By Jeremy McDermott, Steven Dudley
“Connections between European and Latin American criminal networks have surged in recent years, with drugs, gold, and human trafficking proving particularly lucrative in the European market.
The number of European citizens linked to criminal networks arrested in Latin America has increased significantly, especially in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina. The strengthening alliance between Latin American and European crime groups now poses a global threat.
Today’s Latin America’s major criminal networks, unlike the cartels of the 1980s, operate in a world of subcontracting. Groups, or nodes in the network, often specialize in specific roles or stages of the supply chain. If a node is targeted by law enforcement, the network can quickly adjust and reconfigure itself, ensuring efficiency and the uninterrupted flow of criminal commodities.
These networks pose a serious threat to the rule of law, subverting it by establishing social norms through violence to exercise control with different forms of criminal governance. In Latin America and the Caribbean, they pose the single biggest threat to democracy in the region, using corruption to penetrate the state, and violence where bribery fails. This means it is the primary motor for human rights abuses and homicides. Corruption, like cancer, is spreading through state institutions in many nations of the region. Additionally, these networks harm economic stability development, distorting local economies, deterring foreign investment and affecting international financing.
Studying these networks is crucial to understanding the flow of illicit goods from Latin America to Europe, and essential to crafting effective strategies to combat these structures. After an analysis of different variables such as their criminal economies, geographical distribution or state response, EL PACCTO 2.0 and InSight Crime, with the support of the European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT), particularly within the Operational Action 8.3, of the High Risk Criminal Networks EMPACT, have ranked the 28 most active or relevant high-risk criminal networks in Latin America and the Caribbean, identifying key factors about their operations that reveal potential opportunities for combating organized crime in the region. This work has direct implications for both Latin America and Europe.
The list ranges from criminal networks with thousands of members to small brokers or gangs operating in Latin American countries, Caribbean islands or in Central America. In addition, the current report has sought to identify the connections or influence that high-risk criminal networks may have in different countries. This has led to the creation of a specific file for each criminal network with a specific individual map. Likewise, an aggregate map of all the information on the 28 criminal networks has been designed to provide a global overview.”
Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2025. 114p
