Threats to U.S. national security extend well beyond our own borders. Within the Western Hemisphere, cartels, armed rebel groups, and other criminal networks smuggle drugs, traffic weapons and people, profit from illegal extraction of raw materials like gold, and launder money for nefarious actors — all direct threats to the United States. Within Latin America, transnational criminal groups are major contributors to increased rates of public insecurity, violence, and crime — issues that directly impact citizens.
The United States and the leaders of many countries in Latin America have a shared interest in curbing the rise of these transnational organized crime networks. This convergence of interests was on display in early March, when the United States hosted invited leaders from more than a dozen Latin American countries at two high-level meetings on trafficking and transnational organized crime: the Americas Counter Cartel Conference at the headquarters of U.S. Southern Command, and the Shield of the Americas Summit hosted by President Donald Trump at the Trump National Resort.
Amid a push to heighten the security response, it’s worth recalling that the United States has long partnered successfully with regional countries to combat transnational organized crime via cooperation between U.S. law enforcement agencies and their counterparts. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has regularly assigned agents to U.S. embassies and consulates in countries throughout the Western Hemisphere, including a newly established presence in Ecuador.
Cooperation among law enforcement agencies has helped the United States investigate and extradite suspected criminals who serve as brokers of the international money laundering and trafficking networks that not only span multiple countries in Latin America, but also continents. After Bolivia’s new President Rodrigo Paz recently renewed cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Agency, its law enforcement coordinated with the U.S. agency to arrest and extradite Sebastián Marset, a Uruguayan national accused of laundering money and brokering cocaine trafficking who had previously evaded arrest while hiding in Bolivia due to local corruption.
These arrests and extraditions of central players suspected of facilitating illicit trafficking and money laundering represent important disruptions to transnational organized crime networks. However, modern criminal networks are complex, multilayered enterprises that survive and adapt by taking advantage of institutional weaknesses and opacity, relocating operations across borders, and buying political influence and complicity through corruption.
For example, these factors have contributed to Ecuador’s transformation into one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere, as transnational organized crime networks have converted the country into a major transshipment point for trafficking cocaine and other illicit goods from neighboring Peru and Colombia to foreign markets. This has prompted Ecuador to seek increased security assistance and collaboration from the United States.
Recent U.S. actions have emphasized security cooperation, but the U.S. policymakers should take all of these dynamics into account. To sustainably counter transnational organized crime in the region, the United States can also consider efforts to strengthen the role of civil society, local institutions and health of democratic processes. Investments in civil society and democratic reforms strengthen grassroots accountability and bolster efforts for the broader reforms needed to truly uproot and counter organized crime.
State Department offices such as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) have partnered with, supported, and provided a platform for nongovernmental organizations in the Western Hemisphere to inform policymaking by increasing transparency and collecting data about the enabling environment for organized crime networks.
Small investments in civil society and nongovernmental organizations can have larger ripple effects. For example, within three years of INL funding for the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory, the Observatory’s data has become a trusted source of information about transnational organized crime’s impact in Ecuador that is frequently cited by international media and used for further analysis by other organizations that study crime networks in Latin America.
Supported budgetarily by the U.S. Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy has provided grants to independent media and nongovernmental organizations that uncovered ties between Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro regime with drug traffickers and money laundering networks, including Iran-backed Hezbollah.
The United States should also leverage its relationships in the region to incentivize leaders to undertake the equally difficult work of strengthening governing institutions, implementing reforms to strengthen rule of law, and building political will to root out corruption that enables criminal organizations to gain a foothold and extend their influence.
To this end, the United States needs a strategy for engaging every democratic government in the hemisphere — including Latin America’s three biggest economies and significant bases of organized crime, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico — to identify opportunities to collaborate on this issue of mutual concern.
Countering transnational organized criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere requires leveraging multiple strategies that simultaneously target the various dynamics allowing them to proliferate. Partnerships with governments, law enforcement agencies, and civil society throughout the region will strengthen momentum to this end.
