage of the security crisis in the wake of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 to use Haiti as a hub for drug and arms trafficking.
Security Forces
Many Caribbean nations have limited economic resources, small government budgets, and low levels of public confidence in security forces. This manifests itself in low law enforcement capacity, with national authorities struggling to displace drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and other criminal operations.
Corruption within Caribbean security forces and political elite compounds these issues, allowing criminal organizations to evade law enforcement. Haiti is in the top ten of the world’s most corrupt nations, followed by the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad & Tobago, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. While the region has much work to do to stamp out corruption, it scores far better overall on the index than Latin America.
Because of these limiting factors, regional cooperation against trafficking in the region is key. The Caribbean Community’s Implementation Agency for Crime and Security promotes a collective response to crime threats between member countries.
The United States is also a significant contributor to regionwide security operations. The Caribbean Basin Security Initiative is a US-led aid program started in 2010 and geared towards drug interdiction, port security, and promoting justice reform. It has provided over $900 million in aid to 13 Caribbean nations. The US Southern Command also carries out anti-narcotic operations and air and maritime surveillance in the Caribbean in cooperation with partner countries.
Despite this interdiction assistance, Caribbean leaders have questioned the United States’ commitment to security in the region, citing their unwillingness to take action against the illegal arms trade.
Judicial System
Caribbean countries largely have a poor record in prosecuting criminals and crooked state officials due to weak, corrupt judicial systems. Lack of resources and slow pace of police investigations often lead to a backlog in criminal cases, inhibiting the application of justice, a 2020 United Nations Development Program report found.
As a result, high level criminals are often extradited and tried in the United States. Prominent examples include Dominican trafficker César Peralta, alias “El Abusador,” and the leader of the infamous Jamaican Shower Posse, Christopher Coke, alias “Dudus.”
Prisons
Conditions in many Caribbean prisons are harsh due to inadequate facilities and extreme overcrowding. Pretrial detention is also a major issue because of limited access to legal counsel, arbitrary laws on bail, and the slow pace of the justice system.
High incarceration rates are a problem across the region, with six of the world’s top 15 rates belonging to Caribbean islands.
Haiti has some of the worst prison conditions in the world, with prisons holding three times their intended capacity and only 18% of prisoners having been convicted of a crime. The Bahamas has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and was faulted by a 2021 US State Department report for unsanitary conditions and overcrowding at the country’s notorious Fox Hill Prison.
Some of the first cases of prison gangs arose in Puerto Rican prisons, a model that has since spread to many Latin American nations.