This is understandable, the truth is fighting crime is hard, and previous few countries in the Americas have actually succeeded in dismantling well-armed and entrenched criminal networks. Analysts are skeptical of government policies because their predecessors also brought supposedly revolutionary crime-fighting ideas that never survived contact with reality. Plus, if there’s one thing worse than a perennial skeptic, it’s the commentator who thinks they’ve stumbled upon one simple trick to fix the security situation in Latin America.

For today’s post, therefore, I’ve decided to share my one simple trick to fix the security situation in Latin America.

It’s called “spend more money on security.”

In all seriousness, calls to devote more resources to a policy problem are as unimaginative as they get, and certainly there’s good reason to expect that simply turning the money hose onto organized crime won’t yield magical results. However, I hope to argue in this post that many Latin American countries are spending much less than they should be on public safety relative to the criminal challenges that they face.

The reasons for this, in my opinion, can be traced to a broader problem with the region. Low average tax rates, high levels of informality leaves governments strapped for cash, especially for funding politically-sensitive social programs, which means that security agencies are often left fighting for scraps with other ministries. Resolving this is not easy, indeed, it will likely require Latin American leaders to confront powerful interest groups, and weigh costly tradeoffs with other forms of spending. Still, right-sizing spending on security is likely one of the most straightforward mechanisms for governments to combat organized crime.

Putting Your Money Where the Violence Is

More money lets governments hire additional personnel, deploy and integrate equipment like security cameras, cargo scanners, marine and air patrol craft, as well as improve state presence in rural communities that are especially vulnerable to criminal predations.

Nevertheless, the conversation around increasing security and defense spending in Latin America remains a contentious one. In fact, one study by the Inter-American Development Bank included certain security sector investments, like the cost of prison administration, as part of its tally of the cost of crime. The logic behind this is that, if crime was lower, governments could reallocate funds spent on police and prisons to more productive sectors.

That may be true, but I think it misunderstands the sequencing that needs to happen to bring violence levels down. For countries facing resurgent criminal threats, they may need to spend more on defense and security first before there can be a peace dividend to reap.

Within Latin America Ecuador is probably one of the biggest spenders on security as a proportion of government budget. Combined spending by the Ministry of National Defense and the National Police made up nearly 10 percent of the government’s 2023 budget, the first year of the country’s “internal armed conflict.”

Still, increased funding has not kept up with the magnitude of the security threats Ecuador faces. Between 2020 and 2025, military and police budgets increased by about 33 percent (the overall government budget grew by 30.3 percent). Meanwhile in that same timeframe, the number of annual homicides in Ecuador grew by a factor or more than 6. Adjusting for inflation in the U.S. dollar paints an even more dire picture, suggesting that real spending on security has barely budged.

In Mexico former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had been surprisingly fiscally cautious for most of his term, only to spend lavishly in the runup to the 2024 elections, leaving his chosen successor Claudia Sheinbaum with a strong mandate but brewing budgetary crisis. Mexico’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC) was one of the biggest victims of this fiscal crunch, seeing its budget cut by 36 percent in the government’s 2025 proposal, only to sustain another 18.6 percent reduction in 2026.

Expenditure on national defense has fared better, and some of the variation can be chalked up to the 2024 transfer of responsibility for the National Guard from SSPC to Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). Still, SSPC and SEDENA’s occupied a shrinking share of both the 2025 and 2026 budgets.

But perhaps the most emblematic case of this currently is the bind that Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella has found himself in over the country’s budget. Despite campaigning on a platform of slashing government spending, his 2027 budget entails a roughly 16 percent increase from the previous year. If implemented, it will bring the country’s deficit to a soaring 9.4 percent of GDP, and even the proposed “rescue” law will merely reduce this to 7.2 percent.

Some of the biggest drains on the new budget will include debt service, pension payments, as well as fuel price stabilization driven by ongoing chaos in global oil markets. Meanwhile, uncertainty over how the Colombian state plans to make up for the shortfall in government finances has left international investors skittish.

None of this bodes well for De la Espriella’s security policy, which requires more resources for the Colombian armed forces and national police to modernize equipment, recruit more personnel, and sustain a high operational tempo. The security assistance package the United States announced over the summer may help alleviate some of this pressure, but not enough.

Informality, Inequality, and Demography

A recent data visualization from Latinometrics highlights how Latin American countries consistently fall below the OECD average for tax revenue as a percent of GDP. Indeed, all four of the Latin American OECD members, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, rank below the supposedly laissez fair United States when it comes to tax collection.

The reasons for this are multifarious, and I won’t have time to give a deep dive into all of these in a single post. My rough diagnosis of the problem most countries face rests on three interlocking challenges, a small base from which to draw taxes thanks to high levels of informal employment, the structural power wielded by a small number of financial elites who have an interest in keeping their own taxes low, and more recently added pressure from demographic factors and ageing populations.

Beginning with informality, more than half of Latin America’s workforce is employed in the informal economy. These range from the proprietors of small and micro-sized enterprises, to rural farmers, to gig workers cycling between multiple jobs to make ends meet. While it is not true that people who are informally employed do not contribute to the tax base, this vast, largely cash-based sector is a persistent challenge for public finances. Beyond taxation, informality is an economic development problem for Latin America as businesses with no formal registration struggle to attract financing that would otherwise allow them to scale operations.

On the other side of the economy, the region infamously ranks as one of the most unequal in the world, where wealth is concentrates in a small number of hands. Wealthy households are part of the formal economy, and represent a major source of revenue for the state. Furthermore, in many countries wealth concentrates specifically around commodities such as oil or minerals, with a limited number of firms competing. This grants the special interests that control said industries significant influence over national economic policy. However, these individuals and companies tend to leverage their power over the formal economy to push for lower tax rates for themselves, further exacerbating inequality.

Poor delivery of government services fuels another vicious cycle. Upper class households don’t see the benefits of their contributions to state coffers, and accordingly are unlikely to support further tax increases. In mid-2000s Mexico for instance, business elites were reticent to pay into President Felipe Calderón’s war on crime, preferring to deal with the cartel threat as best they could through private security or simply by eating the occasional extortion payment.

Demographic trends will only turn up the fiscal heat in Latin America. The region’s total fertility rate has been below replacement for nearly a decade now, with birthrates in some countries approximating those observed in significantly more affluent countries in Europe and North America. An ageing population coupled with low levels of formal employment will only put more pressure on the tax base and means virtually every country will need to consider painful, and politically costly reforms to keep their pensions solvent.

The above factors are general problems that most Latin American governments will face when seeking to balance budgets, but they also mean investments in public safety are competing over how to divide a shrinking pie. Even with strong popular support for counter-crime initiatives, actually getting resources for policing and security efforts has been a persistent challenge.

Don’t Spend it All in One Place

Of course, there’s lots of reasons why merely throwing money at security problems might not yield desired gains. Large infusions of cash can quickly become magnets for corruption, or else can be frittered away through bureaucratic bloat. Absent efforts to hold security agencies accountable for how they spend their bigger budgets, we should rightly be skeptical of proposal aimed at significantly increasing government spending.

In addition, it seems like even if smart investments in security could yield gains, getting the money will be an uphill climb for the structural reasons outlined above.

There’s still hope. Between 2002 and 2009, the Uribe administration in Colombia managed to forge a durable consensus among economic elites to voluntarily increase their own taxes in order to help bring an end to the country’s long-running civil war. Known as the “Democratic Security Tax” these reforms specifically targeted the wealthiest Colombians and corporations, with revenues ultimately constituting 20 percent of the Colombian armed forces’ budget and 1 percent of GDP. Together with U.S. assistance through Plan Colombia, the increased resources had an undeniable impact on the size and professionalism of the Colombian armed forces.

As far as tax reforms go, the Democratic Security Tax is anomalous in Latin America. It was a levy imposed on a small fraction of wealthy Colombians and companies wealthiest to pay for a public good. This was made possible thanks to close cooperation between political and economic elites that reassured the latter, as well as the truly dire nature of the security situation Colombia faced heading into the early 2000s which helped forge greater public consensus on the need for increased defense spending.

The confluence of factors that made Colombia’s Democratic Security Tax possible may not be easy to replicate, but there are lessons that can be drawn for Latin American countries to responsibly increase tax revenue.

In particular, it highlights the importance of earmarking new taxation for specific (hopefully popular) security initiatives to generate public buy-in. While people are distrustful of new levies when these go into the black box of government revenues, they can be more easily sold when there is a clear public benefit the additional monies will be contributing towards.

This could be particularly effective at the local level, where the returns from improved security conditions are more immediately apparent to taxpayers. Successful cases of local security tax hikes could in turn pave the way for a stronger national consensus.

Another factor here will be the United States’ evolving attitude towards security assistance. U.S. financial aid can be a key factor in relieving pressure on cash-strapped governments, though the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn attitude towards overseas aid could complicate matters.

There are still signs that security assistance may persevere, even as development aid withers on the vine. The United States’ $1 billion security assistance pledge to the De la Espriella administration in Colombia, and recent reports that the Trump administration is considering reallocating some $52 million in foreign military financing from Europe and the Middle East towards regional allies in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru suggest that there could be more funding to come.

When a policy proposal sounds simple, the first thing you should ask is why it hasn’t been implemented already. In the case of public safety spending in Latin America, the reasons we haven’t seen an increase already appear to be well-known and difficult to dispense with. That doesn’t mean, however, that governments interested in improving their citizens’ security situation shouldn’t try anyways.

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It also got me thinking about a topic that I’ve wanted to write about for some time. While from the U.S. perspective the drug trade is largely a self-contained ecosystem within the Western Hemisphere, criminal groups are global operations. The burgeoning cocaine trade with Europe has alerted many to the transatlantic nexus, but this is hardly the only region where Latin American criminal outfits are looking to expand into.

In the past months alone we’ve seen representatives of Mexican cartels turn up in connection to Nigerian and South African meth labs, while kilograms of cocaine wash ashore on remote Pacific beaches. As the United States looks to squeeze more traditional trafficking routes through the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, it seems likely that criminal groups will face pressure to identify new opportunities and markets for their illicit wares.

There are still good reasons why globally Europe and North America are likely to remain the primary markets for illicit narcotics in particular. Most fundamentally, these are the places with the wealthiest consumers, meaning that drug cartels can turn a tidy profit from even comparatively small shipments. Nowhere else on the planet enjoys such a large concentration of high-income earners.

That being said, just as transnational criminal outfits have sought to diversify their revenue sources, it make sense that they would also see benefits accruing from at least trying to broaden their consumer base. Even if geographic expansion doesn’t automatically beget greater revenues

Today’s post accordingly is going to take a look at what efforts by Latin American criminal groups to expand into Africa and the Asia-Pacific, why these areas present especially fruitful opportunities for criminal diversification, as well as some of the obstacles the cartels can expect to face here.

Asia-Pacific

After North America and Europe, the Commonwealth countries of Australia and New Zealand probably represent the third-most appealing market for illicit narcotics. Both countries have wealthy consumer bases, while the vastness of the Pacific Ocean creates logistical complexities meaning that traffickers can charge massive markups for their product. Cocaine reportedly goes for up to $350 AUD ($248 USD) a gram in Australia compared to around $95 in Europe and $60-110 in the United States.

In 2024, the first ever sighting of a narco-submarine in the southern Pacific was reported when a vessel was found abandoned in the Solomon Islands. In 2025, two vessels were recovered, and as of February 2026 a total of seven have been reported in the south Pacific, suggesting that traffickers have adapted the tried-and-true strategy of using low-profile artisanal vessels to make long oceanic trips.

My friend and colleague John Augé recently put out an interesting dataset showing the spread of drug trafficking throughout the Pacific since 2024. The data shows a clear pattern of increasing trafficking activity in the Pacific, with French Polynesia emerging as a key route for Australia-bound trafficking. In 2025 authorities seized a “historic” shipment of 3,600 pounds of cocaine and 512 pounds of methamphetamine, reportedly bound for Australia. This was quickly surpassed in the first months of 2026 when the volume of cocaine seized in the territory grew to 11.5 metric tons.

The problem has gotten so bad that now-Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Matthew Wale, endorsed the U.S. campaign against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, calling for “killing them all to smithereens.”

Still, Australia and New Zealand count a little over 32 million inhabitants, while the lengthy logistical tail required to move cocaine and other drugs through the Pacific likely means that these countries are unlikely to overtake North American and European drug markets in the future.

Turning north, Southeast and East Asia boast much larger and increasingly wealthy consumer bases. Southeast Asia in particular is home to large states with difficult-to-access hinterlands and relatively weak state capacity that ought to make the region a prime target for transnational criminal organizations.

A recent report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime highlighted the Sulu and Celebes Seas Triangle, encompassing maritime regions of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines as an increasingly important drug trafficking corridor. For the time being this region seems to be important mainly for the transit of drugs, though the report notes: “The growth in transit traffic through the region may have the effect of expanding drug user markets along this route, as has been seen with methamphetamine transit trafficking in other countries in South-East Asia.”

Perhaps the exception of the Middle East, Southeast and East Asia have some of the harshest penalties for drug trafficking and consumption in the world. Singapore is of course (in)famous for its longstanding hardline approach to drugs, while according to Harm Reduction International, 8 of the 11 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have some form of death penalty for drug crimes on their books. In 2025 Indonesia and Vietnam alone sentenced more than 200 people to death on drug-related charges.

In the Philippines, which abolished capital punishment, former President Rodrigo Duterte nevertheless unleashed a brutal counternarcotics campaign upon taking office in 2016. Duterte’s war on drugs is alleged to have killed up to 30,000 people, complete with stories of rampant abuse by the Filipino National Police and ultimately helped land the former president in the Hague where he is on trial for crimes against humanity.

Harsh penalties for drug trafficking have not stopped individuals from trying to move narcotics into these countries. In addition, new trafficking modalities and technological innovations may be providing criminals with an advantage over state authorities.

Liquid cocaine and methamphetamine allows traffickers to conceal narcotics in textiles, food and beverage imports, and even coal and other minerals. This method of adulteration renders the substances invisible to traditional cargo scanning methods, and difficult to detect even by specialized drug-sniffing dogs. After passing inspection, criminals can extract the pure narcotics from their associated cargoes, a process which is becoming increasingly efficient.

In 2024 Korean authorities busted a trafficking ring moving liquid cocaine from Colombia to Australia. The outfit had reportedly brough on Colombian experts to assist with their operations. Advances in the liquified narcotics trade could give criminals a leg up even in the face of harsh drug enforcement regimes across the Asia-Pacific.

Africa

In 2008, the United Nations declared the small West African country of Guinea Bissau to be Africa’s first “narco-state.” Colombian cocaine and pressure on traditional trafficking routes intersected with weak institutions and rampant corruption in Guinea Bissau to produce an ideal operating environment for organized crime. To this day, Guinea Bissau remains a trafficking hub while political instability remains high following a military coup last November and a recent contentious constitutional referendum.

At a basic level, the appeal of many African countries to Latin American criminal groups is as transshipment hubs for narcotics bound to Europe. But proximity to European markets is only part of the picture.

Nigeria and South Africa are home to growing synthetic drug industries to supply regional and domestic drug demand. In May, the Nigerian National Drug Law Enforcement Agency announced it had uncovered an “industrial-scale” meth lab in Ogun State and seized 2.4 tons of methamphetamine and precursor chemicals. Then on August 20, South Africa announced it had also dismantled a major meth operation near the border with Zimbabwe.

In both operations, Mexican nationals were arrested, hinting at the ongoing export of cartel talent to African drug operations. The meth business in particular seems to lie at the convergence of strong regional demand in populous countries like Nigeria and South Africa, while also being a sector where Mexican criminal groups enjoy a surfeit of talented illicit cooks and chemists.

Geographic diversification also allows criminals to arbitrage regulatory regimes and take advantage of bureaucratic friction. If Mexican port authorities have gotten wise to a particular precursor chemical used in meth production and are stepping up their inspections for it, odds are good Nigerian customs officials are still in the dark.

Beyond the Mexican cartels, Lusophone Africa offers significant opportunities for Brazilian criminal groups, especially the First Capital Command (PCC). Mozambique in particular is becoming an increasingly important route for cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine trafficking. In 2020, senior PCC leader Gilberto Aparecido Dos Santos was arrested in Maputo as part of an international sting operation. Mozambique’s growing ties to Brazilian organized crime is somewhat unusual given it borders the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic, making maritime trafficking from the Americas more complicated.

PCC leaders likely leveraged formal trade and diplomatic ties between Lusophone nations, as well as deeply entrenched elite corruption in Mozambique to gain a foothold in the country’s illicit scene. From there, Mozambique has become a useful logistics hub for traffickers, with cocaine and heroin flowing north to Tanzania and eventually Europe, while methamphetamine moves down to South Africa.

As the United States and its allies look to squeeze the drug trafficking balloon in the Americas, it seems more than likely that Africa will swell in importance for the global narcotics trade.

What’s Next?

It is rarely the case that Latin American criminal groups are creating new drug markets from whole cloth. Rather, the increasingly globalized nature of organized crime is bringing disparate networks into contact with one another, and having a multiplicative effect on existing narcotics challenges.

One area where Latin American groups seem to have carved an especially troubling niche is as technical experts and specialists in drug synthesis. Whether it is refining the kind of amateur chemistry behind most meth labs, or helping boost the recovery rates from t-shirts contaminated by liquid cocaine, Latin American criminals seem to be in high demand.

Another lesson from the ongoing internationalization of drug trafficking is that pressure breeds innovation. Drug cartels do not throw up their hands in despair when one established smuggling route closes, they are usually already searching for another soft underbelly to exploit. While this is hardly a reason to abandon the fight against organized crime, it should chasten our metrics of success, and cause us, as I’ve argued often on this blog, to view illicit narcotics themselves as symptoms of the deeper challenges of corruption, state capacity, and incomplete sovereignty.

Other noteworthy features of the operation include the fact that the shootdowns occurred without any apparent airspace closures or restrictions at the border, and that they targeted real drones. Given embarrassing failures on both of those counts earlier this year, that’s no mean feat.

While we ought to celebrate the real progress that continues to happen in the counter-drone space, the United States is still playing catch-up when it comes to the scale and sophistication of the border drone threat. In particular, we should not be so enchanted by advancements in interdiction capabilities that we forget the border is a sensors game. You can’t shoot down what you don’t know is there, and you shouldn’t try to shoot down what you can’t identify.

Today’s post aims to take stock of the recent history of drone and counter-drone operations along the border, what we’ve learned and what we need to do better, as well as what the United States can learn from Latin America’s current struggle against illicit uncrewed aerial vehicles (UASs).

A Brief History of Drones at the Border

Immediately upon taking office in January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency along the southwest border and surging 1,500 troops to the area. Over the subsequent months, roughly 7,500 additional troops in total joined 2,500 military personnel at the border left over from the Biden administration, bringing for a time the total force deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border to 10,000.

