Gangland killings: Violent nonstate actors and naive policies are destabilizing the globe

A constant stream of news headlines illustrates the wave of rising global instability, from the descent of Haiti into gang rule and rising cartel violence in Mexico and South America to the war in Gaza and unrelenting attacks by Houthi rebels on global shipping. 

Global instability is clearly on the rise. Among the principal culprits are criminal organizations and other violent nonstate actors. Gangs and violent groups are seeing a resurgence across much of the world, bringing terrorism and even collapse both to historically stable nations and to countries with long-standing security challenges. 

Transnational criminal organizations number in the thousands and span the globe, controlling illicit industries that combined exceed most European economies. The global illegal drug trade alone represents upward of $650 billion a year in illicit value, while human trafficking is estimated at over $150 billion. This revenue has enabled many criminal groups and other violent nonstate actors to expand dramatically, equipping themselves with weapons and technology sufficient to outgun most police forces and rival a well-resourced military.  

The threat of gangs and transnational organized crime is not new. Even factors like their sponsorship by corrupt officials and rogue authoritarian states are not novel developments. What, then, is driving the apparent wave of global instability? Of course, countries across the world all have their own unique context, and many face materially different challenges when it comes to violent nonstate actors.

However, there are also some key, shared factors underlying the recent wave of violent nonstate actors. A mix of policy decisions, a changing and more interconnected global environment, and the onset of uncontrolled migration crises are empowering violent nonstate actors and driving a new period of crisis. To regain control, policymakers in the U.S. and around the world will have to recommit to defending the rule of law and confronting criminal threats.

Policy choices: From enforcement to enabling 

A primary driver of the outgrowth of organized crime is a fundamental shift in the way many governments approach criminality. In the recent past, tough-on-crime policies that favored proactive enforcement against everything from street crime to cartel drug trafficking were the norm. However, governments around the world are increasingly abandoning these policies as a mix of ideological, misguided, and even corrupt motivations.

Progressive activists, academics, and politicians in the West and beyond have long pushed an effort to change policing and security policy radically, often attacking the legitimacy of police, counternarcotic initiatives, and the so-called war on drugs. Instead, they call for treating even organized crime as an economic development issue at its core, to which the only appropriate response is to deliver economic and humanitarian aid. In large part, many nations are now seeing the consequences of the success of these advocates as governments enact policies that de-emphasize law enforcement and imprisonment and dismantle the international counternarcotic consensus.

Most people are aware of this effort’s latest manifestation in the United States, where progressive prosecutors and legislators have cut funding for police forces, implemented bail reform, and reduced sentences even for violent crimes. However, similar approaches and policies have also become increasingly prominent abroad, including in countries that face far more dire criminal threats. 

In Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, far-left President Gustavo Petro has called for ending the so-called drug war and implemented an aid-centric approach to combating cocaine production and trafficking. At the same time, Petro has severely restricted the offensive operations of the Colombian military against the country’s powerful narco-terrorist guerrillas.

In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, another critic of the “war on drugs,” has pursued a “hugs, not bullets” approach to the country’s drug cartels over the last six years. This largely empty strategy relies on increasing social spending in the country while limiting military operations against the cartels and actively dismantling U.S.-Mexico security cooperation.

Certainly, there are also nonideological motivations behind many governments’ shift away from enforcement and confronting criminal threats. While Lopez Obrador has deepened Mexico’s departure from conventional counternarcotics efforts, this shift began under his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who explicitly changed Mexico’s security policy to de-emphasize confronting the drug cartels. Notably, Peña Nieto’s minister of defense was arrested by U.S. law enforcement in October 2020 for taking money from drug cartels in exchange for aiding their narcotics trafficking operations.  

This dynamic has also accelerated the outgrowth of violence and instability outside of Latin America. In recent years, South Africa has seen some of the most rapid rises in criminality in the world, according to the Global Organized Crime Index. There, rampant corruption by officials has enabled a collaborative relationship between the state and criminal gangs. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the government of South Africa does not even seek to fund its security forces properly. 

