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On October 27th 90 police officers, 22 vehicles and a water cannon stood ready in a field on the outskirts of Santiago, the capital of Chile. They were not there to guard a rowdy protest. Instead, they were there to monitor a narcofuneral: the burial of a young woman with alleged ties to drug-traffickers. Such an event, which often ends with bullets being shot into the air by mourners, would have once been unthinkable in Chile, long considered one of Latin America’s safest countries. But between May 2019 and September 2023 gangs held nearly 2,000 such funerals, according to Gabriel Boric, the president. In September Mr Boric sent a bill to Congress intended to limit them.
Latin America’s murder map is being redrawn. The region’s homicide rate has been falling since 2017, although countries such as Mexico and Brazil are still home to some of the cities with the highest murder rates on Earth. But in previously safe countries murder rates are hitting record levels, including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Chile. Call it the new narco network: a cocktail of drugs, guns and migration is fuelling gang violence across the region.
Take Ecuador first. Its descent into chaos has been swift. In 2018 the country was a sleepy Andean patch of 17m people. It exported oil and fish. It had the fourth-lowest homicide rate in Latin America, at 5.8 per 100,000 people. But this year that rate is expected to top 35 per 100,000 people. It is already higher than Mexico’s and Brazil’s (see chart). Criminal groups kill with impunity, setting off car bombs and hanging dead bodies from bridges. In August a presidential candidate running on an anti-corruption platform was assassinated. The six supposed Colombian hitmen were found hanged in their prison cells in October.
Cocaine is the primary cause of Ecuador’s problems. For decades the country was mostly ignored by international drug-traffickers. That changed in the late 2000s, when gangs realised they could get even juicier mark-ups by shipping blow farther afield, to Europe and Australia. Partly as a result, gangs then changed their shipping methods: rather than pack it onto planes or boats to the United States, coke was squirrelled away inside container ships among legitimate goods.
After Colombian ports tightened their security, criminals looked for alternative shipping routes. Ecuador’s poorly-monitored ports became even more attractive after 2009, when Rafael Correa, a left-winger, then the president, undermined the country’s defences by closing an American naval base and, as such, ending co-operation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Ecuadorean gangs such as Los Choneros signed up as transportistas, moving coke for Mexican gangs and the Albanian mafia. By 2019 Ecuador had turned into a cocaine superhighway.
Locking up gangsters merely helped them strengthen their networks. Los Choneros thrived in the crowded prisons, recruiting heavily and launching attacks on their enemies. Targeted killings escalated into massacres, where dozens of inmates were dismembered and burnt. In 2021 some 330 prisoners were murdered in Ecuador, the highest number in the world. That same year coke ranked as Ecuador’s sixth-biggest export, worth nearly $1bn, or 0.9% of GDP, according to InSight Crime, an investigative outlet.
Similarly, this year in Costa Rica homicides are predicted to hit a record of 17 per 100,000 people, compared with 11 per 100,000 people three years ago. Cocaine is a big part of the problem there, too. Rising production in Colombia, where record amounts of coca leaf have been harvested in recent years, translates into larger shipments arriving in Costa Rica, says Álvaro Ramos, a former security minister.
However, coke is not the only reason for rising violence. In recent years many murders have been about the domestic marijuana market. Illegal cannabis is big business in Costa Rica: 3% of residents say they use it monthly, one of the highest consumption rates in Central America. Many gangs prefer weed to coke. Moving the white stuff is hard: it requires connections and corrupt officials (of whom there are relatively few in Costa Rica). By contrast weed has few barriers to entry and it can be sold anywhere.
The state is ill-equipped to stop these new gangs from thriving. Costa Rica abolished its military in 1949. Rodrigo Chaves, the president, blames past administrations and the judiciary for the situation. He says the country does not have enough police, the laws are outdated and the judicial system is too soft on criminals.
The third place in this new narco network, Chile, is not a murder hotspot. Last year its homicide rate reached a record 6.7 per 100,000 people. That is far below its neighbours, and close to the rate in the United States, of 6.3. But as its narcofunerals attest, crime is getting much worse. More cocaine and potent cannabis are being interdicted than ever before, with cannabis seizures tripling between 2018 and 2021. Its ports have become targets for gun-runners. Timber-trafficking is also a problem. The copper industry, which accounts for nearly 11% of the country’s GDP, is blighted by armed hijackings.
Cocaine blues
Chile is one of the region’s richest countries. It also hosts half a million Venezuelan migrants fleeing Nicolás Maduro’s regime. That combination has attracted mafias such as Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest gang. It is battling to control Chile’s underworld, having built a human-trafficking empire across South America. Shoot-outs occur regularly in the port city of Iquique, as local gangs fend off incursions by the Venezuelans. Tren de Aragua’s cells run prostitution rings in several cities. Some 40 alleged members were jailed in one province last year. Dozens have been detained in police raids this year.
As a result, the share of Chileans who say immigration is bad has surged from 31% in December 2018 to 77% in April 2023, according to Cadem, a pollster. Another survey found that most blame illegal immigration for the rise in crime. Facing regional elections next year, the government has focused more on security. After three police officers were killed in March, Mr Boric pledged a 40% annual increase in the security budget and passed stricter penalties for crimes against police. Even so, many consider him too soft on crime.
What does this new narco network mean for the countries that were once among Latin America’s success stories? Many citizens will vote with their feet. Last year, Ecuadoreans were the second-biggest nationality to cross Panama’s treacherous Darien Gap on their way north.