In March, U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) established a new Joint Task Force – Southern Border, helmed by the Army’s 10th Mountain Division to oversee the drastically expanded military presence. Meanwhile subsequent Executive Orders designated hundreds of miles of border as “National Defense Areas” where the U.S. military would be authorized to detain migrants.

While the militarization of the southern border attracted fierce criticism, judicial challenges, and pushback at the local and national level, border encounters dropped precipitously during the first six months of the second Trump administration and have hovered around 10,000 a month since.

However, this created other problems. Criminals who made their money from human smuggling now had to contend with reduced demand for their services and a more challenging operating environment. Illicit actors had been employing drones for surveillance along the border since at least 2019, but increased attention along the border elevated the cartels’ relative need for drones.

First and foremost UASs offer an easy way to surveil U.S. border patrols and spot potential gaps in enforcement coverage. In March 2025 CBP officers in El Paso reported drones monitoring their activity “every day” from the Mexico side of the border, while according to one CBP official, during the 2025 fiscal year nearly 35,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the border.

Surveillance drones typically stay on the Mexican side of the border if they can help it, but drug cartels are increasingly experimenting with drone-dropped narcotics shipments.

Again, these are not particularly new tactics, but with interest in land encounters along the border on the decline, UASs offer a convenient way for criminals to move their product more covertly, or at least without risking any of their own members who might rat on the rest of the organization.

While most small commercial UASs are probably still not as economical as other methods for trafficking high-volume drugs like cocaine, the rise of ultra-potent synthetic drugs is a natural fit for airborne narcotrafficking. Cartels have also acquired larger systems like the DJI Flycart capable of carrying heavier payloads that may allow them to move even greater quantities of narcotics without putting members at risk.

In response, the U.S. military began pushing more air defense and cUAS capabilities to the border. The 10th Mountain Division moved additional radars to help develop a “pattern of life” for the unidentified drones they spotted along the border, while in September 2025 Joint Interagency Task Force – 401 (JIATF-401), the Pentagon’s newly-minted counter drone team reportedly began to experiment with the potential for laser-based interdiction.

In December 2025, I argued for CSIS that these steps were encouraging, but the United States still needed to take border cUAS more seriously. In the article at the time I noted “the high level of economic integration between the United States and Mexico means that drone countermeasures could be highly disruptive or even dangerous if they make a mistake.”

Those concerns seemed to have been vitiated on February 10, 2026 when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced a sudden and complete 10 day airspace closure around El Paso. The restriction was lifted a few hours later to conflicting reports including an initial official statement that the U.S. government had interdicted several cartel drones which had incurred into U.S. airspace.

Subsequent reporting revealed that the FAA has issued the airspace closure in response to CBP’s use of a military anti-drone laser. One particularly damning report from The New York Times stated that the border agency had used the laser without coordinating with the FAA against what they suspected to be a cartel drone that later turned out to be a party balloon.

Not to be outdone, on February 26 the FAA issued another airspace closure east of El Paso around Fort Hancock, part of one of the new National Defense Areas. This time, soldiers at the base reportedly used a laser to shoot down a nearby drone that was being operated by CBP.

In May an even darker event may have transpired when a civilian medevac plan travelling from Albuquerque to Ruidoso, New Mexico crashed into the side of a mountain. Recent reporting from Wired suggests that the crash may have the consequence of a GPS jamming test conducted at the White Sands Missile range that denied the airplane access to critical navigational data in the dead of night. This tragic episode was not directly a consequence of border cUAS operations, but nevertheless underscores the real danger that counter-drone systems of all varieties can pose when they are active in close proximity to civilian activity.

The border is not a no-man’s land, it is a hub that billions of dollars in commerce and thousands of people lawfully pass through each day. Just as we cannot afford to neglect the drone threat, a myopic focus on interdiction without precision puts lives at risk.

Have We (Finally) Got it Right?

The El Paso and Fort Hancock incidents were essentially worst-case scenarios from a public relations standpoint. They disrupted (however briefly) peoples’ daily lives for seemingly no purpose, and revealed deep fissures in coordination between the U.S. military, CBP, and FAA, among other agencies.

The good news is that the actors involved in these debacles seem to have taken these failures seriously. In April the FAA and Pentagon signed a “landmark” safety agreement after an investigation into the high energy laser system being piloted at the southern border identified key safeguards for protecting civil aviation.

Building on the recent successful triple shoot-down, NORTHCOM and JIATF-401 also began the fourth iteration of the Falcon Peak exercise in Yuma, Arizona. The experiment, which will run through September 25 is designed to “address the unique challenges of C-sUAS at the Southern Border” with an eye to industry and interagency coordination.

These are all important developments to be sure, but we still have a long way to go. Laser Wars again points out with regards to the April safety agreement:

“First, the agreement doesn’t appear to clarify who has final say in authorizing a laser engagement when US military, CBP, and FAA jurisdictions overlap — the precise ambiguity that yielded February’s airspace closures and, until resolved, will complicate future engagements during a fast-moving crisis. Second, the US military’s arsenal of operational laser weapons is currently limited despite a stated goal of rapidly fielding new systems at scale within three years.”

On top of this, discussion around cUAS initiatives can over emphasize the interdiction piece of the puzzle and ignore the foundational question of sensing. While this may make sense when it comes to questions of military base defense or even critical infrastructure broadly where one can be reasonably sure that a site will have sufficient organic sensors to spot an incoming threat, it begins to fall apart when applied to a place like the southwest border.

At nearly 2,000 miles long, it is next to impossible for the United States to monitor the air littorals of the entire U.S.-Mexico border with current capabilities. Criminal groups deliberately avoid areas where state presence is strong and seek out blind spots to become new nodes in their illicit supply chains.

Thus, even if lasers begin striking down cartel drones for pennies on the dollar around El Paso, cartel operators will merely relocate to areas where U.S. ISR capabilities are more limited.

The issue how the United States should take down a suspicious drone along the border is downstream of a number of other questions. How do we know when and where unidentified aerial systems are flying? How do we distinguish between a drone, a bird, and a birthday balloon? And who gets to make the call when our sensors disagree with one another?

There are, again, promising signs that JTF-Southern Border and other agencies are thinking critically about these questions. The deployment of additional radars by the 10th Mountain is one such example, while Anduril and CBP have worked together to construct a network consisting of hundreds of autonomous surveillance towers providing critical passive intelligence collection capabilities. In theory, the latter can form the foundation for a network of electro-optical sensors using artificial intelligence to scan for suspicious UASs, with radars and acoustic sensors supplying additional verification and targeting data.

Still, rolling out the requisite number of sensors is will likely take some time, to say nothing of the effort required to scale up the number of interceptors be they jammers, lasers, or otherwise. Europe’s own experiences trying to construct an eastward “drone wall” should be instructive of the difficulties associated with building a distributed UAS shield.

Whatever you believe when it comes to border policy writ large, countering illicit drones should be an area with some common ground. There are few reasons to allow unknown drones to flit back and forth across the border. Drones cannot claim asylum, while even the most benign cases involving careless hobbyists may still present a threat to nearby infrastructure and aviation security.

Meanwhile the proliferation of weaponized drone use in Latin America underscores the real security concerns associated with this technology.

Look South

Another major area for the United States, and more specifically agencies like JIATF-401, should be engagement with other Western Hemisphere militaries to share counter-drone technologies and tactical experience.

Thus far, Mexico has been slower to focus on drone use around the border for a couple of reasons. First, the border has been a perennial sore spot in U.S.-Mexico relations and from the perspective of the Sheinbaum administration the less it comes up the better. Second and more importantly, from Mexico’s perspective the greatest drone threat isn’t from quadcopters running drugs into the U.S., instead it is weaponized drone attacks that are killing and displacing Mexican citizens at frightening rates.

Fighting has been fiercest in Mexico’s southeast, where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and its rivals have entered into a UAS arms race, aided by the recruitment of mercenaries who have served in drone units on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Despite sensationalist reporting to the contrary, I believe it is vanishingly unlikely that Mexican criminal outfits would seek to employ weaponized drones on U.S. soil. However, it’s not unthinkable to suggest that a peer or near-peer adversary might seek to take advantage of the same vulnerabilities along the border the cartels exploit to target U.S. bases (Naval Base San Diego comes to mind) on the eve of a major conflict.

But while the United States is gearing up to fend off such potential attacks on its own territory, our neighbors in Latin America are already facing a wave of drone attacks.

Mexico and Colombia are by far the hubs today, but drone knowledge is proliferating throughout Latin America at a frightening pace. This year alone Colombian armed groups have pulled off their first documented attacks using fiber-optic UASs as well as with drone swarms. Ecuador meanwhile is reportedly facing an epidemic of drone incursions into prisons, with 600 such attempts reported at a single facility.

Countries like Colombia and Ecuador are scrambling to develop effective countermeasures in response to a surge in illicit drone use.

But just like at the U.S.-Mexico border, increasing interdiction capabilities alone does not necessarily mean these countries will have the necessary interagency coordination mechanisms to minimize risk to civilians when using these tools. It is easy to see overreliance on GPS jamming for instance sowing chaos for regional civil aviation.

For the United States, working with Latin American partners also offers an opportunity to test new cUAS tools and tactics under real-world conditions. Accordingly, while security border airspace should remain a priority, stopping drones before they reach the border may hold more promise still.

At the same time, as we approach one year since the first alleged drug-running boat was blown up in the Caribbean, all signs suggest these operations are having a negligible effect on criminal profits. While it’s challenging to say the least to get a good handle on illicit markets, cocaine prices have remained relatively stable, and may have even fallen in some markets thanks to a glut from booming production in Colombia.

SOUTHCOM’s messaging around counter-cartel operations has also shifted to now emphasize “Total Systemic Friction” a concept laid out by its commander, General Francis L. Donovan intended to capture the breadth of activities that go into countering modern transnational criminal organizations.

At the same time, a spate of pro-U.S. governments facing significant criminal threats have been eager to embrace artillery and airpower, increasingly with U.S. backing. Ecuador bombarded alleged drug smuggling camps along its border with Colombia earlier this year, while President Abelardo de la Espriella of Colombia pledged a full-scale offensive against criminal groups. The addition of armed drones will certainly give the new Colombian leader a boost to his ability to surveil and strike nonstate armed groups, and I expect it may spur demand from other regional governments for the same capabilities.

But if the United States’ own experience at sea is any guide, these explosive pronouncements from allies will prove underwhelming. Still, it’s worth interrogating why the greater use of lethal force, and airpower in particular, has seemingly been so ineffective thus far.

In today’s post, I want to dive into the logic behind bombing the cartels, and why that hasn’t held up in practice. Fair warning, this post will gloss over the many, many, legal, ethical, and moral concerns that have been raised by critics of the airstrikes. I’m not interested in reprising these critiques, but instead want to examine these strikes on the same terms as their defenders.

Punishment or Denial

One of the hottest Substacks right now is the Escalation Trap by Dr. Robert Pape. Like many other political science undergrads, I read Pape’s book Bombing to Win and have been a convert ever since.1 In very broad terms the book views air campaigns as seeking to coerce an enemy via four mechanisms, punishment, risk, denial, or decapitation.

Punishment campaigns aim to coerce an adversary to some action by inflicting pain, either by terror-bombing population centers or assassinating key leaders. Risk relies on a similar logic but progressively targets bigger and juicier targets as a negotiating strategy. Denial campaigns target the military capabilities an adversary relies upon to achieve their political objectives. These include bombing defense industry sites, supply depots, or tactical air support to enhance ground offensives. Decapitation campaigns, enabled significantly by the advent of precision-guided munitions, seek to surgically remove enemy leadership until a willing partner can be found or the adversary’s command and control collapses.

In Pape’s empirical study, punishment campaigns never work, while denial campaigns can be highly effective.

In practice, virtually no air campaign is falls perfectly into one of these categories. In World War II the Allies orchestrated massive strategic bombing campaigns that decimated German and Japanese cities, but many of these operations specifically targeted the factories and industrial sites clustered in these cities while tactical airpower was also employed extensively.

More recently in Iran, U.S. bombing objectives ostensibly included eliminating Iranian missile capabilities in order to deny the Islamic Republic’s greatest military asset. But it has become clear by now the air campaign began as a decapitation effort aimed at installing a pliant regime through precision strikes on Iranian leadership, and morphed into a risk strategy as Trump threatened increasingly ominous strikes if Tehran did not come to the table.2 As Bombing to Win readers would predict, this effort has failed to produce the desired effects for the United States.

Looking to the Americas, most Mano Dura security policies focus on deterrence by punishment and the belief that looking tough enough on crime is sufficient to convince other criminals that a life of vice is not worthwhile.

Based on this alone, we might predict that these campaigns would fall flat, but there are reasons why governments keep returning to the same well and legitimately expecting results.

Unlike rival governments or terrorist organizations, criminals are first and foremost motivated by profit. Traffickers don’t rally around the flag when one of their shipments gets blown up in the same way that citizens of a country do in the wake of an enemy bombing. In theory, these groups should be uniquely susceptible to coercion by punishment because although they may be willing to price in the risk of going to prison for their actions, nobody wants to lay down their life just to get a few more kilos of coke across the border.

Indeed, this has been the strategic logic for the United States’ air campaign. Officials like Joseph Humire have framed the boat strikes as an effort to close part of the “four-lane cocaine superhighway” that runs through the easter Pacific, western, eastern, and central Caribbean.

In theory, U.S. strikes slow or shut down one of these “lanes,” thereby freeing up U.S. and partner forces to increase interdiction in other areas.

That theory, of course, rests on two assumptions that have since proved questionable. First, that a relatively small number of lethal strikes can exert a large deterrent effect on drug trafficking in a given area, and second, that U.S. and partner countries will be able to shift resources as traffickers shift supply routes. This latter point is especially key as it seemed like the boat strikes did indeed reduce the number of fast boat launches, but also led to more smuggling via containerized cargo. However, it seems that Latin American port and customs authorities may not have had the resources to scan and inspect an increased quantity suspicious shipments, leaving overall drug supply unimpacted.

Another argument for bombing the cartels could be that true coercion by denial has simply never been tried with organized crime.

Under this framing, the U.S. air campaign has not achieved its stated objectives because it hasn’t gone far enough. The United States should not just be bombing a subset of suspicious vessels, but instead should be striking every single suspected drug trafficking boat at sea anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, countries like Colombia should follow suit, and begin systematically blowing up illegal mines, spraying herbicide over every coca field, and cratering every clandestine runway in the region.

With modern satellite imagery, long-endurance UAVs, and U.S. assistance, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for countries to build a rich target set. Coca fields, for instance, are remarkably easy to spot from above, so much so that for years numerous unclassified reports have clearly delineated coca growing regions in South America.

Illegal gold mining operations might be a bit easier to conceal, and can occupy considerably less territory than coca plantations. Still, AI-enabled imagery analysis and canopy-penetrating synthetic aperture radars should make quick work of what limited concealment criminals can muster. From this perspective, some types of organized crime ought to be solved problems, it’s just that we’re too squeamish to accept the brutality of the solution required.

Making Peace of a Wasteland

I suspect that the above argument is an oversimplification for three reasons. First, the availability of substitute revenue sources and supply chains that are more resistant to kinetic disruption makes modern criminal networks highly resilient. Second, achieving and maintaining the operational tempo needed for a true airpower-led denial campaign is far more taxing than it would appear, and finally, endemic corruption means many governments face internal checks on their ability to persecute a comprehensive denial campaign.

Precisely because TCOs value little besides profit, they are free to adopt highly asymmetric Fabian strategies in the face of state pressure. Destroy one illegal mine or fumigate a coca field and two more pop up down the road.

Even in extreme scenarios, where an entire illicit industry becomes foreclosed to a criminal group, the diversification of modern criminal revenue streams means that the organization is likely to continue to persist in one way or another. If coca cultivation becomes too vulnerable to aerial eradication, TCOs may shift their production towards synthetic drugs like methamphetamine or fentanyl that require less territory and can be concealed by complex urban terrain.

This brings us to another challenge. Maintaining the operational tempo required to successfully put criminal groups on the back foot is often more resource intensive and expensive than we initially assume.

Aerial fumigation is a good example of this problem. At the height of Colombia’s aerial eradication program in 2006, 172,000 hectares were sprayed with glyphosate. Meanwhile, in 2024 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated 261,000 hectares were under coca cultivation in Colombia. Colombia could return to mass crop eradication tomorrow and still find itself with more cocaine in its hands than it did at the height of the Medellín Cartel.

In a similar fashion, an air campaign aimed at destroying the hundreds of illegal mines scattered throughout the Andres would consume thousands of munitions across several months and likely tax many of the region’s airframes to the brink. This is to say nothing of the monetary cost that such operations demand or the human rights concerns associated with a bombing campaign of such scale.

Finally, even in a world where the proliferation of sensors has rendered it easier than ever to detect illicit activity, endemic corruption undermines the ability of Latin American security forces to act on their intelligence.

In Ecuador 1,654 complaints pertaining to illegal mining were filed with the Prosecutor’s Office between 2021 and 2025, yet just 34 of these resulted in convictions. In Mexico, several high-ranking security officials have fallen from grace after their ties to powerful criminal organizations were uncovered. Organized crime devours institutions from within, rendering them ineffective by design when it comes to implementing security policy.

Total Systemic Friction Must be Totalizing

It’s probably a good thing that deadly, extrajudicial airstrikes carried out under opaque conditions with little to no accountability also don’t work from a practical standpoint. But criticizing a bad policy is easy, and can be of limited help when we want to identify what a good policy should look like.

I’m reminded of the fact that we’ve been here before. In the 1990s the United States launched the Air Bridge Denial (ABD) Program aimed at intercepting and forcing down suspicious planes trafficking cocaine north from production centers in Peru and Colombia. In 2001, the program drew condemnation after a plan in Peru was shot down, killing two U.S. citizens.

Added safeguards when the initiative was re-introduced in Colombia helped to ensure this incident was not repeated, yet the ABD’s overall effectiveness was questionable when the Government Accountability Office examined the program in 2005. According to the GAO report, the program reduced the number of suspicious aircraft tracks, but noted a lack of “clear performance measures that can be used to help assess the ABD program’s progress toward eliminating aerial drug trafficking in Colombia.”

Additional reforms were implemented and the ABD program lives on today as a partnership between the Colombian Air Force and the United States’ Joint Interagency Task Force-South. According to the former, it has successfully reduced the number of identified illegal flights through Colombian airspace from 639 in 2003 to just seven in 2024.

Of course, just because Colombian airspace is no longer a safe haven for traffickers hardly means the fight against drug smuggling is won. Colombian armed groups pivoted to pushing their product overland through Ecuador and Venezuela, or doubled down on maritime routes.

However, the modern ABD Program shows how sustained cooperation over long time horizons can work to shape the conditions criminals must operate under to avoid detection. That is what a true strategy of denial should look like.