At their core, these dynamics and policies rest upon the quiet conclusion that organized crime cannot be eliminated through enforcement and the rule of law — and is therefore a problem to be managed and, where possible, contained. 

Of course, governments that adopt this view are constantly forced to expand the acceptable bounds of containment as criminal groups and violent nonstate actors gain strength thanks to their permissive policies. And eventually, this leads to chaos, as exhibited in the case of Haiti, where a deeply corrupt government has collapsed under the onslaught of drug trafficking gangs. While not motivated by corruption or progressive ideology, in many ways, Israel is now reckoning with the consequences of its leaders’ flawed assumption that the threat of Hamas could be contained and managed. 

Regardless of the motivation, the crises these and other countries are now facing are owed to policy decisions that shift away from confronting these threats. The results have been predictably disastrous. In the U.S., political projects such as bail reform enabled the wave of violent street crime in major cities and even facilitated the establishment of organized retail theft networks throughout the country.

Drug cartels in Mexico are more powerful than ever and continue to push homicides and violence in Mexico to record high levels while driving over 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. each year. In Colombia, coca production is skyrocketing and narco-guerrillas have expanded their territorial control, bringing an uptick in violence to the country. 

One of the most pernicious aspects of these policies is that their consequences do not remain within the borders of the countries that enact them. Instead, criminal groups and violent nonstate actors that once had to contend with security forces now are free to grow and expand to new territory. 

Colombian guerrilla groups and Mexican cartels have rapidly expanded their presence in Ecuador, bringing a dramatic wave of narco-violence to what was recently one of the safest countries in the Americas. Elsewhere in the world, the outgrowth of organized crime in Myanmar has also spread into neighboring Asian countries, where police forces in previously low-crime nations are now struggling to reassert control.  

Bucking the trend

As gangs and criminal organizations gain strength in much of the world thanks to permissive government policies, the prospect of reversing course and confronting these illicit groups becomes even more daunting for leaders. However, there are nations that have done just that and made notable progress against the threat of organized crime, in large part because they have bucked the international trend of undermining security forces.  

Perhaps the clearest example is that of El Salvador, where the government of Nayib Bukele has made dramatic, once-unthinkable gains against the violent gangs that once terrorized the country. In 2015, El Salvador had the unfortunate distinction of being the most violent nation in the world as gangs such as MS-13 operated with impunity. 

In 2022, the Bukele government launched a major offensive against El Salvador’s gangs, embracing the so-called La Mano Dura or tough-on-crime policies that many progressives have sought to delegitimize globally. Bukele’s strategy has included the empowering and aggressive deployment of police and military forces, a major initiative to double the size of the military, and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of gang members in a new maximum-security prison.

The impact has been dramatic. Now, two years after El Salvador launched its crackdown on gangs, the country has gone from the global murder capital to the safest country in the Western Hemisphere after only Canada. In the whole of 2023, El Salvador saw fewer than 150 murders, a number that a decade earlier was surpassed in the space of less than a week.

Of course, now the activists and analysts who were saying five years ago that such policies couldn’t bring security and stability to El Salvador are now frantically formulating arguments for why such tough-on-crime policies can only work in El Salvador and should not be attempted elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, these latest warnings have little credibility, and leaders from around the world are seeking to learn from El Salvador’s success. 

The success of rule of law-centered security strategies and so-called tough-on-crime policies is not limited to El Salvador. In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro adopted an aggressive strategy against the country’s violent drug trafficking gangs while also encouraging gun ownership by private citizens. Critics lambasted Bolsonaro’s strategy. However, by 2022, its implementation brought Brazil’s homicide rate down to a 15-year low, even as other countries saw a post-pandemic spike in violence.