Those who stay at home may turn to more extreme solutions. According to Latinobarómetro, a regional survey, fully 48% of Ecuadoreans, 31% of Chileans and 22% of Costa Ricans rank security as their country’s biggest problem, well above the regional average of 13%. Plenty of Latin Americans admire El Salvador’s authoritarian president Nayib Bukele, who over the past year has locked up 1.6% of the population in a sweeping gang crackdown and whose approval rating is 88%, the highest in the region.
Politicians across Latin America are taking note. On October 15th Daniel Noboa, a 35-year-old right-winger, won the presidential elections in Ecuador. He has promised to ape Mr Bukele’s approach, and build floating prisons in the Pacific. Some are sceptical that will curb the gang problem there. But such outlandish solutions are increasingly popular. Faced with ever more powerful gangs, many Latin Americans appear to think sacrificing civil rights is a price worth paying for security.
Caribbean Murder Rates Are Spiraling As Illegal Guns Flood In
By Khalea Robertson and Brian Ellsworth
October 30, 2023
Will demands for U.S. action help slow gunrunning to a region where the homicide rate is triple the global average?
PORT OF SPAIN — The Peterkin family was asleep in their home in the Trinidad and Tobago village of Heights of Guanapo on September 21 when gunmen unloaded weapons—including an assault rifle—on the family of nine. The brazen crime, now known as the Guanapo murders, killed four of the Peterkins’ children, including a ten-year-old girl, and wounded the other five, shocking a nation already indignant about soaring gun violence. Less than a month later, the Trinidad police announced the country’s largest-ever seizure of weapons, including high-powered sub-machine guns, fueling concern about the growing prevalence of assault rifles in the Caribbean nation.
Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley mentioned the Guanapo murders in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he decried the “metastasizing scourge” of gun violence. “This situation has worsened largely because of the accelerated commercial availability (of firearms), coupled with the illegal trafficking from countries of manufacture into the almost defenseless territories of the Caribbean,” he told the United Nations. “This is a crisis shared by almost all the Caribbean territories.”
Indeed, Caribbean countries are taking new steps to try to slow the traffic of illegal weapons, many of which come from the United States. The average rate of violent deaths in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) region is nearly triple the global average, according to a report this year by the bloc’s security agency IMPACS, and the Small Arms Survey. Gun violence is particularly acute in Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica—the latter now has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Gang violence has led Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness to declare states of public emergency on several occasions, most recently in June, allowing for warrantless arrests. Some in Trinidad and Tobago are calling for similar measures.
Caricom leaders in April announced a “War on Guns” to combat the illegal weapons trade, which followed years of increasingly vocal complaints across the region. Five Caricom countries this year came out in support of a civil lawsuit filed by Mexico’s government in the United States that seeks to hold U.S. gun manufacturers accountable for the damage caused by weapons smuggled illegally out of America. Lax U.S. gun regulations have become such a point of frustration that The Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis this year lamented that “a person’s right to bear arms has unfairly been converted into a [de facto] right to traffic arms.”
Cracking down on trafficked guns
In response to the problem, Caricom’s Implementing Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS) launched the Crime Gun Intelligence Unit (CCGIU) in partnership with U.S. law enforcement agencies to boost cooperation. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in July that the Department of Justice had named prosecutor Michael Ben’Ary as the first coordinator of Caribbean Firearms Prosecutions. Caribbean officials also insist that responses to violent crime must include reducing demand for guns through mediation programs that can prevent conflicts from spiraling out of control.
But the diffuse network of buyers and the relatively small quantities of arms in each shipment make it a maddeningly tricky problem to address. Trafficking typically involves straw buyers making legal gun and munitions purchases on behalf of smugglers and then concealing them in cargo vessels, postal shipments or on commercial airlines. One shipment of munitions reached Haiti in a container labeled as clothing donations for the country’s Episcopal Church. Gun manufacturers continue to supply retailers that are known to sell to straw purchasers and facilitate suspicious repeated and bulk sales, noted Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, The Bahamas, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in their amicus curiae brief in support of Mexico’s lawsuit.
Trinidad police in August arrested a man for using 3D printing technology to make homemade weapons typically described as “ghost guns,” signaling the possibility of a domestic firearms pipeline. Ghost guns are essentially untraceable weapons. This development is less concerning than the growing import of low-cost “conversion devices” that can turn handguns into automatic weapons, said IMPACS Regional Crime and Security Coordinator Callixtus Joseph. These devices can vastly increase the lethality of weapons for about $15 and typically get through customs easily because officials are only now being trained to recognize them, said Joseph, who described the trend as “frightening.”
Two men have been indicted in the Guanapo murders, but no motive has been determined in the brutal crime that continues to haunt Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidadians are increasingly curbing their night-time outings or avoiding areas where they once traveled freely, as the country remains on track to surpass 2022’s record of 601 murders—the vast majority of which are linked to illegal firearms.
“There’s a reason why most gun crime in the world occurs in the U. S. and surrounding region,” said Jonathan Lowy, president of U.S.-based Global Action on Gun Violence and a lead lawyer in Mexico’s lawsuit against gun manufacturers, in an interview. “And that’s because of the easy availability of guns.”
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Ellsworth is a Washington, DC-based freelance journalist with 20 years of experience covering Latin America and the Caribbean.
Robertson is a researcher and freelance journalist working primarily on topics of migration and diaspora within and from the Caribbean.
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