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INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZED CRIME
A recent report analyzing alluvial gold mining in Colombia suggests that the role of organized crime groups in this industry is larger than previously suspected.
During a November 21 presentation, Candice Welsch, regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for the Andean and Southern Cone regions, detailed the organization’s findings on alluvial gold mining — gold deposits found on river banks and beds — across Colombia in 2022.
El Salvador’s success in fighting gangs with a state of emergency inspired Honduras to do its own version, but one year on, two new reports suggest the country is seeing little results.
Although Honduras President Xiomara Castro enacted a nationwide state of emergency that suspended constitutional rights and multiplied security forces’ efforts to crack down on the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio 18 gangs, a December 5 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) found that the country’s state of emergency had “yielded mixed results” and that violence against civilians has “continued unabated” in 2023.
Bukele’s government had once made a pact with the gangs. Now he was making war. In the first two months of the state of emergency, authorities arrested over 33,000 people, nearly doubling the prison population. The gangs had previously managed to exercise their power even from behind bars. But with Bukele’s crackdown, the tables have turned.
In March 2022, the Bukele administration launched a historic crackdown, implementing a state of emergency that has, for the past 20 months, given his government almost free rein in its war against the gangs. These drastic measures have left the gangs reelin
The road to El Salvador’s state of emergency has been long and bloody. The small Central American nation spent decades engulfed in some of the most intense spates of violence in the Western Hemisphere, as the country’s three main gangs — the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and the two factions of the 18th Street, or Barrio 18 — waged bitter wars amongst themselves and security forces. In response, numerous governments employed so-called mano dura (iron fist) crackdowns that included widespread arrests and increasingly draconian laws.
The gangs’ demise has radically altered the country’s criminal landscape, liberating swathes of territory and illegal markets from criminal control. The nation’s homicide rate, which had already sunk to historic lows before the state of emergency began, is now at its lowest level since the end of the country’s civil war in 1992.
Since the crackdown began, the gangs have shown minimal signs of armed retaliation. In a matter of months, Bukele’s crackdown had swept up tens of thousands of suspected gang members and affiliates, and the gangs’ primary reaction appears to have been to go into hiding.
Over the last nine months, InSight Crime investigated the gangs’ response to the state of emergency and analyzed what may happen next. We conducted over 100 interviews with sources in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and Honduras, including active and semi-retired gang members; security and prison officials; politicians; independent lawyers; and people detained during the state of emergency.
The AGC emerged from the ashes of Colombia’s paramilitary movement to become a dominant but fragmented criminal force.
Smoking crack is inhaling fear and getting addicted to the panic. That’s what White, Ángel, and David say. The three men staying in a group home in Comayagüela, the impoverished twin city of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, share something in common. One day, they tried “the rock” — another name for crack — and were hooked immediately.
Many children and adolescents have been roped in by criminal gangs whose power has grown with the increase in cocaine flowing through Ecuador. These organizations are recruiting minors at never-before-seen levels in the country, as a means of fueling their expansion and control of drug trafficking through the port of Guayaquil.
Pablo Escobar and his Medellín Cartel transformed the cocaine trade during their heyday in the 1980s. But the 30 years since the kingpin’s death have shown that the business remains one of the world’s most dynamic criminal economies.
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