During the early 2000s in Colombia, then-President Alvaro Uribe succeeded against another very different threat with his “democratic security” strategy. Uribe broke with his predecessors and launched an aggressive military campaign against the country’s narco-guerrillas, which had taken control of a third of Colombia’s municipalities. Uribe’s aggressive policies delivered dramatic gains against these violent groups and brought Colombia back from the brink of failed-state status. 

US pulls back

It wasn’t long ago that foreign nations would look to the U.S. for support and guidance on how to confront security challenges like transnational organized crime. Indeed, a key factor behind the success of Uribe’s security policy in Colombia was robust U.S. support, including the provision of military training, equipment, and intelligence.  

The U.S. has long played a critical role in supporting partner countries through security cooperation as well as pressing less proactive governments to confront shared security threats, such as violent drug trafficking gangs. This role is necessitated by the reality that transnational efforts are essential to combating much of the transnational organized crime that threatens to destabilize the U.S. 

However, one reason that many foreign governments have pulled back on confronting criminal threats is that the U.S. has increasingly shied away from advocating and supporting such efforts. 

Instead, the Biden administration’s foreign policy seems to have internalized an unfavorable view of U.S. security cooperation, particularly on counternarcotics. As a result, the Biden administration has significantly de-emphasized the once-central priority of security in its diplomatic relations. International security cooperation, training, and engagement by the State Department and U.S. military countries have been increasingly blunted and watered down by everything from climate change advocacy to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Biden administration has also abandoned the vital role of the U.S. as a source of pressure and accountability for foreign leaders. Rather than pressing complacent and corrupt governments abroad to combat transnational drug traffickers and violent gangs, the Biden administration has actively avoided confrontation with such foreign leaders and refused to utilize the substantial economic and political leverage that the U.S. possesses abroad.  

Rather than push back on the Petro government’s efforts to blunt Colombia’s security forces and abandon the country’s historic commitments to combating drug trafficking, the Biden administration has given silent consent to Petro’s actions, prioritizing instead engagement on areas such as climate change. Indeed, the Biden administration even halted U.S. satellite monitoring of coca crops in South America as cultivation of the illicit crop soared along with the production and trafficking of cocaine.

Similarly, the Biden administration has acted as little more than a passive observer as Mexico has dismantled security cooperation with the U.S. even as cartels accelerate the flow of deadly fentanyl to the country.

When a security crisis grows to the point that it cannot be ignored, the Biden administration struggles to play catch-up. In the recent responses to surging instability in Haiti and Ecuador, the response of the U.S. has been marred by a lack of serious planning, causing embarrassing and costly missteps. 

Technology and globalized criminal networks

Beyond the poor policy choices guiding how governments face the threat of gangs and other violent nonstate actors, there are also changing global realities that are driving this age of growth and expansion for criminal groups. 

Even as effective security cooperation between governments has been on the decline, criminal organizations and their illicit networks are growing more globalized and interconnected than ever. With encrypted messenger apps, cryptocurrencies, new financial technologies, and even drones and artificial intelligence, criminal groups around the world are rapid adopters of new technologies and leverage them to facilitate and expand their reach and illicit networks. 

The acceleration of global connectivity through trade, technology, and communication has also brought about an increasingly globalized organized crime threat. Illicit partnerships between the world’s criminal groups and violent nonstate actors now span the globe.

Chinese triads use encrypted messaging technology and cryptocurrencies to sell fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels. Organized retail theft rings across the U.S. partner with Mexican cartels and other South American gangs to move and profit off stolen goods. Brazilian drug trafficking gangs have gone beyond establishing trafficking partnerships with criminal groups in Europe and Africa to actually expanding and recruiting members at a large scale in countries such as Portugal. Even Lebanese Hezbollah has deeply entrenched itself in illicit drug trafficking and money laundering operations in South America’s tri-border region to secure vital revenue. 

With technological advances and international expansion, the world is rapidly becoming smaller and easier to traverse for transnational criminal organizations, at the same time making them more powerful and resilient.

