Data plays an increasingly vital role in our lives, and at InSight Crime, it is no exception. Whether building proprietary databases or sending hundreds of public information requests, we constantly collect, refine, and analyze data on organized crime to better monitor and understand the evolving criminal dynamics in the region.
Here, we highlight five key data areas that InSight Crime will closely follow throughout 2025.
Homicides
Organized crime remains one of the primary drivers of violence in the region, fueled by the increasing fragmentation of criminal groups.
Historically, we have seen surges in homicides as criminal organizations fight for territory or divide. Violence intensifies when rival criminal groups vie for control of the same resources, real estate, or criminal economies, with groups resorting to violence to establish dominance.
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In Ecuador, for example, deadly clashes between the Choneros and Lobos gangs escalated when internal divisions within these groups led to the emergence of additional factions. The resulting fragmentation triggered a prison massacre, highlighting how the atomization of criminal groups drives violence in the penitentiary system.
In Colombia, violence extended to urban areas such as Cali, Bogotá, Cúcuta, and Barranquilla, where gangs fought to control criminal economies.
In 2025, we will gather data on reported homicides through daily monitoring, freedom of information requests, and official government sources. This initiative will allow us to pinpoint homicide hotspots across Latin America and the Caribbean and examine the connections between violence, the fragmentation of criminal groups, and the operations of criminal economies.
Cocaine Seizures
Record amounts of cocaine reached consumers worldwide in 2024 as increasingly sophisticated networks adapted to law enforcement pressure. We expect 2025 will be no different.
Both cocaine supply and demand rose in 2024, with producer and transit nations like Bolivia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Guyana – and consumer markets like Spain – reporting record-breaking seizures throughout the year.
Using data on seizures of cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine paste, we will estimate the volume of cocaine flowing globally and via which routes. The data will also help us determine the role of specific ports in the international cocaine pipeline, identify the primary means of drug transportation, and map the increasingly complex networks operating at every stage of this criminal economy.
Clandestine Airstrips
Violence against Indigenous communities in forest regions will likely escalate as criminal groups increasingly rely on clandestine airstrips to move drug loads and support illegal mining operations near local towns.
In Peru, for example, violence against Indigenous populations has risen since 2022, with drug traffickers overrunning local communities. As gangs seized control of territories, they built covert airstrips to facilitate the movement of cocaine from production areas to major trafficking routes.
Yet in some regions, the number of hidden airstrips decreased. In Central America, aerial cocaine interdictions have dropped significantly over the past three years, suggesting a shift in trafficking methods.
SEE ALSO: Increased Foreign Presence Around Guyana Is Helping Net More Cocaine
By analyzing information from official sources, we will better understand how aerial drug shipments contribute to boosting environmental crime. Our focus will include countries that are home to the Amazon rainforest, such as Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, and remote Central American regions.
Additionally, we will leverage machine learning to identify areas in Latin America vulnerable to the proliferation of clandestine airstrips.
This analysis will shed light on how organized crime takes advantage of aerial trafficking in each region, uncovering the methods gangs employ and identifying patterns of environmental crime and associated violence.
Predatory Crimes
Predatory crimes, such as extortion, rely on victimizing the local community. With a low barrier to entry, we expect these crimes to continue growing in parts of the region.
In Peru, for example, reported cases of extortion surged by 370% between 2021 and 2023. While extortion tends to be the easiest metric to track for predatory crimes, it is often underreported due to intimidation and a lack of trust in authorities and accessible reporting mechanisms.
SEE ALSO: Extortion Rise in Honduras Signals Emergence of New Criminal Players
Extortion has tended to be dominated by smaller, less sophisticated groups. Most schemes require little skill and do not require extensive criminal networks to operate. So, a spike in extortion cases in 2025 could signal the atomization of the criminal landscape or the emergence of new, small-scale criminal groups, which could begin an ascent to sophisticated organized crime.
A decrease in extortion cases, however, is more ambiguous. It could reflect the success of government crackdowns on extortion rackets. Alternatively, it could indicate that criminal groups have moved from extortion to more scalable economies or victims see no point in reporting incidents. Determining which of these scenarios is occurring will require extensive fieldwork, enabling us to analyze the underlying dynamics and their implications for the evolving criminal landscape.
Cryptocurrency
We expect cryptocurrencies to become an increasingly popular payment option for criminal groups, and governments will continue to struggle to keep up. But as authorities improve their ability to trace and seize digital assets, we expect to see significant financial disruption dealt to organized crime.
In one case alone during 2024, for example, Brazilian authorities froze over $1 billion in cryptocurrency suspected of being used to launder money for the country’s most powerful criminal organization, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC).
Using data from public information requests and official databases, we will estimate the dollar value government operations have inflicted upon criminal finances. And for groups that have adopted a cryptocurrency-centric approach to their finances, we may be able to approximate the revenue generated by their operations.
We will also compare cryptocurrency seizures to those of other assets to estimate how criminal operations are shifting from traditional physical assets and paper currency to the digital sphere. As cryptocurrencies are increasingly used to facilitate crimes ranging from cocaine trafficking to ransomware attacks, tracking digital transactions may also uncover other criminal operations.