In this vein, I believe that Total Systemic Friction can work if we take a careful look at what those three words seem to imply.

Total means a recognition that there is no silver bullet to the problems organized crime presents, and that an array of political, military, and economic tools are necessary to fight these organizations.

Systemic requires viewing organized crime as an ecosystem containing a multiplicity of actors engaged in a wide variety of activities that nevertheless feed into the same challenge.

Friction is perhaps my favorite aspect of this, because it does not promise a decisive victory. Instead, the United States must realize that it wins by imposing costs up and down the illicit supply chain that over time weaken the ability of illicit networks to sustain themselves and victimize the peoples of the Americas.

Rather than being a drain on U.S. resources, Venezuela would pay for itself many times over in the form of oil revenues and investment opportunities for American businesses. Once the dollars began to flow, transition to democracy would follow smoothly, almost an afterthought for all parties involved who would be more busy celebrating the piles of money they’d be making.

But since Maduro’s ouster it has become increasingly evident that the United States isn’t out of the Pottery Barn yet. Managing Venezuela is demanding increasing quantities of U.S. diplomatic and economic support. Oil companies need constant cajoling to resume operations, Washington has spent at least $300 million on earthquake reconstruction but the country requires billions more, and Venezuela’s external public debt has proven an even thornier prospect than even pessimistic forecasters had expected.

All the while, María Corina Machado and the Venezuelan opposition have become increasingly impatient with Washington’s slow progress on political transition. Machado’s conspicuous absence from dialogues between the regime and opposition over conditions for elections is the latest in a series of indignities that began before Maduro had even landed on U.S. soil. For a time, it seemed many were willing to grin and bear it, trusting that eventually all would be well, but this patience seems to be wearing thin.

If this keeps up there seems to be a real chance of a rupture between the opposition and Washington that would put the White House in the unenviable position of having to choose between backing Delcy Rodríguez in the face of mounting public pressure or rolling the dice on genuine regime change.

Perhaps things would be different if the intervention in Iran had gone better. As it stands, Venezuela is currently the jewel in a tarnished crown of qualified foreign policy achievements. If it were to collapse into anarchy and (greater) economic depression, the United States would find itself bereft of its best argument for unfettered executive power over foreign policymaking.

Going Nowhere Fast

Much in has been spilled covering Venezuela’s uneven economic progress in the wake of Maduro’s capture. The tone of these reports varies considerably, but all seem to recognize that the investment bonanza promised by the White House after Operation Absolute Resolve has yet to materialize.

Venezuela has strong fundamentals: its oil reserves, both a blessing and a curse, remain central in any story, all the more so as disruptions to Gulf hydrocarbon flows have accelerated the search for alternative suppliers, while its mineral resources also represent a potential growth opportunity. The country’s beleaguered private sector remains resilient and innovative, as the initial response to June’s double earthquakes showed. Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s richest countries and could be again, but that scenario remains distant.

Oil production has increased since Maduro’s ouster, and now stands at a respectable 1.25 million barrels per day, about 35 percent more than its neighbor Guyana is currently averaging. But much of that increase has been driven by efforts to squeeze greater efficiencies out of existing infrastructure. Guyana will likely leapfrog Venezuela at some time in the next 12-18 months, while foreign investors have yet to reach for the billions of dollars needed to raise Venezuela’s output past the 2 million barrels per day mark, let alone 3 million.

Venezuela’s muddled economic progress has empowered voices arguing that political transition must jump the queue before recovery can happen. I agree with that position in theory, but I also think it simply isn’t the case that Washington can flip a switch from Delcy Rodríguez to María Corina Machado and everything would fall into place.

For one, there is no guarantee that the security forces would tolerate such a change. Even if fear of U.S. retaliation is enough to deter a full-on coup attempt, without the support or obedience of the military an opposition-led government could find itself confined to a few urban centers while criminal activity in the periphery surges.

Venezuela’s $240 billion debt bill will still need to be negotiated carefully, and besides perhaps some additional goodwill an opposition-led government would probably not hold many more cards than the regime does right now.

Finally, democratization is hardly a guarantee of political stability. Investors are holding off on making large financial commitments to Venezuela because they have little to no confidence in the kleptocratic Chavista rump, but even in the event of a wildly successful return to electoral democracy I suspect most companies would elect to wait and see for as long as possible. Latin American countries have long been buffeted by the winds of political polarization, and concessions granted by one government may be repealed in short order if a rival ideology comes to power in a few years.

None of this means that political transition isn’t a worthy goal or that flawed democracy wouldn’t be absolutely better that what Venezuelans are currently enduring. Rather, we should recognize that Venezuela’s predicament is a consequence of overlapping economic, political, and humanitarian crises. There are no quick or easy fixes to such a situation.

The silver lining is that U.S. sway in Caracas only appears to be getting stronger. Washington has a vice grip on the Venezuelan oil industry, representing the single most important source of revenue for the regime. Not only that, but the proceeds from oil sales, estimated by the Financial Times to be worth potentially $13 billion, continue to be administered by Washington though a roundabout and opaque process.

In the wake of the June 24 earthquakes that devastated Venezuela’s coastal regions causing over 6,400 deaths and billions in damage, the importance of U.S. support for the regime has only grown. The country has virtually no chance of recovery in the short-term without U.S. humanitarian assistance, and in the long-term depends on Washington running diplomatic interference to help unfreeze seized regime assets and secure terms with the IMF.

On top of that, the disaster response has brought nearly 1,000 U.S. troops to Venezuela. Their presence was vital to repair quake-damaged runways and get the flow of aid started, but it is easy to see this deployment morphing into a semi-permanent U.S. military outpost in the country. That also gives the United States one more tool with which to intimidate or coerce Delcy and company should push come to shove.

Empires Need Administrators

So, if the United States has such a firm grip on the levers of influence, why has it been seemingly reluctant to use these to their fullest extent, say by forcing a purge of odious figures like Diosdado Cabello or by fast-tracking new elections? In part I think this can be chalked up to risk aversion on Washington’s part, and a recognition that pushing too hard, too fast could trigger a collapse into the very chaos that it hoped to avoid by keeping the regime in power. I also think the United States hasn’t committed the requisite human capital at the lower- and mid-levels to get a full picture of the situation in the country and what needs to be done.

What surprises me most about recent reports of Marco Rubio’s voice memo diplomacy with Caracas is the high level at which most decisions on U.S.-Venezuela relations continue to be made. To an extent this is emblematic of the Trump Administration’s overall approach to policymaking. Rather than the bottom-up way in which policy options slowly rise from regional embassies through the State Department and National Security Council to eventually reach the President’s desk, instead the Oval Office sets its priorities and leaves it to the various agencies and missions to figure out how to implement them.

I see the merits in this approach, it cleaves away at unnecessary bureaucracy and grants the executive greater assurance that their desired policies will actually be implemented. But dealing with something as complex as managing a foreign protectorate, particularly one like Venezuela, riven by so many internal economic, security, and political challenges, is a task that simply cannot be done by remote control.

This is how you end up in embarrassing and counterproductive situations where the regime arrests businessmen working for U.S. firms it needs investment from, or slow-rolls prisoner releases. While the United States has unprecedented leverage over the Rodríguez regime, I suspect it doesn’t have particularly good real-time insight into what’s going on outside of Caracas. Instead, Washington is governing based largely on high-level interactions with Rodríguez and company.

What Washington really needs in Venezuela is a cohort of lower and medium-level professionals who can get out of Caracas and relay information about what is going on in the field. The Trump administration seems to welcome a return to a rougher, ruder style of diplomacy from the age of empires, but has seemingly been slow to recognize the quantity and quality of manpower this demands.

Where is the industrious Marine lieutenant doing ride-alongs with the FANB to hunt narcos along the Colombia-Venezuela border? Where is the enterprising commercial attaché surveying for new mineral deposits in the Orinoco? What has become of the intelligence man-turned-courtier who trades information like currency in the halls of Miraflores Palace? I’ll set aside the dubious moral and legal character of these figures, we’re well beyond the pale of standard operating procedure at this point, but merely point out that running a modern-day colony is a labor-intensive affair.

I’m especially interested by the apparent lack of engagement with the security sector. Venezuela’s dizzyingly corrupt and heavily coup-proofed constellation of internal security agencies is the single greatest barrier to a democratic transition. Indeed, the White House’s reservations over the opposition’s ability to navigate this thicket was one of the main reasons why Absolute Resolve did not seek to install María Corina Machado.

Today, U.S. forces are operating out of the same facilities that were bombed on January 3, the United States even reportedly coordinated the June airstrike that killed Tren de Aragua boss Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores. The Cubans who defended Maduro and ran the military’s feared internal intelligence branch are either dead, fled, or gone to ground.

For her part, Delcy Rodríguez is also cleaning house, moving former Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López to the relatively toothless Ministry of Agriculture and purging the officer corps of other potential threats. That may be good news for short-term stability, but bad news for political transition as it risks cementing a new praetorian guard whose political futures are tied to Delcy staying in office. But while the United States probably has at least a decent idea of what the FANB units are saying to one another, there appears to be a dearth of engagement with these forces.

Disentangling the web of corruption, patronage, and mutual surveillance is no easy task, but it is arguably the singly most important consideration for Venezuela’s political transition, and by extension economic recovery.

The Mouse that Roared

I recently rewatched the film adaptation of a 1950s serial called The Mouse that Roared. It’s one of my favorite movies, revolving around a hairbrained scheme by the fictitious European Grand Duchy of Fenwick to declare war on the United States, lose, and let the victorious Americans bankroll the country’s postwar economic reconstruction. The premise always made me laugh, but it also contained some grains of truth.

Germany and Japan swiftly rose from the ashes of total war to become global economic powers, all with the explicit encouragement and backing of Washington. Never before had a victor lavished so many resources upon the vanquished.

This approach would come to characterize the U.S. way of war in the subsequent decades, though hardly with the same degree of success. In Iraq and Afghanistan for instance, the United States poured billions into nation building efforts that yielded marginal or even negative returns, and thoroughly spoiled the American public’s appetite for trying to “fix” its defeated adversaries.

Venezuela was meant to be something different, and Trump’s rhetoric dispensed almost entirely with high-minded ideals of democracy in favor of boasts that the United States would “take the oil.” Even skeptics of U.S. interventionism seemed taken aback by the barefaced nature of these statements.

But even in a war for resources the United States couldn’t help but get sucked into trying to solve Venezuela’s internal contradictions too.

To be clear, I don’t think that the Trump administration has suddenly awakened a nation-building streak. Much of this can be chalked up to mission creep as it turns out Venezuela needs a lot more help getting back on its feet before the extractive spree can begin. Still, it seems notable that even the most mercenary U.S. approach to foreign military intervention in recent history hasn’t been able to deliver either economic windfall or democratization on the cheap.

Readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I agree with Colby’s argument that Latin America should spend more on its defense. I disagree with his assertion that spending should flow primarily into buying American weapons (U.S. defense exports should compete for international orders on their merits) but I do understand why a senior Pentagon official would make this case. I’m also conscious that is not a particularly popular argument at a time when militarism seems to be on the rise both within Latin America and the United States.

My goal with today’s post is to highlight that the country currently doing the most to modernize its defense capabilities is Brazil, one of a shrinking number of Latin American governments ruled by the left. Brazil’s successes (and failures) at bringing its armed forces into the 21st century, as well as developing a globally competitive arms industry, illustrate how military modernization in Latin America does not inherently spell a return to the era of coups and juntas, and may even be beneficial for countries looking to climb the rungs of industrialization.

Brazil’s Military Moment

Brazil is the largest country in Latin America by territory, population, GDP, size of its military, and at least a dozen other factors.1 This makes it difficult to generalize lessons from Brazil to the rest of the region. Still, the South American giant confronts many of the pathologies that affect other regional armed forces, ageing equipment, a defense budget that is consumed by personnel expenses with limited space for procurement, and residual civilian distrust of military leadership.

Within this context, the Brazilian defense industry’s advances in recent years are all the more impressive. Between 2024 and 2025, defense spending rose by 13 percent in real terms according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2025 Brazilian arms exports reached record highs, bringing in $3.1 billion amid global rearmament trends.

While Brazil ranks 23rd globally in terms of arms exporting countries, it is the only exporter of note in Latin America, accounting for 85 percent of all arms sales by Latin American countries from 2000 to 2025.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is hardly a chest-thumping warmonger. He has nevertheless supported the Brazilian defense industry under the umbrella of the New Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), a framework for strategic federal investments in key sectors. When it was announced in 2023 the PAC included some 53 billion reais (about $10.5 billion) for strategic defense projects, most notably naval shipbuilding, border security, and aircraft construction.

Brazil has also pursued a relatively successful offset strategy. Offsets in the defense sector refer to incentive mechanisms used by foreign suppliers to convince prospective buyers to go with non-domestic options for their national defense. Typically, this takes the form of technology transfer and some form of co-production to benefit local industry.

In Brazil’s case, the establishment of a domestic production line for the Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighter aircraft represented a significant offset that provided a boon to Brazil’s already well-established aerospace sector. Other examples include the Tamandaré-class Frigate program and PROSUB submarine program. In both cases, Brazil partnered with European firms, Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems and France’s Naval Group respectively, but brought in a host of Brazilian companies and required some level of construction to take place at Brazilian shipyards.

Perhaps no company exemplifies Brazilian defense industrial success better than Embraer. The company’s C-390 Millennium military transport plane and its planned KC-390 aerial refueling variant have been runaway commercial hits. The airframe came into production as air forces around the world began to see their legacy transports and tankers near the end of their operational lives, creating strong demand for a new platform to fill these roles. The C-390 was also cost-effective and a better fit for the operational needs of many militaries compared even to the venerable U.S. C-130, their strongest competitor. To date, three NATO member states, Portugal, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, have taken delivery of the plane, while South Korea, the UAE, Colombia and others are all in the process of planning or awaiting additional orders.

Embraer has historically been adept at identifying and seizing upon market opportunities in both civil and military aviation. The Tucano and Super Tucano ground attack planes are counterinsurgency mainstays found throughout global air forces, while the company is also seeing new opportunities for its narrow-body commercial airliners and private jets.

There seem to be preliminary signs that Brazil’s shipbuilding drive could become another source of export advantage. Brazil made overtures to Argentina about collaboration on submarine construction as the latter country looks to restore its subsurface capabilities. Meanwhile progress on negotiations to procure an additional four Tamandaré-class frigates to the four already on order, should keep Brazilian shipyards humming well into the next decade.

There are still, however, major problems with Brazil’s defense industrial base and procurement strategy. Budget requests from the armed forces routinely outstrip the funds appropriated to it. Brazil’s simultaneous pursuit of multiple complex defense industrial projects also makes it difficult to ensure all projects stay on track when challenges manifest.

Major procurement drives like the Gripen E/F partnership with Saab have been dogged by delays and cost overruns. While the Brazilian air force recently indicated its interest in purchasing an additional 20 fighters, it remains to be seen whether there will be enough cash to go around.

Brazil’s nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) ambitions could also wind up becoming an expensive diversion from more pressing focus areas. Envisioned as the crowning achievement of the PROSUB effort, the Álvaro Alberto SSN is currently scheduled to come into service in 2037, with a nearly $4 billion price tag that is liable to climb even higher.

The main advantage nuclear propulsion offers is endurance, SSNs can stay at sea longer, and patrol further than their diesel-electric counterparts can hope to. But while it’s certainly conceivable that Brazil might want the capability to undertake long-range missions, but doesn’t fit within the country’s core national security objectives. From the perspective of securing Brazil’s “Blue Amazon” a single SSN is likely less valuable than a larger fleet of conventional propulsion Riachuelo subs.

Brazil’s defense industrial ecosystem is the most robust in Latin America, but it still rickety. The country still doesn’t spend enough on arms for companies to rely on domestic demand alone, a feature which subjects Brazilian defense first to the vicissitudes of international arms sales. Perhaps the most notorious case of this is the EE-T1 Osório, Brazilian firm Engesa’s foray into the main battle tank market which bet on purchase orders from the Middle East that never materialized, torpedoing the platform’s chances before it had a chance to enter into domestic service.

More recently, in 2022 Brazilian company Avibras, one of the key manufacturers of the MANSUP anti-ship missile and Astros II mobile artillery rocket system, filed for bankruptcy amid ballooning debt and labor disputes. In the years that followed a range of foreign buyers, including Chinese state-owned defense giant NORINCO, circled the company but were blocked from buying by the Brazilian state. Ultimately it would be a round of private capital that rescued Avibras and allowed the company to reach an agreement with its union to restart production this year. This was not the first time. The company has flirted with bankruptcy several times in the past three decades, with a last-minute $69 million deal with Saudi Arabia rescuing the firm in 1990.

Larger domestic purchases could help Brazilian companies old and new find more stable footing. There are likely major opportunities in the field of uncrewed systems (UxS) where there is substantial demand from countries for low-cost, reliable, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike platforms. I could see a Brazilian medium-altitude long-endurance UAV easily becoming the next Super Tucano with significant export potential within Latin America.

Brazil has all the ingredients to make a play here, the presence of established firms like Embraer that bring a wealth of engineering expertise, alongside newer entrants like Xmobots working on innovative drone designs, and a military that is in theory large enough to place big orders for new UsX capabilities.

But Brazil cannot rely on early export demand to carry its drone industry. The UAV space is a crowded field and getting busier, with platforms like the Turkish TB2 Bayraktar boasting far longer resumes and capturing significant market share. Brazil should endeavor instead to nurture, including through offsets, a drone industry capable of meeting domestic security needs before it looks abroad.

Give Defense a Chance

Since launching this blog, I’ve heard three main arguments against my position that Latin American countries need to spend more on defense. First, that increased defense spending leads to military aggrandizement, erosion of civilian control, and risks plunging the region back to the age of coups and juntas. Second, that Latin America faces no major interstate security threats worth preparing against. Third, and relatedly, that money spent buying tanks, guns, and jets would be better served on social programs.

These are legitimate critiques, and I’m grateful to have debated them with many of you here on this blog and in person. I have three broad responses to each of these as well.

First, I think Latin American states by and large have managed their post-Cold War civil military relations effectively, and it’s not the case that simply spending more on military modernization will automatically undermine this progress. There have been four successful military coups in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1992 according to the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign’s Cline Center Coup d’État Project. In each of these four countries, Bolivia, Haiti, Honduras, and Venezuela, domestic institutions were under serious pressure well before the coup. By contrast, a country like Chile could conceivably increase defense spending rather substantially without worrying about a breakdown in civilian control.

Furthermore, giving the military better equipment in my opinion is probably much less risky from a civil-military relations standpoint compared to other forms that increased defense spending may take. In Mexico for example, the armed forces have assumed new roles in administering public infrastructure projects, collecting customs revenues, and distributing federal aid programs. These moves have undoubtedly increased the risk of politicization and praetorianism within the Mexican armed forces, even as the quality of their equipment has fallen behind the curve.

