As a growing number of people fled their homes across Latin America and the Caribbean in 2024, migrant smuggling completed its transformation from a tertiary criminal economy to a major revenue stream for some of the region’s most powerful organized crime groups.
This criminal shift is happening at the same time that organized crime groups are themselves one of several major drivers of irregular migration, pushing many from their homes amid ongoing fights for control of this and other criminal activities like drug trafficking and extortion rackets.
This article is part of our Criminal GameChangers series for 2024. Read the other articles in the series here.
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As migrants flee this organized crime-related violence and other push factors like environmental devastation and economic uncertainty, criminal groups have cashed in. These networks profit not just from smuggling people displaced by their operations, but also through sophisticated extortion and kidnapping rings that have made the migrant economy one of their biggest profit makers.
“The abuse of migrants as a form of criminal activity has taken on increased significance,” said Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “As the enforcement system has ratcheted up tremendously, migrants have effectively been led straight into the hands of smugglers and become much more reliant on them.”
As migrant flows through the Darién Gap reached historic levels, Colombia’s Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia – AGC) seized near-total control over the migrant economy in the region, transforming this perilous jungle crossing into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
“The [migrant economy] has become their primary source of revenue [in this area of Colombia],” said Caitlyn Yates, an expert on migration in this region. “Even the trafficking of cocaine has taken a backseat.”
This dense stretch of rainforest, covering over 575,000 hectares between Colombia and Panama, has witnessed a dramatic surge in crossings since 2021. In 2024, more than 265,000 migrants traversed this unforgiving terrain, making the Darién one of the hemisphere’s most heavily trafficked routes.
Colombians have become the second-largest group migrating irregularly through the Darién Gap, according to data from Colombia’s migration agency that was processed by the Resource Center for Conflict Analysis (Centro de Recursos para el Análisis de Conflictos – CERAC). President Gustavo Petro’s flagship security policy, known as “Total Peace,” has seen negotiations collapse with some of the country’s largest criminal groups, leading more than 17,000 Colombians to traverse this treacherous jungle path in 2024, according to Panama’s migration agency.
On the Colombian side of the gap, the AGC holds a monopoly over the criminal underworld, controlling key migrant corridors in northern Chocó and parts of northern Antioquia. The AGC generates revenue from the migrant economy primarily by extorting formal and informal businesses, imposing a “tax” of roughly 10% on their profits. This includes boat companies that ferry migrants across the Gulf of Urabá, guides who lead migrants through the Darién to the Panamanian border, and local hotels, restaurants, street vendors, and other businesses catering to migrants.
The AGC has also expanded into more direct involvement in migrant smuggling, creating networks of subcontractors who offer migration packages, provide security on the Colombian side of the Darién, and ensure migrants reach their destinations.
“It’s significantly safer if you’re a migrant to be moved by the [AGC] than it is to be more or less on your own,” Yates told InSight Crime. “Their model is, ‘We’re going to protect you so that we protect our business.’”
Last year, more than half a million migrants crossed the Darién. Taxes on these networks and transportation packages alone could have generated between $17.5 million and $25 million, according to estimates from InSight Crime. Estimates made by other organizations like Human Rights Watch suggest those revenues may be double that.
Including extortion fees levied on local businesses, the AGC’s total annual income from the migration economy could easily surpass $100 million. As this revenue stream has come to rival the group’s drug trafficking earnings, maintaining its tentacles in the migrant economy has become highly important for the AGC.
Few criminal groups grabbed more international attention over the last year than Venezuela’s most notorious gang, Tren de Aragua. In recent years, the group has expanded its reach across South America, establishing a permanent presence in Colombia, Peru, and Chile on the backs of the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have left the country since 2015.
With so many Venezuelans seeking stability in neighboring countries, Tren de Aragua exploited this demand and established itself as a dominant player in regional smuggling operations. After first controlling crossings on the Colombia-Venezuela border, the group went on to offer its own migrant transport services that include comprehensive package deals covering transportation, accommodation, and food for the entire journey.
But 2024 also marked an unprecedented year of government action against the gang. Since Venezuelan security forces invaded the infamous Tocorón Prison in Aragua state at the end of 2023, effectively seizing Tren de Aragua’s headquarters, the gang has taken several significant hits.
The Venezuelan government may have initiated this crackdown after years of tacit support for the gang and the fiefdom it created in Tocorón, but regional governments have also taken part.
SEE ALSO: Tren de Aragua: From Prison Gang to Transnational Criminal Enterprise
In early July, Colombian authorities arrested Larry Álvarez Nuñez, alias “Larry Changa,” one of Tren de Aragua’s co-founders and principal leaders. Álvarez was reportedly key to the group’s expansion into neighboring Colombia and helped consolidate its operations in Chile. In November, Colombian police also captured Jeison Alexander Lorca Salazar, alias “Jeison Comino,” alleged second-in-command of Tren de Aragua’s criminal activity in Colombia. Prosecutors in Chile and Peru have also taken aim at the group’s members in their respective countries.
