Peru is the world’s second-largest cocaine producer after Colombia. While the Shining Path guerrillas used drug proceeds to fortify their battle against the state, the group has grown weaker in recent years. Today, Peru’s criminal landscape features localized groups that maintain sophisticated cocaine trafficking networks to Europe, Asia and the United States. Domestic traffickers share territory with foreign drug trafficking organizations from Colombia and Mexico, and also have ties to transnational groups in Brazil and Italy.
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Hide and Seek: How Drug Traffickers Get Creative at Sea
Drug traffickers engage in a creative game of hide and seek with coast guards and other security forces that board their ships at sea.
Loan Sharks Circle as Latin America Reels From Pandemic
As workers across Latin America struggle to stay afloat amid economic strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, loan sharks offering abusive interest rates have cornered the market, forcing workers seeking…
InSight Crime’s 2020 Homicide Round-Up
While unrest gripped much of Latin America in 2019, it was the coronavirus that took center stage and ripped through the region in 2020, upending everything from commercial trade to…
Peru Profile
Violence in Peru has been relatively low since the end of its civil conflict in the late 1990s. Although it remains the world’s top coca producer behind Colombia, illicit cultivations in the country are decreasing. Profits from drug trafficking and illegal logging have fueled a small resurgence of the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group that no longer poses a major threat to the stability of the Peruvian state, but which continues to attack security forces and foreign companies in the remote Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro River Valley (VRAEM).
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A series of assassinations on Ecuador’s southern border with Peru have been attributed to gang members fighting for control of the illegal crossings by which both people and contraband are…
A new report suggests the Chinese fishing fleet that mass trawled just off Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands in recent months crossed the maritime boundary to fish illegally in Ecuadorian waters, sparking…
A sizeable seizure of adulterated rum shipped to Honduras from Europe reveals the extent to which black markets for alcohol in Latin America have expanded in response to limits on…
Police in Peru have recently seized large quantities of contraband cigarettes in one of the capital’s most populous districts, in what is just the latest reflection of the regional boom…
Peruvian authorities have destroyed yet another illegal mining site in one of the nation’s most popular national parks, but the ongoing failure of official efforts to target this trade strongly…
From US President Donald Trump to Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi, well-known visages are used by drug gangs to not only mark their product but to stand out from the…