Second, the absence of major interstate war does not mean countries can afford to let their national security apparatus simply atrophy. The character of defense threats in the region is also changing in ways that necessitate some degree of modernization. Drones for instance have become mainstays in criminal arsenals throughout the region, and no country to date fields enough sensors or countermeasures to defeat this threat. While reasonable people might disagree about the relevance of particular systems and where they might fit in the picture (Brazil probably doesn’t need a nuclear sub, but Peru probably does need new fighter jets), on balance more military spending is probably necessary. Put more simply, the legacy systems that most Latin American countries field are insufficient to combat the threats they are currently facing, let alone future challenges.

Finally, investing in domestic defense industry can have positive spillover effects on the rest of the economy. Brazil’s developmentalist approach to defense industrial spending is a case in point here, but countries like Peru have also had success leveraging defense spending to create jobs and revitalize domestic industry. The Peruvian SIMA shipyard for instance has become a naval hub as well as the jumping-off point for South Korea’s defense-industrial collaboration with the Americas.

Absent a regional war the debate in Latin America will always skew towards butter over guns, but some reweighting of the scales seems to be in order.

My goal with spotlighting Brazil’s defense sector is not to claim that everything is rosy, or that all countries in the region should pursue the same types of investments Brazil had. Instead, I want to point out that you hardly need to be a hard-core militarist to think that military modernization in Latin America could be beneficial for some countries to consider.

Talking tough on crime can help politicians get elected, but once in office the pressure mounts to deliver on these lofty promises. As I’ve written ad nauseum here and elsewhere, reducing violence and insecurity is tougher than it looks, especially when criminal groups are prepared to fight back. Although violence may fluctuate from year to year, cases of countries successfully dismantling entrenched criminal networks are few and far between.

With this in mind, I’ve been pleasantly surprised recently with some of the news coming out of the Caribbean on homicide rates. More specifically, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago appear to have both made major progress on curbing murders within the past year. Both countries consistently rank close to the top of the list of Latin American and Caribbean homicide rates, but both saw murders decline by around 41 percent between 2024 and 2025.

Both countries have attributed their wins in part to extraordinary security measures, especially states of exception. Last fall, ACLED released a great study noting that these politics may yield short term gains, but often end up displacing violence to other areas as well as increasing the incidence of human rights abuse by security forces.

While neither country is out of the woods yet, at this point both seem to have successfully kept violence down for longer than we should expect. In Jamaica’s case, murders are down a further 20 percent for January-July 2026 compared to that same period in 2025, suggesting durable improvements.

As governments and electorates in the Americas continue to look for answers to organized crime, today’s post hopes to look Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago as two possible success stories, and whether there might be any lessons from either country for the rest of the hemisphere.

Jamaica: Slowly, Then All at Once

In 2017, Jamaica’s homicide rate stood at 106.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. At the time only El Salvador and Venezuela rivaled that level of violence in the Americas. While this was an extraordinarily bloody year, Jamaica remained near the top of regional homicide rankings and by 2022 the island was the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere with a homicide rate that was a little over 53 per 100,000.

The spike in Jamaican homicides is a textbook case of Kingpin strategy gone wrong. In May 2010, Jamaican security forces stormed the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood in Kingston to arrest organized crime boss Christopher “Dudus” Coke. Gang members fought back fiercely, resulting in a death toll of more than 70 killed in a single week of violence but Dudus was eventually captured and extradited to the United States.

While the operation seemed to suppress gang activity for a time, like elsewhere, the decapitation of a major criminal outfit did not result in disintegration but rather fragmentation as multiple new gangs sprung up to contest the leadership vacuum. In addition, Jamaica’s diminishing role in the international drug trade forced criminals to seek out new revenue streams, including extortion and scamming that required territorial control to maximize profits fueling a wave of bloody turf wars.

In response, Jamaica resorted to the periodic use of states of exception to clamp down on criminal activity following particularly egregious periods of violence. Like most states of exception, these had diminishing returns the more the state used them, fueling a vicious cycle of crises and crackdowns that trapped many Jamaicans in a perpetual state of siege.

In 2017, the year Jamaica’s homicide rate reached record highs, the government also established its first Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs), targeting hotspots with increased police and military presence, curfews, expanded search authorities, as well as social programming. The programs got off to an embarrassing start when Mount Salem was designated as the first ZOSO due to a data error making the neighborhood out to be more violent than it was. The community remains under the ZOSO regime to this day.

The ZOSO regime has proven controversial, especially as it continues to be extended seemingly with no end in sight. Episodic outbursts of violence within designated zones also undermine public confidence in their efficacy. Still, the ZOSOs do appear to have created breathing room to advance security objectives in conjunction with broader states of emergency.

Alongside these measures, Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ government more than tripled national security spending between 2016 and 2024, expanding the Jamaica Defense Force (JDF) and Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF). This has included increased training for JCF officers including on human rights and community relations, bringing officer-involved shootings down by 30 percent in 2025. The country has also invested in its correctional system, which has grown in recent years as a consequence of more aggressive policing efforts. These initiatives seem to be bearing fruit as Jamaica’s recidivism rate in 2025 declined from 41 to 27 percent.

In 2025 Jamaica recorded 673 murders, making that year the first in over three decades where the homicide total fell below 700. Looking at some of the ACLED data also shows that political violence overall has trended downwards since a recent peak in July 2023. There is no obvious discontinuity in either Jamaica’s security strategy or the composition of criminal groups on the island, instead, it appears that progress has been the hard-won consequence of sustained investment in bolstering public safety.

But could it be that the ZOSOs and states of emergency are simply displacing violence to other regions? It doesn’t seem like it. Between 2024 and 2025 the number of incidents of political violence fell or remained the same in all but two of Jamaica’s parishes. In Saint Catherine violence against civilians fell, but the number of battles increased while in the less populated Saint Elizabeth parish incidents spiked from 2 in 2024 to 7 in 2025. Still, these are outweighed by significant reductions in events in places like Kingston, Westmoreland, Hanover, and Clarendon.

A similar story is present when examining official homicide statistics for the January to July 25 period in 2025 and 2026. Murders have declined in eight of Jamaica’s 14 parishes, with notable reductions in Saint Andrew, which recorded the highest number of homicides of any parish during the January-July 2025 period, and has slashed this total by more than a third so far in 2026. Saint Elizabeth is again an outlier, experiencing a 137.5 percent jump from 8 murders to 19. This change is small in absolute terms, but does bear watching as a potential sign of gang diffusion.

Overall, Jamaica appears to be an example of incremental investments in security adding up to substantial gains over time. Channeling resources into training and capacity building for security forces while using states and zones of exception to surgically target the most violent gangs seems like it should be an effective strategy for countries willing to stay the course.

However, continued progress is not guaranteed. Communities subject to ZOSOs are beginning to chafe after years of tight surveillance, while the failure to roll back some of these restrictions is also a drain on government resources that could be better spend policing hotspots elsewhere. The recent killing of a 45-year-old woman by a police officer in Granville triggered mass protests and suggests that relations between security forces and civilians are far from ideal.

Trinidad and Tobago: Eternal Emergencies

Compared to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago has had more qualified success in reducing homicides. To be sure, the country achieved an impressive 41 percent reduction in its homicide rate between 2024 and 2025, but the country’s murder rate has fluctuated more significantly in recent years. As of July there have been 222 murders so far in 2026, down ever so slightly from 232 killings over the same period in 2025, suggesting that the reduction in violence may have staying power, but gains may not be accumulating as quickly.

Trinidad and Tobago has leaned heavily on states of exception to curb gang violence. The country has declared three such emergencies since 2024 and in June voted to extend the current one for a further three months. Such measures have not been ineffective when it comes to reducing violence. Looking at ACLED data for 2024-2025 shows a decrease in political violence in 12 of the country’s 15 regions, with major decreases in Port of Spain and San Juan-Laventille.

Rhetorically, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been an enthusiastic supporter of the United States’ militarized approach to drug trafficking. Shortly after the first lethal airstrike on an alleged drug boat in September 2025, Persad-Bissessar called for the United States to “kill them [traffickers] all violently.” The prime minister would go on to authorize the deployment of U.S. radars ahead of Operation Absolute Resolve, as well as attend the inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit in Doral, Florida in 2026 and sign on to the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.

Trinidad and Tobago is also aiming to establish some 30 joint military-police checkpoints at major intersections and thoroughfares throughout the country to further beef up security and increase security force presence. Meanwhile, Attorney General John Jeremie has called for lawmakers to take a page from Jamaica’s playbook and pass legislation that would allow the country to establish its own ZOSOs at known organized crime hotspots.

However, the Persad-Bissessar is seemingly at risk of winding up on the horns of a dilemma. Its success at curbing homicides is based on a near-perpetual state of exception, but has drawn fierce criticism from the opposition in Parliament who may mount a constitutional challenge to the regime if it continues to be extended. But relaxing some of the security measures would risk seeing organized criminal activity return to 2024 levels, undermining the government’s mandate as well.

This pattern is consistent with the experience from countries like Ecuador and Honduras that have also used states of emergency or exception in response to criminal provocations, only to see violence rebound as soon as these periods lapsed. Unlike Jamaica, which has been able to use the ZOSOs to apply consistent pressure on a smaller geographic area, Trinidad and Tobago’s longer and more sweeping states of exception are more like public safety strategic bombing campaigns, useful for shock and awe, but limited in their ability to produce lasting gains.

This is not to say governments cannot use states of exception effectively, El Salvador of course proves the contrary having extended its current regime more than 50 times now, but the remarkable durability of Bukele’s program is largely due to the sheer magnitude of the drop in violence it has created. If murders in Trinidad and Tobago were down a further 40 percent from 2025 to 2026, perhaps the state of emergency would enjoy similar levels of approval. As it stands, the current 4.5 percent reduction does not seem like it warrants the continued deprivation of liberty.

Still, the fact that violence has not yet rebounded is a positive sign. Trinidad and Tobago’s efforts to cozy up to the White House may also pay future dividends as the United States looks to expand its partnerships in the counter-crime space. An especially relevant issue should be enlisting U.S. military and law enforcement assets to clamp down on the flow of illicit firearms to the Caribbean to cut gangs in places like Trinidad and Tobago off from their ability to contest the state and clash with one another.

Who Gets the Credit?

Jamaica’s Minister of National Security and Peace Dr. Horace Chang recently announced that the country should expect a “peace dividend” soon from reduced crime rates. It’s still probably too early for that, and wins in the security space don’t always translate easily into economic opportunities. Nevertheless, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago ought to receive more attention in discussions of regional trends in crime and violence.

If the two can seize the current moment to keep applying pressure on gangs, potentially with U.S. assistance, we could soon see once merely good news were transform into durable trends towards greater safety, security, and prosperity in both countries.

From this perspective, both governments’ statements about plummeting crime rates are likely premature, but they also raise an important secondary question: When do politicians deserve credit for reducing crime from their electorates?

This has been a topic of lively debate with respect to Mexico, where President Claudia Sheibmaum’s administration has reported a dramatic reduction in homicides. Overall levels of violence in Mexico show a clear decline, though the magnitude of the drop, as well as how much of it can be attributed to Sheinbaum’s polices, remain live issues.

Closer to my home of Washington, DC, it has been close to a year since U.S. President Donald Trump surged the National Guard into the city in response to an alleged crime wave. At the time, Trump’s characterization of DC as an out-of-control crime hub needing a militarized solution prompted articles highlighting how murders were actually trending down in the city. I never found those arguments particularly convincing even though they were true.

Even at historic lows, DC’s homicide rate was still too high, surpassing that of other American capital cities like Bogotá, Lima, Brasília, and Mexico City in 2024.

The reality is that people don’t just want their lives to get safer in relative terms year after year; they want to live somewhere that is safe in absolute terms. This, in my opinion, is also what gets overlooked oftentimes in discussions about El Salvador, where the real story isn’t just that murders went down, but that a country that used to be unsafe became a place that now feels objectively safe.

When it comes to a country like Mexico, while I think Claudia Sheinbaum deserves more credit than she’s gotten for reducing homicides, the country’s homicide rate in 2025 was still quadruple the United States’, and more than thirteen times higher than El Salvador’s. Similarly, big wins in violence reduction in the Caribbean are encouraging, but there’s a long way to go, and there’s a world of difference between a country with 23 murders per 100,000 inhabitants and one with 2.3 per 100,000.

To be perfectly honest, it’s been somewhat infuriating trying to predict what might happen in Cuba. On the surface it looks like the United States is attempting to run the Venezuela playbook back, but dig a bit deeper and several countervailing forces have kept me second-guessing my predictions.

On the one hand, the disastrous one-again off-again war with Iran has poisoned public opinion against foreign military interventions. On the other, as I’ve argued previously, the need for a quick foreign policy success elevates the Western Hemisphere as a region where the cost of U.S. power projection is comparatively low. A swift, decisive intervention to depose another one of the Western Hemisphere’s anti-U.S. authoritarian regimes could be just what the doctor ordered to repair Trump’s foreign policy reputation ahead of the midterms. But this is all contingent on military intervention being able to produce political outcomes roughly on the level of Operation Absolute Resolve, and in Cuba, that appears to be an uncertain bet.

The United States seems to have gotten itself into something of a pickle when it comes to Cuba. Washington has more or less cemented an ironclad grip over the supply of fuel to the island and enjoys an overwhelming conventional military advantage above and beyond that which it exercised against Venezuela. At the same time, the White House remains deathly afraid of a complete humanitarian collapse that could trigger a mass exodus from the island, while its search for an equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez seems to be running into some dead ends. The Cuban Communist Party seems sufficiently well-institutionalized for Washington to be convinced that there’s no pro-U.S. leader within the organization who would be able to swoop in should Miguel Díaz-Canel find himself in handcuffs and a tracksuit.

But Cuba is not the only anti-U.S. authoritarian country in the Americas. In Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has been trying, with mixed success, to fly under Washington’s radar by cooperating on migration and drug issues while simultaneously expanding ties to Russia and China. Compared to Cuba, the regime in Managua is more brittle and personalistic, potentially making it a closer analogue to Venezuela. Finally, at least on paper, its armed forces are the weakest among the Latin American “Troika of Tyranny” while U.S. military facilities in Honduras, El Salvador, and Panama could allow for effective prepositioning of assets.

For today’s post I want to tug on a hypothetical a little, and postulate whether the United States, facing an impasse in Cuba, might turn its attentions to Nicaragua in the coming months.

Why Nicaragua Might Be Next

Whole books have been written on the abuses perpetrated by the Ortega-Murillo regime. Just this week, Nicaragua’s aged co-dictator Daniel Ortega announced that the country would no longer hold elections where seditious elements could “try to take over the government.” While the move doesn’t change much in practice, whatever institutional guardrails there were in Nicaragua had been eviscerated long before, it is a particularly brazen statement in an era where even tin pot dictatorships at least go through the motions of letting their citizenry cast ballots.

If Ortega’s theory of survival involves avoiding U.S. attention, the move has done him no favors, earning international opprobrium and fueling renewed interest in the idiosyncratic dictatorship.

But beyond a concern for democracy and human rights, there is a strong realpolitik argument for U.S. action against Nicaragua. The country has become a beachhead for China and Russia in the Americas. Especially with the fall of Maduro, both Beijing and Moscow have been doubling down on their cooperation with Managua.

According to a report by Fundación del Río, Chinese mining companies have been granted concessions totaling 1.2 million hectares or approximately 10 percent of Nicaraguan territory. Recently Nicaragua also announced plans to host Chinese military personnel for joint trainings in the fall of 2026, a move which would bring PRC troops to the country for the first time since it dropped diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 2021.

Nicaragua has also signed agreements authorizing the presence of Russian military personnel for trainings, law enforcement, and humanitarian assistance. Since 2017 Russia has operated a GLONASS satellite ground station in Managua, a facility which periodically makes the rounds in Washington as a possible signals intelligence site. Russia has also helped build a shadowy “training center” in Nicaragua reportedly run by the Kremlin’s Ministry of Interior Affairs. From the perspective of the new U.S. National Security and National Defense Strategies, Nicaragua is crossing virtually every red line imaginable when it comes to adversarial influence.

On the leadership side, Ortega is 80 and hardly the picture of health. Rosario Murillo, 75, is deeply unpopular within the regime itself, and there is reason to believe she would struggle to retain control over the security forces in the event of Ortega’s death. To this end, Murillo has initiated a series of purges targeting judges, ministers, and members of the military, including influential veteran Sandinistas. These moves are blatant attempts to centralize power not just around Murillo, but the couple’s children as well to forge a dynastic dictatorship.

This personalistic approach however means that the Nicaraguan regime is more brittle than, say, Cuba’s Communist Party. Remove Ortega and Murillo and the whole system suddenly looks wobbly, potentially opening the field to install a new Delcy Rodríguez expy. One name I’ve heard floated in a couple conversations is Laureano Facundo Ortega Murillo, son and special advisor for investment, trade, and international cooperation. He has been acting as one of the regime’s main international operators, signing new agreements with both Russia and China in recent months, but that same role that could make him well-suited to backchannel negotiations with Washington.

In terms of coercive tools, the United States has a broad and deep set of resources at its disposal. 30 percent of Nicaragua’s GDP is comprised of remittances sent from individuals living abroad, a majority of those living in the United States. The United States is also Nicaragua’s largest trading partner by far, with bilateral trade between the two countries accounting for nearly $9 billion in 2024 thanks to the CAFTA-DR free trade agreement. While Venezuela and Cuba are susceptible to economic pressure in the form of blockades and secondary sanctions, Nicaragua is deeply dependent on access to the U.S. market, and as a result comparatively less experienced with the kinds of sanctions evasion networks that have sustained its fellow authoritarian regimes.

Operationally, Nicaragua probably sits somewhere between Venezuela and Cuba in terms of how feasibly the United States could project power. Managua is comfortably within the combat radius of U.S. fighters and drones that could be launched from Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras or CSL Comalapa in El Salvador. To the south, U.S. Southern Command has been beefing up its operations in Panama following a series of agreements to bolster Canal security. All three countries have U.S.-aligned governments and would be unlikely to raise serious objections with Washington over a buildup. This constellation of bases could reduce the need for U.S. aircraft carrier in theater, and allow for something resembling Operation Just Cause in 1989 when the United States was able to preposition assets directly in the Panama Canal Zone ahead of its overthrow of Noriega.

Why Nicaragua Might Not Be Next

Despite the reasons I’ve given above, I still think it’s unlikely that Nicaragua comes to the fore before a decision is reached inside the White House on Cuba. One reason for this is that the domestic salience of the two issues is lopsided in favor of Cuba.

Far more Americans are aware of U.S.-Cuba tensions than the situation in Nicaragua. In terms of diaspora, Cuban Americans outstrip Nicaraguan Americans by a factor of five and remain a highly mobilized constituency when it comes to questions over Washington’s approach to Havana.

