Welcome to GameChangers 2024, where we chronicle the major stories and trend lines of the last 12 months and preview the year to come. This year, state resistance to organized crime in the Americas faded, as criminal organizations became more entrenched in governments across the region.
Venezuela remains the model for this criminal-corrupt state. In July, after a highly questionable election that the Carter Center said could “not be considered democratic,” Venezuelan authorities claimed President Nicolás Maduro had been re-elected to another six-year term in office. Maduro manages a criminal-hybrid government, where his political allies on the national and regional levels tolerate, and in some instances work with, criminal enterprises that keep his regime afloat politically and financially.
This article is part of our Criminal GameChangers series for 2024. Read the other articles in the series here.
InSight Crime co-directors Steven Dudley and Jeremy McDermott will join some of our most experienced field investigators for a discussion of the Criminal GameChangers annual series and challenges for the year ahead. To attend and participate live, you can make a donation as small as $10.
The elections sparked protests, which were squashed by the government, using both official and paramilitary/criminal forces. The repression is part of a long-standing playbook, which was put into practice years ago and has led to hundreds of human rights violations related to torture, extortion, and extrajudicial killings. This modus operandi was typified by one 2022 raid referred to as Operation Trueno, which InSight Crime detailed in a special illustrated investigation published earlier this year.
The regime has also fomented some of the region’s most powerful criminal organizations, in part by spurring record migration. The most infamous of these is Tren de Aragua, a prison-born gang that has spread to numerous neighboring nations, including, possibly, the United States, where the group was declared a transnational criminal threat and became a presidential campaign issue. Still, the group’s US presence seemed to be closer to a moral panic than an actual invasion.
Tren de Aragua does operate in Colombia, Peru, and Chile. The group has established control over much of the migration routes leading to these countries, and in many instances, runs human smuggling and trafficking rings. In places like Chile, the network is involved in kidnapping and extortion, and authorities there are investigating whether it was behind the murder of a former Venezuelan military officer that had fled the Maduro regime.
SEE ALSO: Is Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua Behind Surge in Chile Kidnappings?
Honduras has also slipped into a tailspin. President Xiomara Castro cancelled the country’s extradition treaty with the United States in August, just days before InSight Crime published a video of her brother-in-law meeting with drug traffickers in the lead up to the 2013 presidential election. Castro lost that election, but won the 2021-presidential election and is apparently not taking any chances with possible US criminal charges for her relatives.
Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, who is the former president and now a top presidential advisor, has long been the subject of rumors regarding his dealings with drug traffickers, and his 2006-2009 administration was a major topic of conversation in the 2013 video. But both Mel and his brother, Carlos, denied they had ever received drug trafficking money for their political efforts, and while Carlos fled to Nicaragua, Castro and Mel retrenched in the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa.
Still, the prosecutorial threat looms following a historic conviction of Castro’s predecessor. In June, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for participating in a years-long drug trafficking conspiracy, making him the third foreign president convicted in a US court of drug trafficking-related crimes. Ironically, in defense of her own regime, Castro cited the crimes of her former political rival and his political allies, many of whom have also been convicted of drug trafficking.
Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sought to thread a similar needle. In October, AMLO, as he is popularly known by, celebrated the conviction of the former security chief of a rival politician in a US court for drug trafficking, while beating back accusations of his own government’s connections to drug trafficking organizations. Part of this was the result of a January InSight Crime report, which chronicled how the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigated whether his 2006 presidential campaign had received contributions from a major cartel. A US special committee shut down the investigation in 2012, as it deemed it too politically sensitive, but the general perception persisted, in part because of a near-constant barrage of social media and AMLO’s own “abrazos no balazos” (hugs not bullets) approach to organized crime.
The perception that AMLO was catering to narcos increased following the spectacular July-capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the head of one of the various pillars of the Sinaloa Cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, the son of the famed, imprisoned trafficker, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, and one of the leaders of another cartel pillar. In what appeared to be a conspiracy between US agents and Guzmán López, Zambada said he was kidnapped and flown to an El Paso-area airport where he was arrested, along with Guzmán López. During his morning briefings, AMLO made clear that he was taken off guard by the arrest and said the Mexican government had not played a role in the capture.
Yet none of this seemed to matter to the Mexican electorate, which voted overwhelmingly in favor of AMLO’s handpicked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, during the June elections. Sheinbaum took office in October, but it remains to be seen whether the climate scientist can chart her own path, especially regarding the ever-spiraling security situation, which was highlighted by a brutally violent electoral period. From Chiapas to Sonora, large criminal organizations have increasingly expanded their portfolios to include activities such as migrant smuggling. With the incoming Donald Trump administration in the United States poised to fortify the border and expel more migrants to Mexico and beyond, this economy may grow.