Migration crises

Mass, uncontrolled migration is also having an undeniable accelerating effect on the global spread of criminal groups and increasingly dwarfs the impact of technology and globalization. 

Fiscal 2023 saw a stunning 2.5 million migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border. In Europe, migrants and refugees continue to arrive at dramatic levels. In 2021, the European Union had under 10% of the global population of refugees across its 27 states. By 2022, the EU’s share surged above 20% with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and continued arrivals from Africa and the Middle East. Similarly, the Venezuelan crisis continues to see the outflow of migrants to the U.S. and across the Western Hemisphere with nearly 8 million Venezuelans having fled their country as of the end of 2023.

These migration crises and policy choices around migration have left many countries without the capacity to vet migrants or otherwise exercise control over their borders. This dynamic provides easy cover for criminal organizations and illicit smuggling networks to spread to and infiltrate not only the U.S. but also countries in Europe and Latin America. At the same time, these uncontrolled migration crises offer an opportunity for gangs to grow by tapping into new revenue through migrant smuggling.   

The rapid growth of the Tren de Aragua gang exemplifies the close linkages between migratory crises and the spread of gangs and other violent groups to new nations. Tren de Aragua originated in Venezuela, gaining strength in the country’s corrupt and lawless prison system.

With the acceleration of the Venezuelan migrant crisis, this criminal gang has now spread into the U.S. and across much of Latin America, where their members commit violent crimes and establish new networks of human smuggling, drug trafficking, retail theft, and extortion. This group’s arrival in other nations has also brought a new wave of instability and criminality to low-crime nations such as Chile and Uruguay, whose governments are struggling to contend with the new gang threat. Europe has seen a similar dynamic over the past several years as uncontrolled migration has seen the establishment and growth of criminal gangs from Africa and the Middle East. 

These new criminal footholds secured abroad empower these violent groups, making them more resilient to crackdowns in a single country and allowing them to expand into lucrative new international illicit activities. 

In the U.S. and elsewhere, the effectively open borders driving mass migration also create a set of lucrative opportunities for criminal networks in human trafficking. Gangs such as Tren de Aragua owe a great deal of their surging numbers to their ability to tap financially into the migration crisis. The U.S. migration crisis has even brought terrorist-affiliated human smuggling networks to the Western Hemisphere from as far as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Path forward

An increasingly unstable yet interconnected world will continue to accelerate the growth of organized crime and violent groups. Therefore, it is more crucial than ever for governments to adopt proactive policies designed to confront organized crime and reassert the rule of law. 

When it comes to transnational organized crime, confronting these well-funded and heavily armed networks requires an aggressive, internationally coordinated effort spearheaded by security forces to secure borders and maritime routes and control ungoverned spaces. 

For the U.S., confronting the surging transnational criminal threat begins at home. The porous border is a major and increasingly principal driver of the growth of instability and criminality, not only in the U.S. but across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Therefore, the first step in countering the global criminal threat is for the U.S. to implement appropriate border security policies and resourcing, many of which were present under the Trump administration. The increased severity of the migratory and cartel threat also calls for more aggressive action, including ramping up of resources for border security as contemplated in H.R. 2 and the deployment of U.S. military resources and personnel to secure the border and combat these growing threats to national security.

With growing global instability and the increasing weaponization of migration by foreign regimes, the U.S. should also play a leading role in promoting border security abroad, particularly close to home in the Americas, where some leaders recognize the need for such policies. 

More broadly, the U.S. should reassume its role of both pressing for and supporting such an international offensive against armed criminal groups, particularly those who threaten national and domestic security with deadly narcotics, weaponized migration, and violent crime. 

Without a major reversal of course and concerted action along these lines, the recent images of global instability hitting the headlines will only multiply, along with their impact on the public. 

Andrés Martínez-Fernández is the senior policy analyst for Latin America in the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security.