While Cuba has been a U.S. boogeyman for decades, Nicaragua, despite its current links to China, Russia, and Iran, hasn’t reached the same status. Although the Ortega-Murillo regime has its hands in all manner of illicit activity, the country has birthed no criminal groups that rival the memetic status acquired by the Tren de Aragua or Cartel de los Soles. In terms of migration, while hundreds of thousands have fled the Ortega-Murillo tyranny, these refugees have largely settled in other Central American countries like Costa Rica, and have yet make up a significant fraction of U.S. border arrivals compared to northern Central American states.

This all means the argument that a regime reshuffling would serve an “America First” foreign policy agenda currently seems to be weaker when it comes to Nicaragua. Ultimately, the potential benefits of intervention may not prove worth the potential costs.

Not only that, but at this point I do genuinely believe Trump when he says he’s going to do something. Anticipating what precisely that “something” involves is the real challenge, but the White House needs it to be decisive enough to credibly be presented as a victory. Maybe that means a limited airstrike campaign, or maybe Cuba can eke by with a “deal” that both sides know the other doesn’t plan on adhering to.

If the sequencing ends up being “Cuba first, Nicaragua next,” the latter’s fate will depend heavily on how the former turns out. A Caribbean expedition that’s viewed as successful will almost certainly embolden the United States to seek out another monster within its hemisphere to slay. Meanwhile, a military intervention that ends in U.S. casualties, or a deal with Havana that is met with condemnation in Miami, could chasten the United States and embolden more isolationist elements within the Trump administration.

Cuba isn’t the only determinant either, the Iran War seems to be back on, and less popular than ever. So long as Washington remains preoccupied with conflict in the Middle East, it is unlikely to be willing to mass the forces required for a simultaneous intervention in Latin America. We should remember that, despite the tactical success of Operation Absolute resolve, it still required about a quarter of the U.S. deployed surface fleet and more than 150 aircraft. It seems unlikely the U.S. will attempt a military operation in either Cuba or Nicaragua without similarly overwhelming force.

I think the regime understands these factors on some level. Their best strategy is to play for time and hope that winds will shift in the United States to make a maximum pressure campaign impractical. To this end, while Ortega’s recent remarks on elections may have ignited an uproar, the news cycle and Washington’s attentions already seem to be moving on.

Careful What You Wish For

Let’s assume, for a second, that Nicaragua at some point in the future the United States does sanction a pressure campaign up to and including military action to remove Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. What can we expect to come in the aftermath of this?

First, I think the United States clearly prioritizes leader-level relations above all else. Trump in particular wants people he can talk to and that he likes talking to. His solution to leaders who won’t play ball is to try and get rid of them, a strategy that worked well in Venezuela, and poorly in Iran. This means any scenario in which the removal or Ortega and Murillo leads to a rapid transfer of power can be safely discarded.

Like María Corina Machado, much of the Nicaraguan democratic opposition remains out of the country, exiled and stripped of their citizenship by the regime. I’ve had the honor to meet several members of the opposition personally, and have a deep admiration for their courage, nevertheless, it seems likely to me that the United States will want to keep this status quo in the wake of a successful decapitation operation as it works to manage whoever its handpicked interlocutor is within the regime.

Economically, the prognosis is muddled. After Haiti, Nicaragua is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of around $3,173 in 2025. Most of the private sector that remains now exists mainly to enrich the regime. And yet the bottom hasn’t fallen out of the Nicaraguan economy in the same it has in Cuba or Venezuela. The country also faces the softest sanctions regime of the three, making it considerably easier for the United States to prime the pump for businesses to reenter.

But it’s unclear whether there will be any enthusiasm on the part of the U.S. or international private sector to move in. The country’s economy is based heavily around remittances and agriculture, not particularly appealing areas for foreign capital. Nicaragua’s most tantalizing asset is likely its mineral reserves, especially gold, but China has already scooped up the rights to most of these. Of course, part of the United States’ deal with the new Nicaraguan leadership might be to kick China out of the mining sector, but that is a more risky proposition that it might at first appear. China was willing to cut its losses in Venezuela, in Nicaragua Beijing has more skin in the game.

Politically speaking, it’s tempting to try a one-for-one comparison with Venezuela. But those kinds of analogies make for poor predictions. Instead, I think it’s worth reiterating a call for humility among analysts.

A U.S. decapitation operation could give rise to a successor who appears compliant initially, but quickly goes back on his or her word. Alternatively, the U.S. could succeed in bringing a Delcy figure to power, only for them to be swiftly dispensed with by an internal power struggle. Mass unrest in the wake of U.S. strikes could plunge the country into chaos and allow criminal elements which once skirted around the edges to expand their tentacles. Nicaragua is a difficult media environment even as authoritarian countries go, and up-to-date information on the country’s political and security elites is hard to come by.

The Ortega-Murillo regime is one of the most odious governments in existence today, and I will shed no tears for either of the dictatorial co-presidents nor their cronies. Still, any analysis of what it means for Nicaragua to be next on the United States’ checklist of interventions should be clear about what this truly means and what we aren’t able to know for certain. I’ve tried to do that in this post, but I’m sure there are plenty of factors I’ve left out still, my hope is for this to be more of a jumping-off point than the final word, something tells me there could be plenty of headlines involving Nicaragua to come.

More than a month later, both Abelardo and Keiko have emerged as victorious presidents-elect, the latest in a series of victories for right wing candidates in Latin America. It is now easier to list the countries that have not elected a right, or right-adjacent, leader in the past three years.

Much has been written about this reverse pink tide, new right, “blue tide,” or even “Orange Drift” (in reference to the pro-Trump orientation of many candidates). Typically, these analyses stress the pro-U.S., and more specifically pro-Trump facets of new Latin American leaders.

This is understandable to an extent for the simple fact that Latin America’s “new right,” if it can even be called that, has little in common save for a broad alignment or desire for alignment with Washington. Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia bears little resemblance to Abelardo de la Espriella, and calling Keiko Fujimori an emissary of a “new” right-wing is surely a mischaracterization. The Shield of the Americas and Americas Counter Cartel Coalition is even more diverse in its ideological composition, including Guyana, governed by Irfaan Ali’s center-left People’s Progressive Party/Civic, and in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo might be the most left-wing leader the country has had since Jacobo Árbenz.

This is important to keep in mind as, for the purposes of this article I’ll be mainly referencing leaders and parties that identify with the right. It strikes me that the rise of a wave of leaders who are at least nominally on the same page when it comes to their relationship with the United States could present a unique opportunity to forge a consensus on other issues as well. And it would be very funny, not likely, but funny, if the right is the one to achieve Latin America’s dream of regional integration.

Regional integration has for decades, if not centuries, been the ever-elusive goal of Latin American leaders of all stripes. Indeed, the Americas were the birthplace of many of the ideas we now associate with the modern international order. But it seems these very ideas have still struggled to take root at home. While the Americas boasts a plethora of multinational institutions, the OAS never acquired the same diplomatic or economic clout as the European Union, and the Rio Treaty never produced the same level of security and defense integration as NATO.

The question I hope to tackle with this post therefore is whether the shared desire for closer alignment with the United States among new pro-U.S. governments might also plant the seeds of greater intra-regional cooperation.

Strength in Numbers

The ascendancy of the Latin American right wing over the past two years both is and is not remarkable. I suspect most readers have their own theory of the trend and I’m no different. My very rudimentary sense is that much of it comes down to cyclical voting patterns and an anti-incumbent environment.

Every election, however has its own dynamics. In Peru, Trump notably demurred from issuing a forceful endorsement of Keiko Fujimori, even as his social media accounts threw their weight behind Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. But in both cases, my sense is that Washington had a relatively minor impact on the final outcome. By contrast in Argentina’s midterm elections, forceful U.S. assistance in the form of currency swaps and promises of future investment likely played a vital role in resurrecting Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party’s chances on the heels of a corruption scandal.

The most interesting feature of recent elections in my view is the consistency of the trend. In several coin-flip elections, including Peru, Colombia, and (an odd three-sided coin) Honduras, the right has eked out a victory. One might expect that we should see at least one outlier, but the pattern seems to hold up, even where the U.S. declines to explicitly endorse a particular candidate.

Still, we shouldn’t overstate the scale of the new conservative wave either. The region’s biggest players, Brazil and Mexico, are led by leftists, meaning more than half the population of Latin America, and more than half the region’s GDP, is still governed by the left. This could change if (and that’s a big if) Flávio Bolsonaro wins October’s elections, meaning that virtually all South America would be governed by some flavor of pro-U.S. government.

Even without total victory, in theory the rightward shift of the region opens new opportunities for collaboration among like-minded leaders. At a bare minimum, ideological alignment should help allay some of the intra-regional crises that tend to flare up between governments of opposing political stripes. Some examples from the past few years include the recent trade war between Ecuador and Colombia, Mexico’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Dina Boluarte’s government in Peru following Pedro Castillo’s abortive self-coup, and of course, the dramatic saber-rattling between Venezuela and Guyana over the Essequibo, a dispute which hasn’t gone away just yet.

There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the rightward drift in the Americas has led to progress on the diplomatic front. At the 2026 Mercosur summit, both Chile and Paraguay extolled the virtues of the Paz government in Bolivia. The chummy FaceTime between Abelardo de la Espriella and Keiko Fujimori suggests to me that the dispute over Isla Chinería may be put safely returned to the back burner after Gustavo Petro elevated the issue last summer.

The recent Hondurasgate scandal also suggests that some of the new right governments may be cooperating with one another in a more sinister fashion. According to a series of recordings released by Canal Red earlier this year, former Honduran president and now-pardoned narcotrafficker Juan Orlando Hernández worked with current president Nasry Asfura, Javier Milei, the United States, and Israel to organize a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting progressive governments in the Americas.

The veracity of these recordings continues to be disputed, but the idea that right-leaning governments are coordinating media and messaging campaigns to aid one another isn’t particularly novel. Expressing support for ideological allies via social media is a low-cost, and potentially high-impact method for leaders to support one another, and even arch-isolationists like JD Vance have taken to the digital public square to back right-wing parties and leaders in Europe.

While I don’t wish to downplay the gravity of the scandal, unpacking it fully would require a post all its own, and helping your ideological comrades-in-arms garner clicks, or even win elections, is in a certain sense the easy part. The real acid test now is what the Latin American right will do in their moment of triumph.

What Regional Integration Really Means

Traditionally, the right has been far less interested in reaching across borders than the left. The “pink tide” of the 2000s saw the birth of new multinational groupings like the now-defunct Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as well as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) framed as a regional alternative to the U.S.-dominated OAS.

By contrast, right-wing governments on average tend to be more inward-looking and concerned with their domestic agendas. For example, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele hasn’t pushed particularly hard to elevate his profile in inter-American fora despite his many admirers among the Latin American right.

Still, it would be a serious own goal for the current crop of right governments to not engage in more substantive cooperation on trade, infrastructure investment, and security.

Of these three, security is probably the most promising avenue for closer regional integration. Transnational criminal operations demand transnational responses, with porous borders allowing billions of dollars in illicit commercial activity each year. It is also the one area where there is at least in theory already a U.S.-led multilateral framework in the form of the Shield of the Americas and Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition.

Ecuador for instance, is notably not a major cocaine producer, but has been flooded by cocaine trafficked in from Colombia and Peru, the world’s first and second largest coca growers respectively. The Noboa administration has not been shy when it comes to venting its frustrations over this situation. Ecuador not only imposed tariffs on Colombia over the Petro government’s alleged security failures, in March the Ecuadorian military dropped bombs along the border with one allegedly landing on Colombian territory. Now that Abelardo de la Espriella has pledged to bombard drug traffickers and illegal miners on day one of his administration, there should be considerably more alignment between Quito and Bogotá. Add Keiko Fujimori’s more aggressive approach to public safety to the mix and it’s easy to see a broad Andean coalition dedicated to waging war on crime taking shape.

A bit further south, Chilean President José Antonio Kast could run into a bit more trouble even with friendlier governments in Peru and Bolivia. Kast’s platform included a hefty pseudo-Trumpian anti-immigration plank, and since his inauguration Chile has begun digging several kilometers of trenches along the country’s northern borders. The border has been a persistent sore spot for both Lima and La Paz, and that sentiment is unlikely to go away even as both capitals have turned towards the right. Still, Kast likely has better odds of smoothing over border tensions with Fujimori and Paz next door.

Economic issues are a thornier issue, and one where Latin America has historically struggled no matter which direction the electoral winds were blowing. Intra-regional trade accounted for just 15 percent of Latin American trade in 2019, lower than East Asia, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The region faces challenges when it comes to harmonizing tariff rates, dismantling regulatory barriers, and modernizing labor mobility, making it difficult to leverage comparative advantages. Add to that the fact that most Latin American economies depend heavily on raw commodity exports, meaning countries in the region are more likely to compete than complement one another.

There have been some qualified successes, most notably the Mercosur trading bloc between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Other projects like the Pacific Alliance have also driven some greater integration, but remain a long ways away from rewiring trade away from the U.S., East Asian, or European markets.

Compounding these challenges is a dearth of infrastructure connectivity. The region lags in terms of port, airport, road, and rail connectivity. Part of this is a feature of geography, with dense jungles, high mountain ranges, and arid deserts that complicate construction. But equally important is the difficulty of pooling resources at the regional level to get new projects off the ground in the first place. This contributes to a vicious cycle wherein low intraregional trade makes it unprofitable to build or modernize infrastructure, driving up transportation costs and further diminishing trade between Latin American states.

While ideological alignment is hardly necessary to strengthen regional economic integration, it can provide a useful catalyst to get countries to the negotiating table together. Nevertheless, these will remain hard challenges and the window of opportunity for the current collection of leaders to put in meaningful work on resolving them is closing just as quickly as it opened.

The United States Won’t Save You

For now, it appears as though most of the new right leadership have staked their hopes on a stronger relationship with Washington in lieu of stronger intra-regional ties. While this is understandable, it is short-sighted. Despite powerful rhetoric, U.S. engagement with Latin America has so far been less of a comprehensive strategy, and more a series of one-offs, particularly when it comes to economic issues.

This is further complicated by the fact that Venezuela, the country currently receiving the lion’s share of U.S. attention as well as foreign assistance, is not a member of the new right at all, but rather the rump of a kleptocratic and ostensibly socialist authoritarian regime. The ongoing humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is likely to continue U.S. attention and resources, and with good reason given the scale of the need in that country. Still, this means other pro-U.S. leaders could find themselves competing for a slice of a shrinking pie.

In other moments of crisis, U.S. assistance to the Americas has struggled to move beyond the rhetorical. When Bolivia was paralyzed by mass protests and roadblocks, the United States rallied fellow Shield of the Americas members to issue a joint statement condemning efforts to sabotage the Paz presidency, but it was Brazil that offered to deploy humanitarian aid to relieve dwindling food stocks. In a similar manner, as Panama faced retaliation from China over its Supreme Court decision to revoke the port concessions given to CK Hutchison, the United States, together with Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guyana, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago expressed solidarity with the Mulino government, but seemingly hasn’t pressed the issue much since even as Beijing continues to detain Panama-flagged vessels at increased rates.

In addition, as the number of right-wing, pro-U.S. governments grows, the number of governments vying for the White House’s attention does as well. Even if it likes them, Washington doesn’t want to have to bail out its allies on a regular basis. Indeed, while the 2025 National Security Strategy first articulated the “Trump Corollary” as U.S. policy, it also made clear the United States would view burden sharing as the norm with even its closest allies and partners.

This tendency was on display at the recent Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, where Elbridge Colby admonished the region’s militaries to spend more on their national defense, holding up the new NATO standard of 3.5 percent of GDP as an example to be emulated. Even in the United States’ own neighborhood, Washington is signaling that its friendship is not unconditional.

I’m not saying that there’s no utility for governments to pursue greater collaboration with Washington, and some forms of U.S.-Latin America partnership will take time to cultivate. But for leaders under pressure to deliver results quickly, it seems a risky gamble that Washington will provide the kinds of transformative change in the security and economic domains that voters want.

When I launched this blog my goal was to post something once every two weeks. When the United States captured Maduro on January 3 I switched over into more of a weekly schedule which I was able to keep up for 11 weeks straight. Going forward, I’m hopeful to maintain a more-or-less weekly schedule, but will be prioritizing consistency over frequency. The goal is to publish at a minimum every other week, with no more than one week gap between articles. I also want to experiment with different article formats and maybe build out some datasets for others to use. If you have any ideas or topics you’d like to see addressed, please do drop me a line.

As far as today’s post goes, I figured I would share something that’s a little different from the normal Caballeros fare and feature five opinions I hold about Western Hemisphere issues that represent some of my most controversial or otherwise out-there takes.

These arguments are less than ironclad, and my evidence for them less robust than I would put in an ordinary post. Maybe some of them will materialize into more serious analyses, but for now, I’m putting them out there in the hopes it might be fun to read my more oddball thoughts and because I believe authors should always be willing to push the envelope somewhat.

In today’s post, I’ll cover:

1. Why Brazil should have a Pacific coastline

2. Why I’m still with Dina Boluarte

3. Why we need to stop putting “Narco-” in front of everything

4. Why we need to shut up about “Plan Bukele”

5. Why it’s all the United States’ fault, and why that doesn’t matter as much as you’d think

This is probably a bit risky of me, there are more than 500 of you now, and if I succeed in getting a majority of you to disagree with me on at least one of these, I could be in for a lot of angry comments. They could also end up being perfectly milquetoast, which will be embarrassing for me in a whole other way. Nevertheless, let’s get into it.

1. Brazil Should Have a Pacific Coastline

On April 8, the following post went semi-viral in LatAm circles on Twitter, calling for Brazil to annex the territories of many of its neighbors to form a new superpower and master of the South American continent.

The overwhelming reaction to this post was derision, from both other Brazilians as well as commentators from countries the author suggested annexing. The thing is, I think the original poster is right.

The United States and Brazil are alike in many ways. Both are populous countries with vast and resource-rich territories. Both benefit from a lack of dangerous and adversarial neighbors like the medium powers that hem in Chinese and Russian ambitions. But one thing the U.S. has that its southern mirror does not is bioceanic access. The U.S. didn’t luck into this, it was the product of a conscious, bloody, process of territorial aggrandizement that was sustained by governments throughout the 19th century.

For Brazil, a Pacific coastline would not only augment the country’s resource wealth, potentially bringing new hydrocarbon as well as mineral deposits into the picture, it would turn the country into a true trade dynamo. The most immediate opportunity would be in the form of brand-new synergies for trade with China. Already the country’s largest trading partner, China-Brazil trade suffers from the fact that all shipping must pass either through the Panama Canal, now bereft of PRC influence, or else through the Strait of Magellan near the southernmost point of South America, adding time and inconvenience to the flow of goods between the two countries.

