How Organized Crime Threatens Latin America

In a new article published in the Journal of Democracy (Vol. 35, No. 4), CFR Fellow Will Freeman and Amherst College’s Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of political science Javier Corrales provide a new framework for thinking about the threat organized crime poses to Latin America’s democracies. 

Freeman and Corrales argue that organized crime has emerged as the most important security threat to democratic governance in Latin America. At the same time that democratic governments successfully curbed traditional security threats—coups, insurgencies, and anti-democratic oligopolies—in the 1980s and 1990s, they failed to address the problem of increasingly powerful drug cartels and mafias. 

Today, cartels and mafias possess power attributes associated with those traditional threats (military-like coercive capacities, guerilla-like control of territory, and oligopolists’ access to international markets). But because they pursue less maximalist goals—namely, the co-optation of parts of the state rather than its overthrow—democratic governments often tolerate them. This erodes democracy in several ways. It favors the election of mano dura populists, the excessive delegation of power to the military, and national governments’ toleration of mafia-ruled subnational enclaves, in which citizens have little access to democratic rights. 

Curbing organized crime’s power, and thus safeguarding democracy, will be difficult. Latin America faces an adverse international environment: the United States does little to curb the flow of illegally trafficked firearms into the region, a key factor enabling organized crime’s territorial control. Ending drug prohibitionism would reduce traffickers’ profits significantly, but is similarly politically unlikely. Latin American democracies must increase the state’s capacity to deter crime (by making prisons, prosecutor’s offices, and police forces stronger and less prone to capture) while making a real attempt to bring jobs and social services, not just the state’s coercive arm, to the marginalized communities from which cartels and mafias so often recruit. 

Read the full article at the Journal of Democracy.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.