However, even as the gang suffered serious hits to its regional operations across Latin America, its reputation continued to grow. In July 2024, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization, underscoring what officials described as an “escalating threat” to American communities. Several US politicians made repeated calls for such government action, including President-elect Donald Trump, who argued some cities had been “overtaken” by the gang.
The designation came on the heels of a long list of media reports that suggested Tren de Aragua was not only smuggling people across South America, but actively operating along the US-Mexico border and “invading” the United States by disguising its members among migrants. While some crimes have been attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in certain cities, national, state, and local law enforcement have failed to establish any connections between those individuals and the group’s broader structure or leadership.
“This isn’t like the Central American gangs,” said Schacher, of Refugees International. “There’s not a long-standing Venezuelan diaspora in the United States. Tren de Aragua is a new gang to the United States, you don’t not have this cycle where people came here and formed a gang, then were deported, and then came back. It’s nothing like that.”
Still, the group’s outsized influence has provoked nationwide panic, which runs in contrast to the fact that it maintains no significant presence in the United States. Suspected members have been linked to robberies and burglaries, but not extortion, the group’s primary economic motor. Nor has there been any evidence to suggest these alleged members have established cells or conspired with other criminal groups.
As migrants flowed steadily through or lingered in Mexico throughout 2024 due to restrictive immigration policies, migrant smuggling became a centerpiece of the country’s criminal landscape, with everyone from transnational drug trafficking groups to regional predatory gangs cashing in.
“[Migrant smuggling] is 100% a pillar of their operations and profit models now,” said Ari Sawyer, an expert on migration dynamics and the security situation in Mexico. “They are getting extremely rich off the backs of migrants due to US and Mexican policies that make arriving in the US more and more difficult.”
SEE ALSO: How US Policy Foments Organized Crime on US-Mexico Border
For decades, the US government has relied on a set of flawed “prevention through deterrence” policies to thwart the flow of migrants into the country, often outsourcing enforcement to complacent allies like Mexico. It has not worked, and the result has been a boon for criminal groups offering smuggling services and exploiting the heightened vulnerability of migrants.
While powerful networks like the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels are making huge profits from taxing coyotes transporting migrants through areas they control and even installing their own human smuggling infrastructure, extortion and migrant kidnappings have also exploded.
“The kidnapping market has grown immensely,” Sawyer told InSight Crime. “Organized crime groups saw a ripe opportunity to double down on smuggling, but they’ve become so well-organized that they also operate kidnapping and extortion rings alongside that.”
Migrant kidnappings in Mexico are not new, but the scale of the problem is. In the past, Sawyer said migrants may have gotten kidnapped once en route to the US-Mexico border or as they waited to cross. Now, criminal groups are offering smuggling services at the same time they are carrying out mass kidnappings all over Mexico. Migrants are held for ransom multiple times along their journey from the southern border with Guatemala, throughout the interior, and to the northern border.
“Everybody is looking to get a little cut,” they added.
It is difficult to determine the true scale of profits involved in migrant smuggling and these adjacent criminal economies, but InSight Crime calculates it has become a multimillion-dollar business that now rivals the drug trade. In just one small village near the border in Sonora, for example, networks associated with the Sinaloa Cartel are making well over $1 million every month.
“It’s become a huge problem,” Sawyer told InSight Crime. “The US and Mexican governments know what is happening but they continue to engage in these policies that are enriching crime groups and their smuggling operations.”
Organized crime groups are likely to continue making huge profits as the region’s governments toughen anti-migrant policies. Among them is the US government and President-elect Trump, who has promised to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in American history.”
This comes as migrants are fleeing from all over the region. In Venezuela, a fraudulent election has entrenched a regime that frequently blurs the line between governance and criminality.
In Haiti, a makeshift government and a UN-backed security mission have made little headway in reclaiming control of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where gangs hold sway over approximately 80% of the city. Constant threats of displacement, sexual violence, and targeted killings have driven a mass exodus of Haitians, many of whom travel through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico on their way to the United States.
And in Ecuador, escalating drug trafficking, record-high homicide rates, and growing gang dominance have destabilized a country that was once a beacon of stability in the region. Widespread extortion and kidnappings have driven thousands of Ecuadorians to leave.
“If the ability of people to come to the United States is completely cut off, there’s going to be even more sitting ducks for organized crime to take advantage of,” Schacher told InSight Crime.
The continued rise of hardline anti-immigrant policies, coupled with heightened region-wide insecurity, creates the perfect storm for Latin America’s organized crime groups to continue reaping the benefits of the region’s dysfunctional approach to immigration.