Beijing is currently working to rectify Brazil’s geographic faults through a planned bi-oceanic railway connecting Brazilian producers to their export nexus at the port of Chancay in Peru. I’ve written and spoken at length in other outlets about the geopolitical relevance of this project, but I think it stands to reason that, had Brazil already possessed a territory bordering the Pacific, it would likely have already built the infrastructure needed to link this to the rest of the country. Depending on how long ago Brazil acquired its Pacific coast in our alternate history, we could also expect the country to be a genuine naval power, as a capable military would be needed to secure the trade revenues derived from bioceanic access.

Of course, I’m not saying Brazil should march its troops over the Andes, tomorrow. The time for wars of territorial conquest has passed (hopefully) for South America, and it was never particularly couth in that region to begin with. Still, if you ask me for the greatest single impediment Brazil faces in a bid for Great Power status, I’d probably say it’s not having a Pacific coast.

2. I’m Still with Dina Boluarte

Dina Boluarte, Peru’s disgraced ex-president reached cartoonish levels of unpopularity prior to her removal from office in October 2025, some polls reporting a barely 2 percent approval rating. That’s within the margin of error for most polling methodologies, raising the real possibility that not a single person thought she was doing a decent job. Nobody except for me, that is.

To be clear, I never thought Boluarte was a good president, rather that, given the circumstances of her ascension, she performed about as we should expect. Ideologically homeless, beset immediately by protests that paralyzed the country, and constrained by a legislature with the power to remove her at any point, the best she could hope for was to muddle through. And muddle through she did, not without a bloody crackdown against pro-Castillo protesters and a number of corruption scandals. But my sense is that the crackdown would have happened with or without Boluarte, and in fact, you do need to give her some credit for preserving the constitutional line of succession instead of letting it slip to a military or legislative coup. In terms of corruption, clearly that wasn’t a problem unique to Boluarte herself, as her successor José Jerí speed-ran himself into an impeachable corruption scandal as well.

Accordingly, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, Peru’s choice was never between Dina Boluarte and someone better, but between Dina Boluarte and someone worse, or at least even more incompetent.

More broadly I guess you could say I have a strong bias towards letting incumbents govern. Too often in the Americas I feel the pendulum swing of public opinion is so dramatic electorates and analysts alike start clamoring to throw out the current executive and replace them at the first whiff of failure. Fiddling with electoral calendars, or modifying lines of succession is one of the most insidious slippery slopes in a democracy, even when the current leader is deeply unpopular.

3. Stop Putting “Narco-” in Front of Everything

This is probably the most petty personal grievances on the list, but ever since I started working on organized crime issues in the Americas, I’ve found the obsession with affixing “narco-” to everything a deeply annoying stylistic choice. Narcosubs, narcostates, narcomoney, narcomessages, narcotanks, even narco-funerals and narco-cattle all abound in this space.

I do understand why this happens, or I think I do at least. The above terms tend to roll off the tongue more easily in Spanish, while they serve as an easy shorthand for highlighting the link between a given activity and organized crime where such a connection might not be intuitive. I’ve used the narco- prefix often in my work and even, albeit partly in jest, tried to coin “narco-datacenters” in a previous piece for this blog (a bit sad that one didn’t catch on). Still, I find the excessive use of narco-something-or-other in discussions about organized crime to be either redundant or misleading.

More often than not, the narco- prefix doesn’t add much to our understanding of an event. The statement, “the CJNG set up blockades along three major roads” is functionally identical to “the CJNG set up narcoblockades along three major roads.” Indeed, the latter suggests that there is something about these narcoblockades that makes them significantly different from regular roadblocks.

It may be true that the fact that it is a drug cartel putting up these blockades could have some analytical significance, but we seemingly don’t use differentiating prefixes for the activities of any other non-state armed groups. ISIS doesn’t put up “terrorblockades” or leave “terrormessages” they put up blockades and leave messages like everybody else.

There are some cases where I’ll grant the “narco-” prefix plays a role. Narcosubmarines for instance are a specific class of vehicle with a distinct operational history centered around their use to transport illegal narcotics. On the other hand, much prefer the term Improvised Armored Fighting Vehicle (IAFV) to “narcotank” since the fact that these vehicles are in the service of drug cartels has little bearing on their actual design or tactical employment.

Sadly, this is one conviction I simply don’t hold onto strongly enough to go against what seems to be the popular consensus, you’ll still probably find me writing about narcomantas or narcotanques in the future. But if by some chance I’ve managed to convince you with a couple short paragraphs, I invite you to join me in my own personal fight against the “narco-.”

4. We Need to Shut up About “Plan Bukele”

I’ve been talking about El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for the majority of time I’ve been working on Latin America issues. There are good reasons for this, El Salvador’s transformation from one of the Western Hemisphere’s most violent countries to one of the safest has been genuinely remarkable, the human rights abuses happening in the country’s prison system have been genuinely deplorable, and Bukele himself has been very good at staying in the news cycle.

One of the most common perspectives that circulates about El Salvador’s story involves the export of “Plan Bukele” as a template for the kinds of anti-crime policies voters in Latin America are demanding. Barely an election goes by these days without some candidate styling themselves, or being stylized, as “the Bukele of X” with Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella beening the latest to receive this treatment.

Advocates of “Plan Bukele” furthermore tend to champion the El Salvador story as an example of how crime and violence are simply choices any government can solve with the right amount of political will. Richard Hanania recently posted something to this effect, arguing that Latin America’s combination of weak state capacity and excessive rights for accused criminals undergirds persistently high homicide rates.

The thing is, by now I think we have enough data to say that either “Plan Bukele” does not translate to other country contexts, or else requires a level of political buy-in most Latin American leaders never receive. Ecuador is probably the best case in point here, where spiraling violence and insecurity gave President Daniel Noboa a mandate to wage war on crime in January 2024.

If there was ever a country to test whether the Bukele model was exportable, surely it would be Ecuador. However, more than two years into the country’s “internal armed conflict” homicide rates have remained stubbornly high, and Noboa’s dalliance with autocratization has done no favors for his approval ratings. Either Ecuador got what should be a simple formula for public safety horribly wrong, or else curbing organized crime is a tougher battle than it might at first appear.

Personally, I believe the latter explanation to be more the case than the former. I’ve long argued that El Salvador’s real success in curbing crime is the product of a combination of policies and circumstances that happened to work really well in the specific context of El Salvador. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons that can be drawn from the El Salvador story, but rather that endlessly regurgitating narratives about a single country’s success feels increasingly stale when that same success hasn’t been replicated anywhere else in the region.

“Plan Bukele” does a disservice to voters who want a stronger stance on crime and insecurity from their leaders by offering a neat branding strategy to disguise a lack of real substance. Analysts and commentators would accordingly do well to avoid retreading familiar ground when the next tough-on-crime Bukele wannabe surfaces.

5. It’s All the United States’ Fault, That Matters Less than You’d Think

I’ve saved probably the most controversial for last.

Did you know that the United States is responsible for the MS-13 gang getting its start among Salvadoran deportees? Or that the DEA’s aggressive counternarcotics campaign in 1970s Mexico may have helped kick-start the country’s bloody cartel wars? Surely if nothing else you’re aware of the linkage between the CIA, drug-running Nicaraguan contras, and the crack epidemic that ripped through U.S. inner cities in the 1980s.

Everywhere you look in the region, the scars of past U.S. interventions and policy failures are painfully obvious. Still, I don’t think it follows that U.S. engagement today is by necessity pernicious or counterproductive. Nevertheless, I often find myself encountering a certain type of commentary that substitutes historical grievances for an actual understanding of current events.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think the legacy of CIA intervention in Nicaragua makes efforts to combat the brutal authoritarianism of the Ortega-Murillo regime any less noble, or has much bearing on U.S. sanctions posture for that matter. I don’t think the U.S. origins of MS-13 matter that much either except insofar as they help us understand the group’s organizational structure. While we shouldn’t ignore these pieces of the story, they tend to receive more attention than they deserve in analyses that should be focused on current trends.

In order to apply history effectively to policy questions, we should be allowing history to inform and guide our recommendations. It’s not enough to list all the reasons previous peacekeeping missions in Haiti failed (often to the detriment of the local population), you need to explain, based on the lessons of the past, what the United States and international community should do right now. History ought to instill us with a sense of humility, but it should not also shame us into inaction.

There are plenty of scholars who do this, and my frustration isn’t directed at them. Instead, it is the smug analogization of contemporary policy proposals to Cold War blunders that rankles me. It is true the United States orchestrated a coup in Guatemala in 1954, it is also true the United States probably stopped a coup in Guatemala in 2024, if your analytical framework for contemporary Guatemala-U.S. relations relies more on the former event and ignores the latter, it’s probably a bad framework.

However, as most analysts and law enforcement professionals will tell you, the vision of the drug kingpin and his vertically integrated narcotrafficking operation is increasingly out of synch with reality. Modern cartels are decentralized, distributed, and networked in ways that make them highly resilient to leadership decapitation. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was in many ways one of the last major criminal group with an identify built around a founding kingpin, but El Mencho’s operation had already undergone significant decentralization before his death earlier this year in a Mexican special forces raid.

Criminal revenue streams are also increasingly diversified, with illegal gold, timber, wildlife, and fuel trafficking bringing in billions all told for illicit enterprises. Indeed, for some South America criminal groups, illegal gold may already be a more valuable revenue stream than drugs. Meanwhile, in Mexico, fuel theft or huachicol is identified as the “most significant non-drug illicit revenue” according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Even where there are no raw materials to plunder, criminals turn to the time-honored tradition of extortion to pad out their revenues.

Imagine if tomorrow all the coca, methamphetamine, heroin and cannabis in the world vanished into the ether, while users in the U.S. and Europe miraculously decided to get clean and embrace DARE. In this world where the drug trade functionally ceased to be, would cartels vanish alongside it? And if not, would they at least be defanged somewhat?

I think the answer to the first question is a definitive “no.” Criminals would doubtless still exist in a drug-free world and would still collude with one another at scale. The second question is more interesting, and what this post aims to tackle.

I argue that a number of structural factors mean the drug trade retains its pride of place as the single most important illicit economy for Latin American criminal groups. However, there is a secular trend towards revenue diversification among transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and for this reason, it strikes me as increasingly impractical to think about counternarcotics policy as separable from a broader counter-organized crime strategy in the Western Hemisphere.

Why Cartels Diversify

There is a good economic argument for diversification. Illicit revenue streams are almost inherently uneven, characterized by feast-or-famine cycles of profit and loss. Even if a group traffics a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine in total one year, the constant risk of interdiction means that monthly cash flow can be highly uneven.

The CJNG is a good example of how successful criminal operations diversify their revenue almost by default as they grow in power and territorial influence. Widely regarded as Mexico’s strongest criminal faction, with a reported presence in at least 27 of Mexico’s 32 states, the CJNG’s sheer geographic scope allows it access to a variety of non-drug revenue streams, often tailored to local conditions. In agricultural hubs like Michoacán and Jalisco, the cartel extorts avocado and lime growers. In central Guanajuato CJNG operatives have established a fuel theft empire. In coastal resort towns, the group engages in lower-profile, but still lucrative timeshare fraud and extortion of hotels, restaurants, and other businesses.

Fluctuations in the price of certain illicit commodities can also explain the rise and fall of various criminal industries. Gold in particular has been gaining ground and may have even eclipsed drug revenues for some TCOs already. This is in part because of a glut of cocaine supply, which has depressed prices in major markets like Europe and the United States. At the same time, the price of gold has skyrocketed, more than doubling since 2023 to reach around $4,000 per ounce. According to an August 2025 report from the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, illegal gold exports are valued at $1 billion in Ecuador, $2.2 billion in Venezuela, and a whopping $4.8 billion in Peru.

Even in the case of narcotics, not all drug types are equivalent in value for cartels. Fentanyl seizures crested in 2023 and declined in subsequent years as pressure from the U.S. government as well as social stigma drove down demand for the drug. In its place, cocaine has experienced a renaissance within the U.S. drug market, trends that benefit the CJNG which, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation, struck a deal with the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel to take over their coke trafficking routes. Although the CJNG may be the winners now, future shifts in law enforcement priorities or drug market preferences could change these fortunes, and elevate different criminal actors. This in theory should drive further diversification not just away from drugs to other illicit economies, but also experimentation within the narcotics trade.

There are also advantages that transfer over from one illicit sector to another. If you already have the clandestine airstrips, muscle, and money-laundering infrastructure set up to protect your coca plantations, it’s not terribly difficult to repurpose some of that to break into the illegal gold trade and vice-versa. Organizations like Earth Leage International refer to this as crime convergence, and it is especially notable in the case of illicit activities that degrade the natural environment.

Expansion into commodities like gold also offers advantages from a logistical standpoint. A kilogram of cocaine will be regarded as an illicit substance most anywhere it goes, gold on the other hand, is perfectly legal to buy and sell once it has been adulterated into legitimate supply chains. Separating out illegally mined from legal gold remains a major challenge, further complicated by the prevalence of artisanal mining operations in countries like Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia where local communities mining for gold may or may not be connected to criminal networks.

There are also opportunities to arbitrage different levels of law enforcement scrutiny. Whereas being caught with a kilogram of cocaine will likely result in steep criminal penalties, including almost certainly jail time, getting caught with a sack full of gold could merely lead to that being seized but the trafficker going free.

Finally, the structure of the criminal economy lends itself to innovation. This has been documented especially well in the case of Ecuador, which is at the forefront of a globe-spanning transformation in the business of crime. European criminal groups, including the Albanian mafia and Italian Ndrangheta, alongside Colombian cocaine growers and Mexican cartels all converged to make the small Andean nation the epicenter of South American drug flows.

In lieu of cash payments, Ecuadorian criminal outfits often received weapons and were trusted to figure out for themselves both how to secure cocaine shipments to Europe, and how to earn cash themselves on the side. For most, their bread and butter would be extortion and kidnapping, but some, including the CJNG-affiliated Lobos, also expanded into illegal mining, logging, and wildlife poaching. New revenue streams allowed the most successful of these groups to buy more weapons and recruit more gunmen, inflaming the intra-gang wars and pushing Ecuador’s security crisis into the conflagration it is today.

Why Drugs Still Matter

Even if we acknowledge that drugs are not the only thing cartels traffic in these days, it still seems like, the biggest, baddest criminal actors are still the ones that have managed to stake out a position in the drug trade.

This could simply be a case of crime convergence, in a vacuum we would expect that the most powerful drug cartels would have an easier time branching into new areas. However, it also seems as though the more powerful gangs become, the more they tend to converge on becoming drug trafficking organizations. Brazil’s PCC and CV for instance trace their origins back to running protection rackets inside prisons, but today both groups vie for control over lucrative Amazonian drug smuggling routes and domination over key ports like Santos. In a similar fashion, Ecuador’s gangs were relatively weak in the grand scheme of things until the country’s importance as a cocaine transshipment hub saw money and guns flood into the country from global drug markets.

One reason is scalability, whether it is the industrial coca plantations covering tens of thousands of hectares of Colombian territory, or the laboratories pumping out thousands of ultra-potent fentanyl-laced pills, modern drug markets operate at frightening scale. Contrast this with, say, the jaguar trade in countries like Suriname, or Totoaba bladder harvesting in Mexico. In both cases, poaching has led to a depletion of local populations, making it difficult for cartels to meet demand, especially from China. Criminals are innovative, but none of them seem to have cracked factory-farming for jaguars yet.

For another comparison, let’s return to the gold and cocaine markets. Even as illegal gold mining may be eclipsing cocaine as the primary money-maker for South American TCOs, there has been no slowdown in coca cultivation either. In fact, in 2023 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated as much as 3,700 tons of cocaine were produced, roughly equivalent to the amount of legal gold mined that same year. criminal access to gold is limited by geography, geology, and technology, with most groups lacking the sophisticated surveying or separation processes used by multinational mining firms like Newmont and Barrick.

It also could be that the profit margins for illicit drugs are simply that much greater than for other forms of illicit economic activity, even if gross revenue fluctuates. Even considering labor costs for illegal mining operations are negligible given the use of modern-day slavery by many TCOs, wildcat mining still features high capital costs in the form of construction equipment and chemical inputs like mercury used to separate out valuable ore.

Furthermore, when it comes to otherwise legal commodities like gold and fuel, the ability of cartels to set prices is counterbalanced by the licit market. Illicit actors are not the only game in town, and barring structural factors preventing buyers from accessing legitimate suppliers, most of customers can simply buy from the legal market if criminal prices rise too high. Indeed, huachicol in Mexico is premised on the counterfeit fuel being cheaper than what consumers would pay at the pump.

Extortion is another good example of why drug running is still attractive to cartels with diversified revenue streams. Whereas narcotics prices are pegged to the willingness to pay of consumers in wealthy countries, extortion rates must be calibrated to the value of economic activity in cartels’ own backyards. Shaking bus and taxi companies down for a few hundred dollars a month may allow gangs to remain solvent, but it will never rival the million-dollar paydays that just a single successful drug shipment can net.

If anything, extortion-driven criminal groups are self-sabotaging since their predations shrink the overall size of the economic pie. For this reason, Central American gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, which primarily depend on extortion, never reached the same heights of wealth and organizational sophistication that characterize the leading Mexican cartels to their north.

All this suggests that there are still good reasons for the primacy of drugs writ large as the illicit economy of first resort, but unlike the cartels of yesteryear, modern TCOs are doing their best to minimize their reliance on drug revenues alone. We can no longer afford the privilege of arguing about counternarcotics policy in isolation from other illicit economies.

Beyond Supply and Demand

The debate around counternarcotics policy in the United States typically center on the question of whether supply side or demand side interventions are better. Supply side policies have become tarnished by their association with the interminable “war on drugs” and more recently with the ongoing U.S. boat strike campaign in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Demand side advocates, meanwhile, argue for broad decriminalization of drugs and greater support for addiction treatment and prevention campaigns.

While on balance I think demand side interventions show more promise if your metric for success is the impact on drug users, this debate itself obscures the true complexity of the organized crime threat.

It is simply not the case that drug decriminalization would result in the death of the cartels, even if it did succeed in dramatically reducing criminal profits. The revenues that the most sophisticated cartels pull in from other illicit economies would likely be enough for them to remain big sources of destabilization in the countries where they operate. If anything, a major drop in drug profits could spur greater disruption in the short term as TCOs would likely increase their reliance on extortion to make a quick buck. Although gangs that depend on extortion are weaker than those plugged into global drug markets, they remain highly corrosive for the societies they prey upon.

This doesn’t mean there’s no hope in trying to drive down drug revenues. Instead, I think we need a better model for modern TCOs operate.

One potential theory would be that most modern criminal networks are trying to find an equilibrium between centralization and distribution. Too much centralization leaves cartels vulnerable to leadership decapitation like the Medellín Cartel or American mobs. Too much distribution and groups lose the cohesion and sheer numbers to manage complex logistics like moving tons of cocaine or running wildcat mining operations.