The challenge facing the region extends far beyond Mexico, Honduras, and Venezuela. Among those most fleeing to the United States now are Ecuadorians. US Customs and Border Protection “encounters” with Ecuadorian nationals on the United States Southwest border went from 17,000 in 2020, to 124,000 in 2023. And through October of 2024, CBP had encountered close to 120,000 Ecuadorians, putting it on pace to surpass 2023 levels.
The rise is the result of years of malfeasance and corruption, mostly inside the prison system, as we detailed in a 2024 report. In January, to address this issue, President Daniel Noboa militarized the penitentiaries and tried to move the country’s two most notorious criminals into a maximum security prison. The backlash was immediate and historic: Criminal groups – seemingly in coordination with one another – staged jailhouse riots and street-level attacks across the nation. The most stunning of these came in Guayaquil, where a group known as the Tiguerones (Tigers) took over a live television broadcast, flashing both its automatic weapons and gang signs to the cameras.
More bombast and militarization of the streets followed, including the president declaring 22 of these criminal groups “terrorist organizations,” but it has had little long-term impact. In the municipality of Durán, for example, violence initially dropped, only to skyrocket again. Durán, which sits astride Guayaquil and is a vital corridor for the drug trafficking activities that have fueled the recent spike in homicides, has become a bellwether for the Noboa government’s efforts. By this measure, it is failing. And in a report published in September, InSight Crime chronicled the multiple criminal economies flourishing in Durán, among them the land trafficking at the heart of the municipality’s chronic problems.
Many in Ecuador have called on Noboa to implement a more Salvadoran-style approach – i.e., mass incarceration without due process or significant oversight of the security forces or penitentiaries. Noboa himself has quietly scoffed at these calls, noting that Ecuador is far larger than El Salvador and its criminal groups more sophisticated than those in the Central American nation, as evidenced by their continued attacks on prison officials. Three prison directors were killed this year alone.
But the appeal of El Salvador’s model remains, in part because of Bukele’s continued success in keeping crime rates low. Homicides dropped again in 2024, the third time in three years in El Salvador. Bukele also seemed poised to benefit from the election of Trump in the United States, as well as the upswing in the value of Bitcoin that came with it. But as his government continues to trample constitutional rights and ignore the rule of law, the long-term consequences of the Bukele model may be the steady erosion of government legitimacy.
Bukele’s own legitimacy may face its first international test in the United States. In February, yet another top leader of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) was captured in the United States and could provide prosecutors and intelligence officials with vital information regarding a pact the Bukele administration had forged with the gangs prior to his implementation of the Special Regime, as his now-permanent array of constitution-bending measures are called.
Bukele seems to understand how to blunt these inquiries. In February, he spoke at CPAC, one of the premiere conservative political gatherings in the United States. He also offered to intervene in Haiti. Haiti, of course, is the region’s worst quagmire and a constant source of US concern, mostly because of the potential flood of migrants that come as a result of the tumult. But Bukele’s offer was hollow: While it has a similar geographic area and population as El Salvador, its problems are considerably more complex and entrenched. The United Nations estimates that street gangs control as much as 85% of the country’s capital.
SEE ALSO: Harrowing Massacre Underscores Depth of Gang Control in Haiti
Bukele’s offer notwithstanding, the international community has struggled to provide solutions in Haiti. After the national gang alliance forced the resignation of the prime minister in March, an array of nations scrambled to provide the necessary financial support and war material for an international security force. And after only a small part of a promised contingent of Kenyan police arrived in Haiti, they were largely confined to their barracks while they took the measure of the conflict and their new allies: the beleaguered Haitian National Police. The gangs, meanwhile, seemed content to settle into what, for all intents and purposes, is a stalemate.
Stalemate is also a good description of Guatemala’s current battle for control of its own government. During 2024, President Bernardo Arévalo, who rose from little-known legislator to anti-corruption crusader, met head-on with the intransigent, criminal-corrupt blocs that remained from the previous administration. Arévalo, who barely got past these gatekeepers to take office in January, has spent the whole year trying to figure out how to pierce their armor.
However, the president has had little success. From the Attorney General’s Office to Congress to the high courts, opposition forces have largely thwarted any attempts to purge their ranks or prosecute their criminal factions. In fact, they have gone on the offensive in some cases, crippling the president and his political party or forcing them to compromise in ways that resemble the exact regimes they vilified prior to taking power.
With Trump taking over in Washington, some of these criminal-corrupt blocs are quickly trying to rekindle old relationships and reassert themselves. The pattern may repeat itself across the region. Even in countries like Venezuela, there may be space for criminal-corrupt blocs to negotiate with the new US administration, which is far more transactional than the outgoing Biden administration. In the end, the transactional approach helps explain why resistance to organized crime has waned in the first place: When everything is for sale, nothing is sacred.