In my opinion, the key task for counter-crime policy lies in pushing groups out of equilibrium towards the distributed end of the spectrum. Neither blowing up drug boats from the air, nor decriminalizing scheduled narcotics can achieve this. Instead, it is the slow, hard work of building state capacity and presence in areas dominated by organized crime that is needed not just to choke off supply or suppress demand, but to dismantle the infrastructure these groups rely on to exploit and extort.

In 2025 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index scored Uruguay the highest of any Latin American state, placing it squarely between the Netherlands and Japan. James Bosworth routinely puts Uruguay in a category unto itself in his maps of regional trends. This always gets a good laugh from me, but it is true that Montevideo often stands alone as a bastion of rationality in a region buffeted by the winds of populism. But why has Uruguay diverged so sharply from its neighbors?

According to Luis L. Schenoni’s 2024 book Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, the seldom-studied Siege of Montevideo may hold the key to understanding Uruguayan exceptionalism.

Known in Uruguay as the Great Siege of Montevideo, the eight-year battle for the city from 1843-1851 took place in the context of an internationalized Uruguayan civil war. In order to bolster the Uruguayan government led by Manuel Oribe based in the city of Cerrito de la Victoria, Argentina dispatched a force of 12,000 troops to try and seize or starve out the rival government in Montevideo.

Of a pre-siege population of about 31,000, more than 5,000 Montevideans were conscripted to defend the city, representing one-sixth of the total population and virtually all adult male inhabitants. The struggle, now largely forgotten, was of truly epic proportions, even inspiring Alexandre Dumas to deem the city The New Troy in a 1850 novel.

With the intervention of Brazilian troops in 1851 the siege was finally lifted, Argentina defeated, and the Oribe faction, which had represented the interests of countryside landlords and regional caudillos was smashed in favor of the central government based in Montevideo. In this way, Uruguayan politics quickly consolidated around a belief in central government, allowing the country to increase tax revenues, strengthen infrastructure, and conduct its first national census in 1852, just one year after the siege had ended and a decade or two before Argentina or Brazil.

A stronger state did not mean the end of internal violence, however, and Uruguayan politics in the 1800s still featured the regular drama of coups, plots, and uprisings. But unlike its neighbors, both of Uruguay’s dominant political parties, the blancos and colorados, agreed upon the basic notion of strengthening centralized government authority, their disagreements were instead over who should have access to the levers of state power.

This is one of a host of case studies Bringing War Back In uses as evidence to support its theory of how war makes the state. I can best summarize the book’s argument in brief as follows:

1. Early states are characterized by competition between central elites who want to strengthen the state, and peripheral elites who want to weaken it;

2. Interstate war empowers central elites at the expense of peripheral elites to undertake state-building activity to confront an external threat;

3. Victory in interstate war reifies central elites to lock in the gains from state-building efforts, defeat discredits the center and empowers the periphery, corroding the gains in state capacity that were forged in preparation for war.

This was the kind of book I’ve been wishing someone would write since I started taking an interest in Latin America. It is a deeply-researched look into the history of conflict in a region that is consistently overlooked by military histories and political science studies of war and the state. The theoretical framework is ingenious too, and once you start thinking about the argument the book makes, you start seeing it everywhere.

Schenoni frames his argument in the book as a return to tradition. Whereas modern political science literature has focused on too narrow a set of causal mechanisms, the grandfathers of the “bellicist” theory of state formation were more open-minded in theor theorizing. Indeed, Charles Tilly’s famous quote that “war made the state and the state made war” hints at a deeper complexity in its circularity.

According to the book’s literature review, modern analyses of war and state formation make one of two arguments. The first of these reduces war to a pure selection mechanism wherein stronger states outcompete weaker states, who are either dissolved or absorbed into their conqueror upon defeat. This Darwinian view however struggles in cases where defeat did not result in the total destruction of the loser, as is the case in most all Latin American conflicts. It also neglects the role of contingency in war, which Clausewitz reminds us most resembles a game of cards where chance and friction mean history is replete with examples of upset victories by supposedly weaker states.

The second bellicist tradition looks exclusively at preparation for war as the causal mechanism connecting fighting with state capacity. This makes sense as states who believe themselves about to face an external threat need to raise taxes, recruit armies, and build up their war industries, all activities that require a more powerful central government. Schenoni points out, however, that if preparation for war is the sole variable, we would not see any divergence between victor and vanquished in their state building trajectories.

Indeed, according to this theory we should expect both the Chilean and Peruvian states to strengthen after the War of the Pacific. In fact, Peru should even become stronger after its defeat as it had a higher prewar baseline assuming straight lines go straight. Such predictions are inconsistent with the historical record, however, and accordingly should be dismissed in favor of a better theory.

Schenoni’s begins with a modification of this second bellicist theory. Preparation for war does indeed strengthen the state, but these gains are not locked in until victory is achieved. Furthermore, the policies adopted by states preparing for war tend to alienate peripheral elites, such as rural landowners who see their power in decline relative to the central government.

The outbreak of hostilities accordingly represents a moment of maximum risk for the central elites. Battlefield losses in particular can spark coup attempts and cause resentful peripheral elites to rebel against the government. Should the war end in defeat, the discredited state-builders are often easy pickings for regional power brokers to carve up. Should the state prevail, however, the peripheral elites must usually fall in line or be forced in line by the empowered central government and its victorious army.

During the War of the Triple Alliance, for instance, Paraguayan successes on the battlefield were often accompanied by uprisings from Argentine provincial warlords which Buenos Aires struggled to tamp down for long. After Argentina’s ultimate victory, however, its larger and battle-hardened military was able to turn inward and put down the restive provinces with little difficulty.

This example comes from one of three chapters devoted to historical case studies Schenoni uses to test his theory. These chapters were definitely the highlight of the book for me, offering truly excellent and concise histories of the War of the Triple Alliance, War of the Pacific, and Mexican-American as well as Second Franco-Mexican wars. If I have one (unfair) criticism of these chapters, it is that I could have used even more military history in the case studies.

Still, I came away with a raft of new historical trivia from these pages, like how Peru started the War of the Pacific boasting four ironclad warships to Chile’s two, only to be forced to scuttle one in an early engagement when it struck a reef, and have the other captured by Chilean forces in a world-historic case of bad luck.

I also appreciated Schenoni’s decision to test this theory in Latin America, which he himself admits at first glance seems like it should be a challenging region for bellicist theory-testing.

Before reading Bringing War Back In this year I finished Greg Grandin’s sweeping treatise on the Western Hemisphere, America, América. While I enjoyed Grandin’s piece on the whole, one of his central arguments, that Latin America’s uniquely pacific nature stems from the early adoption of the doctrine of uti possidetis and the embrace of arbitration, not war, to resolve territorial disputes, didn’t sit well with me.

Certainly, uti possidetis and anti-interventionist norms carried some sway, but early Latin American leaders could hardly take these norms for granted. In fact, some of the bloodiest interstate wars, including the War of the Triple Alliance and War of the Pacific, took place in the latter half of the 19th century, when norms around uti possidetis ought to have had decades to take root.

To the extent the region went to war, Grandin seems to imply this was the product of malicious European and U.S. financial interests corroding the noble Latin American pacifist instinct. This was uncompelling for me, as surely it can’t be the case that Latin American states happened to emerge from their bloody wars of independence magically more enlightened on matters of international peace and diplomacy than their bloodthirsty neighbor to the north or the barbaric Europeans.

Of the War of the Pacific for instance, America, América writes in a brief section that Chile was “goaded on and financed by British mining and financial houses that were invested heavily in nitrate in the country’s northern deserts.” I won’t deny these foreign economic motivations were at play, as they are in virtually any conflict, but Bringing War Back In adds valuable nuance to Grandin’s depiction of war motivations and financing in the Americas. Schenoni writes that, “From 1879 to 1880 the revenue of the Chilean state doubled from 124,406 to 242,126 pesos. Almost all of it came from tax revenue…internal taxes covered the largest share.” This surge in taxation was in turn channeled virtually entirely into building up the country’s armed forces. In other words, Chile pulled its own financial weight on the road to war.

While it is true that in the 20th century Latin America diverges sharply from the rest of the world as a zone of interstate peace, as Schenoni demonstrates, in the 19th century, interstate wars in Latin America were actually more frequent, lasted longer, and killed more people as a proportion of total population than in Europe. The War of the Triple Alliance for instance, caused more battle deaths in absolute terms than the Crimean War, the deadliest European conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.

While many of the conflicts that gripped Latin America during the 1800s would be considered small in absolute terms, relative to their populations some remained truly grand in scope. There is the case of Montevideo mobilizing its entire adult male population, while Costa Rica during the 1856-1857 Filibuster War managed to raise a force some 10,000 strong from a population of 100,000, a mobilization feat that rivals the 20th century World Wars.

I wasn’t completely carried away by the book however, and was left wondering whether Schenoni’s theory might overemphasize the effects of victory and defeat on institutional arrangements to the exclusion of more “tangible” aspects of the state. State-builders aren’t just discredited after defeat in battle, the losing state can find itself bereft of strategic or resource-rich territory as well as severely depopulated.

In the case of Paraguay in particular, it seems to me that the loss of between 60 and 69 percent of the country’s population do war, disease, or displacement during a compressed period of war to me should be the single most important contributing factor to the country’s weakened state-creating efforts in the late years of the 19th century. Bringing War Back In cites a cable from the U.S. Ambassador to postwar Asunción who claimed that Paraguay could yet rise from the ashes, but I remain skeptical.

I also found myself wondering whether there’s a point at which the consolidation hits a “good enough” threshold where victory and defeat in interstate war no longer yields large swings in state capacity.

For example, the two most obvious counterexamples to the book’s theory are Germany and Japan post-1945, where comprehensively defeated states rapidly rebuilt their capacity. Schenoni argues this was due to the victorious power taking a vital interest in the rebuilding of the vanquished, historically anomalous behavior, as well as the very real possibility of a new war with the Soviet Union in Europe and communist China in the Pacific supercharging a new round to state capacity-building activity.

However, an alternative explanation advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay is that both countries had sufficiently institutionalized high state capacity that rebuilding could take place at an accelerated timeline. Germany and Japan had sufficient muscle memory of what a high-functioning central government looked like that they could reproduce it even after suffering massive defeat. The effects of victory and defeat seem the strongest when states are either young or weakly-institutionalized, but states that are neither of those things could have some built-in antibodies to the effects of losing a war.

Finishing this book also left me all the more intrigued by the decline of war in 20th century Latin America, and what this meant for states in the region today. My rudimentary application of Schenoni’s theory to a counterfactual Latin America that remained more bellicose would predict we’d see even more stark variation in terms of state capacity within the region. While there is undoubtedly variation in the region today, most Latin American countries fall within the same rough range in terms of capability. Had these countries continued to war with one another with the same intensity seen during the 19th century, we would probably be living in a region of higher highs and lower lows, with some serial winners boasting hyper-competent state institutions while others would still be struggling to hold the machinery of governance together.

Limited criticism and questions aside, I give Bringing War Back In high marks. The historical anecdotes I’ve shared here are but a fraction of the treasure trove of historical detail packed into the case studies and footnotes. For a work of academic political science research, the prose is compelling and rendered in refreshingly plain English for the most part as well. Whether you’re a student of military history, early Latin American governance, or state formation writ large, I strongly encourage you to pick up this book. Please drop me a line when you do, I’m dying to chat about it some more.

Ultimately, Peru was able to hammer out agreements with Russia to handle maintenance and repair issues, but the immediate chaos surrounding the purchase turned what should have been a moment of pride for the Peruvian Air Force into a somewhat more embarrassing incident.

Even with Russian assistance, Peru’s MiGs were old before they arrived, and as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, the Kremlin is in little position to aid in their continued maintenance. In addition to the MiGs, Peru operates a handful of Su-25 ground attack planes, and even older French Mirage 2000s.

For the Peruvian air force, fighter modernization has long been a priority. In an interview with Pucará Defensa, former Air Force commander General Carlos Chávez Cateriano claimed the effort had been ongoing for 14 years, only gaining Congressional procurement authorization in the past two.

Today, like in 1996, Peru seems to have stumbled right at the finish line, and the controversy and uncertainty that has surrounded the April decision to purchase a dozen F16 Block 70 jets risks undermining an otherwise sound move by the country to upgrade its defense capabilities. This time around, the added drama of a presidential election has fanned the flames of scandal.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

While Peru’s search for new fighters has taken more than a decade, I started following the procurement campaign in 2024 when news first came out that Congress had appropriated $3.5 billion for the purchase of 24 modern fighters. In that time, I’ve seen probably half a dozen premature reports that Peru had made a decision on its future fighter planes. Most of these have come from less-than-reputable outlets that think a request for information amounts to the inking of a contract.

These reports began to gain steam in the fall of 2025, just in time for Peru’s political crisis to be thrust back to the fore with the impeachment of Dina Boluarte and inauguration of José Jerí. Jerí was himself summarily removed from office in February 2026 and replaced by octogenarian José María Balcázar, the third person to hold the office of president in less than 12 months.

Balcázar initially said that he planned to respect a deal allegedly signed by Jerí confirming the purchase of the Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70. News of that, however, kicked off a fierce response from Swedish defense manufacturer Saab, which, hot on the heels from a recent agreement to sell the JAS 39 Gripen to Colombia, was pushing hard for Peru to be next.

Ultimately, Balcázar retracted his comments, and the fighter decision was placed under military secrecy. Peru had already tipped its hand however, and while Saab kept fighting the good fight, the F-16 was starting to look like the presumptive winner. It seemed neither Balcázar nor Jerí wanted to be on the hook for a purchase that was bound to result in controversy. The air force had already waited 14 years for a new plane, surely they could hold out a few more months for a new president to be voted in.

This was not to be, however, and according to a news release from the U.S. embassy, Lockheed was notified on April 14 of its selection, with a “ceremonial signing” scheduled for April 17. That day, Balcázar took to the radio to claim the agreement had been signed behind his back and claiming the next president should make the final decision.

This kicked off a firestorm from the U.S. embassy, while Peru’s defense and foreign ministers both tendered their resignations, but not before a “technical signing” of the deal reportedly took place on April 20 while the Ministry of Economy confirmed a $462 million down payment on the jets had already been transferred. Whatever the interim president’s goals may have been in backing away from the deal, it seems the facts on the ground moved without him.

All of this came at a time when Peru was facing a political crisis on a much larger scale, dealing with the aftermath of a messy first-round election that saw runner-up candidate Rafael López Aliaga fiercely contest his loss to the point of leveling physical threats against the country’s election authority.

Given the circumstances, why would the United States, and its allies in the Peruvian government, try to ram through a deal that has been a hot potato for months at a time of massive political upheaval?

The answer is probably that the very same political crisis made it less costly for the United States to throw its weight around on the comparatively less salient issue of defense procurement. A weak, unelected, lame duck interim presidency can’t do much to stop the process once the gears got turning. While the controversy did prompt high-level resignations, Peru’s next president would have undoubtedly reshuffled the cabinet once they entered office.

Another piece of the story is Washington’s new ambassador in Lima, the Floridian businessman Bernie Navarro who has made an impression as a walking, tweeting, incarnation of the Donroe Doctrine. To this end, locking up a major arms sale within his first three months on the job is almost certainly a feather in Navarro’s cap, and a victory that the ambassador could not risk being swallowed up by intractable domestic Peruvian politics.

A final factor could be the desire to lock in the agreement now, scandal be damned, as insurance against future presidential caprice. While a victory by Keiko Fujimori in the runoff would likely see the F-16 waved on through, a win by Roberto Sánchez, inheritor of left-populist and failed coup leader Pedro Castillo, could jeopardize the program. With polling still showing the race between Fujimori and Sánchez within the margin of error, it makes sense to push for an agreement on fighters now, instead of waiting for the coin toss to resolve.

This approach is not without risks. While Sánchez has said he would respect the agreement, with a fresh popular mandate (even a slim one) it would not be overly difficult for him to scrap it once in office.

In all likelihood however, the current order is a done deal. The $462 million transferred from Peruvian government coffers has been paid, and reneging now won’t get that money back, but will alienate a U.S. government that is much more willing to throw its economic, and military, weight around in the Americas. If Sánchez wins he will have bigger problems to deal with, and trying to undo the fighter deal would be a costly first battle to pick.

When all is said and done, therefore, it seems like the pressure campaign to get Peru to finalize its selection of the F-16 was worth it for the interested parties. Already, the scandalous nature of the agreement’s signing is beginning to fade into the background, and in the baseline scenario, both Fujimori and Sánchez will likely go about quietly cooperating on the deal.

There remains one possible snag in this otherwise tidy conclusion. Notably, according to all public accounts, the technical agreement signed between Lockheed Martin and the Peruvian government was for 12 planes, not the 24 the Peruvian Air Force planned to procure. While Navarro has indicated that we are merely in the first phase of the transfer, and a second batch is to be expected, without seeing the text of the agreement, we can’t be sure of that.

If, after taking delivery of the first fighters in 2029, Peru finds itself without a contract for another 12 fighters, that could reopen the wounds of April 2026 with potentially damaging consequences. Domestic political pressure would likely pull in the direction of selecting non-U.S. fighters in the event of a new procurement process. From the air force’s perspective however, the prospect of integrating and training on a brand new platform is unappealing to say the least.

Failure to reach a deal for the full two dozen planes means Peru could find itself pulled in opposing directions that, in a worst-case scenario, might scuttle a future tender altogether.

It’s a Good Plane, Sir

With the political rationale behind Peru’s choice clear, what is the operational case for (or against) the F-16?

On balance I think the F-16 checks several boxes that make it a sound decision for the future of the Peruvian air force. The Block 70s that will be sold to Peru can carry a wide range of payloads allowing it to perform missions ranging, from air defense, to ground attack, to electronic warfare and reconnaissance.

Interoperability with the U.S. military is also a big plus given Peru’s new Major Non-NATO Ally status, and will allow for closer cooperation on joint exercises and trainings with U.S. Southern Command.

The plane also fulfills the demand from many Latin American militaries for proven capability. There are nearly 3,000 F-16s in service across dozens of national air forces, and in South America Argentina and Chile both fly the plane giving it a strong track record for Peru to assess. The Gripen has also made inroads in the Americas recently, but remains a less proven platform.

Other competitors ran into similar challenges, the Rafale for instance is a well-regarded fighter in service in at least 7 countries, but counts no Latin American operators. Meanwhile South Korea’s early offer to add Peru to its KF-21 program was likely tempting as a way for Peru to grow its domestic defense industrial base, but with no models in service yet, the risk was far too great.

Still, the F-16 was not a slam dunk, the Gripen E/F boast solid sensors, open and adaptable digital architecture, and are optimized for short takeoffs that may make it better suited for operating out of rugged Amazonian airfields. Saab’s marketing also tends to stress the Gripen’s lower cost per flight hour as a plus for militaries with shallower pockets. The numbers behind these calculations have been the subject of much debate that I won’t wade into here except to say my hunch is the difference is probably less than Gripen fans make it out to be.

I’ve also seen some commentary arguing that Saab’s Brazilian Gripen production line worked against it in Peru as Brazil could theoretically veto the delivery of new fighters to Lima. I wouldn’t put too much stock in that argument, the Peruvian air force already flies Brazilian Super Tucanos and relations between the two countries have been historically stable in the security and defense space.

On balance, however, while the exact timing of the agreement may have been political, at least the momentum towards the F-16 was already building long before Bernie Navarro touched down in Lima.

The good news is that Peru seems to be managing other large-scale defense programs more handily than the fighter procurement saga. Peru has partnered with South Korea to great effect on armored vehicles and naval shipbuilding. Even as the F-16 drama was playing out, the Peruvian air force reached an agreement to acquire a new C-27J Spartan transport aircraft to strengthen the country’s disaster response and logistical capabilities. Scandal grabs headlines, but Peru’s procurement does genuinely seem to be on the right track.

The Future of Flight in the Americas

Still, big military purchases by Latin American governments tend to draw harsh criticism when they break into mainstream coverage. Typically, the commentary around this stresses the absence of interstate conflict in the Americas, deeply entrenched fears of military aggrandizement, and unfavorable comparisons between the cost of weapons systems and social programming.

More recently, other critics have pointed out that the multi-billion dollar price tag of fighter jets and other high-end systems is difficult to justify in the modern age of combat. For the same dollar amount Peru plans to spend on 24 new fighters it could acquire hundreds of Turkish TB2 Bayraktar medium altitude long-endurance UAVs, and/or an arbitrarily large quantity of cheap one-way attack drones and surveillance quadcopters.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I tend to push back especially against the first category of arguments. I think Latin America broadly needs to spend more, not less, on military procurement.

Both criticisms of Peru’s fighter procurement in my view misunderstand the purpose of national militaries in Latin America. For these forces, maintaining a mix of high- and low-end capabilities is critical to the diverse set of missions they are asked to fulfill. The region’s militaries are called upon to act as first responders in the wake of disaster, as airmobile police forces protecting isolated communities and going after criminal activity in inhospitable environs, and yes, as guardians of their countries’ sovereign territory against interstate rivals.

If you care about controlling your country’s airspace, for instance, there actually aren’t many more cost-effective alternatives to a 4th generation fighter like the F-16. Against a foreign aggressor with an air force, most countries would prefer to have some way to contest the skies. Even if the current probability of interstate conflict is low, it often takes far longer to build up a capable and modern force than it does for peaceful conditions to deteriorate.

Even for lower-end missions like counternarcotics, fighter jets have a role to play. Drug traffickers can use speedy private jets that can easily outpace turboprop planes and UAVs. You can plug some of these vulnerabilities by investing heavily in air defenses, radars, and of course drones, but one way or another this still requires greater investment in national defense.

Similarly, overfitting for domestic counterinsurgency or counter-crime missions not only means you risk being caught woefully underprepared for interstate clashes, it also drives down the threshold for the use of military force on domestic targets. It’s probably a good thing for civil-military relations therefore that Peru’s national security apparatus views defense against foreign aggression as a core mission.

As other Latin American countries look to modernize their forces, Peru’s fighter acquisition should serve as a reminder of how easily large defense procurement processes can become captured by narrow interest groups. Even now, when it seems like all’s might be well that ends well, the corrosive influence of politicization still redounds to the detriment of the national defense and domestic stability.

For a small country with a reputation for being overlooked and underappreciated, there’s a surprisingly robust community of Paraguay analysts within the broader Latin America space. I’d be remiss not to give a special shout-out to the Paraguay Post as a go-to source of coverage on the country by journalists who have been living and working there for years. The occasion of Paraguayan President Santiago Peña’s visit to Taiwan also generated a substantial amount of buzz on this platform.1

Meanwhile, investors are taking note of the country’s low taxes, strong economic growth, and alignment with the Trump administration to feel out potential plays in the country. Immigration to has also spiked, with residency applications reaching nearly 50,000 in 2025 and on track to hit 90,000 this year, big numbers for a country of just about 7 million inhabitants. In the weeks before my trip, I saw videos of throngs of Brazilians, many Bolsonaro supporters lined up at the border with Paraguay to flee the perceived tyranny of the Lula government for the warm embrace of their neighbor.

Taken together, South America’s best-kept secret doesn’t seem so secret anymore. This isn’t empty hype either, everywhere in Asunción, there’s new construction popping up, work sites wrapped in artful renders of gleaming modern glass towers. Hype around artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure has dominated recent news as President Peña signed a memorandum of understanding with Taiwan on May 10 to co-develop datacenters, while the AI infrastructure firm X8 Cloud announced a reportedly $50 billion investment in Paraguay late last year.

But the headlines at times mask a more profound sense of anxiety. Paraguay has plentiful, cheap, and green electricity, but on my first day there the swanky new mall next door to my hotel had no power for half the day. Brand-new buildings are rising from streets in desperate need of repaving (or paving) and snarls of interminable traffic. The country is campaigning to become a tourist hub and expat paradise, but flight routes are convoluted and Asunción’s airport is in serious need of expansion.

The next 2 to 3 years will be critical in determining whether Paraguay’s current moment will turn out to be a flash in the pan or a genuine takeoff.

The Forgotten War(s)

Don’t let the subtropical calm of Asunción fool you, Paraguay is perhaps the most war-torn country in all Latin America. The so-called War of the Triple Alliance, or Guerra Guasú as it is known in Guaraní, which raged from 1864 to 1870 was the deadliest interstate conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and First World War. On a per capita basis, it was one of the most devastating wars ever fought, estimates suggesting around 311,000 battle deaths, while between 70 and 90 percent of all Paraguayan adult males perished during the six-year inferno and its aftermath.2

The destructiveness of this 19th-century war may also explain why Paraguay’s developmental path seems to diverge from its neighbors in the southern cone. Paraguay’s GDP per capita in 2024 was about $6,400, less than half that of Argentina and Chile, and about 3.7 times less than Uruguay’s. A similar story appears to play out in Brazil’s South region, encompassing the states of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina, which had a GDP per capita of around $12,000 in 2023.

On paper, Paraguay shouldn’t be lagging this far behind its neighbors. It has strong endowments, fertile agricultural land, and while landlocked, a plethora of navigable internal rivers allow for relatively easy access to markets.

In fact, before the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay seemed like a standout favorite to build the most modern state in South America. The country made impressive strides towards universal public education, laid kilometers of railroad, and secured preferential access to international credit. When hostilities broke out, Marshal Francisco Solano López, the legendary and infamous figure who led Paraguay throughout the war, commanded the largest and most capable army south of the equator.

Unfortunately, as Luis L. Schenoni points out in his excellent book Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America which I read while in Asunción (more on that in a future post), Paraguay’s disastrous defeat at the hands of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay undid many of its prewar state-building efforts. Not only did the loss of entire generations severely impair Paraguay’s economic potential, Marshal Solano López’s death left a power vacuum swiftly divvied up between regional power brokers who had a vested interest in kneecapping the power of central government.

In the decades following the war, Paraguay laid less track, collected less revenue, and invested less in public goods than it had before 1864. At the same time, the victorious trio of allies saw their own central governments supercharged, empowering state-building forces and likely helping set the rest of the southern cone on a more positive developmental path.

Paraguay would march off to war once more in 1932, this time against its western neighbor Bolivia for control over purportedly oil-rich territory in the northern Chaco region. The little-studied war was a final bloodletting before the long quiet of interstate peace settled over Latin America. It featured both sides wielding modern weapons of war, including airplanes, machine guns, and riverine gunboats sold to both sides by a burgeoning international arms industry. This time, Paraguay would fare better, emerging as the victor, though the triumph would prove a hollow one as the promised oil deposits turned out to be illusory.3

There is a palpable difference in how Paraguay’s two great wars are remembered today. The Chaco War is clearly a source of national pride and celebration. Our hotel was located along Avenida Aviadores del Chaco, a major thoroughfare honoring the early Paraguayan air force pilots who fought during the Chaco War. Other streets where we took meeting bore names like “Reservista de la Guerra del Chaco” while national parks are named in celebration of the “Defenders of the Chaco.”

By contrast, at the National Pantheon of Heroes I visited my first day in Asunción, seemed to present the War of the Triple Alliance in relatively neutral terms, though with a pointed jab at the “dark commercial interests” that underpinned the Argentine-Brazilian-Uruguayan coalition. Of the Marshal Solano López himself, historical memory seems to be split between acknowledging him as a great man in the history of Paraguay, and the undeniable reality that his defeat doomed the country to demographic ruination and lost decades.

This left me wondering to what extent the Chaco War may have salvaged the Paraguayan state building project. The process of mobilizing for conflict, even if the stakes were less existential than they were during the 1864-1870 period, reignited centralizing and modernizing forces, while victory, even hack-cocked, helped lock those impulses in. While we don’t think much about these 19th and early 20th century conflicts, Paraguay’s history was a visceral reminder to me of the deep scars war can leave on a country decades and even centuries later.

The Problem With Hydro

Today, fortunately, the drums of war have receded so far into the background in South America as to be virtually silent, leaving Paraguay to confront new state-building and development challenges, especially in the energy sector. Two things are true of Paraguay’s energy sector today, the country produces a tremendous excess of cheap, clean energy, and the country is running out of power, and fast.

The vast majority of Paraguay’s energy matrix is comprised of hydropower, much of this coming from the Itaipu and Yacyretá dams on the country’s borders with Brazil and Argentina respectively. Itaipu in particular is an engineering marvel. Located along the Paraná River, the dam is controlled jointly by Brazil and Paraguay, with each party laying claim to half of the energy produced. The dam boasts an installed generation capacity of 14,000 gigawatts, making it the third largest hydroelectric project in the world and regularly rivals China’s Three Gorges hydropower plant in real electricity generation.

Since its inception, Paraguay has sold a good chunk of its share of Itaipu’s output back to Brazil. In 2018, for instance, Paraguay consumed just 15 percent of Itaipu’s production, enough to meet almost 90 percent of the country’s energy consumption that year, while Brazil used up the remaining 85 percent. By reclaiming even a fraction of this, Paraguay can make available large amounts of energy for new prospective industries.

The country has already experienced a first wave of interest in this power potential from cryptocurrency investors. Now, the crypto entrepreneurs are being displaced by even more energy-intensive apex predators, AI datacenters.

But while Paraguay’s hydroelectric plants are impressive, it is hard to wring more power out of the same river without potentially triggering navigability issues or environmental blowback. The fact that Itaipu and Yacyretá are both bi-national projects, whose operations are governed by both Paraguay and Brazil/Argentina further complicates matters, requiring Asunción to get Brasília and/or Buenos Aires on board with any planed expansion of capacity.

Accordingly, there’s only so many datacenters Paraguay can sustain at current production levels alone. According to some estimates, the country’s energy surplus may run dry by 2030 or sooner, seriously limiting its investment attractiveness and creating friction between power-hungry datacenters and citizens facing the prospect of rolling blackouts.

Now there’s still some relatively low-hanging fruit that can extend this lead for longer. I heard from one interviewee that as much as 40 percent of electricity is lost in transmission, modernizing and upgrading the Paraguayan grid could go a long way towards unlocking greater energy flows.

Itaipu is also evaluating the possibility of adding of new turbines, potentially unlocking 1,400 more megawatts of power. Still, that probably isn’t enough to keep pace with rapidly rising energy demand, and ultimately, the dam will hit its ceiling in terms of productivity.

I heard about a lot of options for Paraguay to future-proof its energy security during my time in the country. Some officials mentioned studies looking into building smaller dams along Paraguay’s internal rivers. Last year Paraguay also announced a national nuclear strategy seeking to develop small modular reactors by 2035.

One of the more promising initiatives I head involved a planned natural gas pipeline from Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale oil field into Brazil via the Paraguayan Chaco. Ideally, this project would also allow Paraguay to tap into the flow of gas to help it diversify energy options for datacenter titans and more traditional industry alike.

The most scalable and green option by far is solar. The Chaco region, with its vast, arid, and sparsely-populated tracts of land, would be an ideal location for solar farms. The government is moving forward already in this area with a tender for a 140-megawatt photovoltaic plant in Loma Plata. However, transmission is likely going to be a problem here, as building the requisite infrastructure, including batteries, to get power from the remote Chaco environs to end users in eastern and central Paraguay probably requires significant public and private sector investment.

In another promising sign, this month Paraguay passed a new regulation easing the requirements for private sector actors to develop their own non-hydro renewable projects without the need for direct supervision from the state electrical authority ANDE.

Getting to Texas

Paraguay is sometimes referred to as the Texas of South America. I’m fond of the comparison as partly true, and partly aspirational. Like Texas, Paraguay cultivates something of a reputation for rugged individualism and personal liberty. A history of ranching, and low 10 percent flat tax (and no tax on income earned abroad) make it a libertarian darling. Modern Texas may even be looking more like Paraguay in the energy sector as the Lone Star State’s grid becomes more and more renewable not out of any particular concern for the environment but rather thanks to permissive permitting and continually decreasing cost curves for solar.

But Paraguay is still a long ways off from Texas, especially when it comes to the country’s efforts to transition from an export-oriented economy rooted in agricultural products to a modern, diversified, and technologically advanced ecosystem. Texas has captured this, it is home to a growing number of world-renowned engineering firms lured in by the state’s ultra-business-friendly environment.

Paraguay is trying a version of this, most notably with its play to become the datacenter hub of Latin America. But hosting datacenters is not a particularly sustainable or practical pathway to broad-based development. Building them creates a lot of jobs in construction, and scaling energy certainly has knock-on effects for Paraguay’s attractiveness to other industries. Over the long run, however, the physical datacenter isn’t the thing creating value.

I did hear some arguments while in country that hosting datacenters could help Paraguay eventually make a play to capture some of the semiconductor value chain, because the demand for chips will allow the country to make the case for manufacturing those in-country. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but this argument strikes me as somewhat wishful thinking, or at the very least a long-term project that depends on building a robust crop of home-grown engineering talent over the course of a couple decades. And that’s assuming Paraguay will remain competitive as a datacenter hub for years to come.

That being said, there is also absolutely a play for the United States (and potentially Taiwan) here given the enormous capital expenditure going into AI at the moment. Beyond just opening new datacenters, part of the cooperation package should include investment by U.S. and allied firms in grid modernization, solar, batteries, and transmission lines. From Paraguay’s end, the country should be putting serious thought into what kinds of bottlenecks are keeping energy projects from being added and set out to correct these.

Beyond building out and building up the grid, Paraguay needs to plough its revenues from datacenter hosting, and any assistance the United States and company can provide, into the education system. Human capital was probably the second-most covered issue I heard from civil society and government officials alike during my visit. Indeed, it won’t matter if Paraguay succeeds in attracting big tech investment if there are no Paraguayans with the skills and know-how to fill local jobs.

I returned from Asunción feeling optimistic. Paraguay, has plenty going for it, domestic political stability and relative safety, insulation from geopolitical flashpoints, and a strong business environment. It doesn’t hurt that the current administration has been adept at cozying up to the Trump administration at a time of unprecedented focus on the Americas. Whether that bid will translate into more tangible investments, especially in the kinds of hard infrastructure that enable true regional development, remains to be seen.

As a final note, I’d like to say I’m truly grateful to the dozens of people I spoke with, both formally and informally, who were willing to volunteer their time and analysis. Paraguayans are some of the most welcoming people I’ve met, and the asado is top-notch. I would highly encourage you the reader to think about visiting South America’s increasingly less hidden gem for yourself should you have the chance.

These disparate incidents all have their own causal logics, but taken together they point to a broad, decentralized supply chain that sustains and enables illicit activity in the Americas. This criminal industrial base is one of the most important, but ill-understood factors explaining the strength of criminal networks in this region.

We are reminded of criminal industrial base when we hear about its outputs, seizures of explosives, armored vehicles, and artisanal firearms that catch headlines. But more concerning to me is the diffusion of knowledge that is happening constantly between and within illicit networks.

Industries, whether licit or illicit, benefit tremendously from clustering. The more people within a particular sector are sharing information and working together on processes, best practices, tools, and technologies, the more innovation you expect to see. In the legitimate economy, this explains why Detroit is an automotive hub, why Boston leads in bioscience, or why the tech industry took root in Silicon Valley.

Looking to the criminal industrial base, I think the same or similar factors help us explain the pace of technological advance by illicit groups in recent years. We’ve seen narcosubmarines for instance go from crude and scarcely seaworthy vessels to standardized and quasi-mass-produced trafficking mainstays. Weaponized drones have undergone a rapid period of innovation, going from unguided bombers, to one-way attack platforms that now increasingly mount fiber-optic spools to avoid electronic countermeasures.

The criminal industrial base is not new, but it is understudied. Governments tend to treat its various components as isolated problems, and in doing so continue to find themselves on the losing end of the adaptation battle. There needs to be a more systematic effort to reckon with this criminal industrial base, and understand how it manifests across countries and criminal groups in the Americas.

Bombs and Drones

Several analysts (myself included) have documented the revolutionary impact that unmanned aerial systems (UASs), or drones, are having on the fight against organized crime in the Americas. Whereas previously states ruled the air, that dominance is now being tested. Commercial, off-the-shelf drones from brands like DJI offer illicit actors the ability to surveil targets at a distance, deliver contraband without exposing members to risk, and launch precision strikes.

But the use of weaponized drones in particular is constrained by another factor, the ability of criminal groups to rig models designed for civilian hobbyists with weapons of war. Non-state armed groups either employ existing munitions like black market fragmentation grenades, or build their own contact-detonating explosives from scratch. In either case, the group must also figure out how to mount these to a civilian drone.

The skill floor for this isn’t particularly high, Mexican cartels have been known to affix explosives with duct tape and other haphazard measures. But to ensure consistent detonation groups must typically invest a considerable amount of time and expertise in fusing, explosive design, and drone tactics. Trevor Ball outlines some key considerations in an excellent article last year:

“If integrated or semi-permanently fixed to a UAV, for example, a munition’s safety, arming, and/or fuzing mechanisms may need to be modified to ensure it will detonate upon impact at a (relatively) low velocity. If a conventional munition is modified to serve as a small air-delivered bomb, it may benefit from the addition of craft-produced components, such as fins or stabilisers. Munitions normally fitted with time-delay fuzes, such as hand grenades, are sometimes modified to accept impact fuzes. If not correctly modified, UAV-delivered munitions may function prematurely, partially, or not at all.”

A major bottleneck to criminal drone employment therefore seems to be the availability and sophistication of explosives. This is borne out in the case of Colombian armed groups where the dissident FARC faction known as the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) were early adopters of armed drone technology. Drones were as new to the EMC as any other actor in Colombia’s decades-long internal armed conflict, but the group did possess significant expertise when it came to explosive design which allowed them to better exploit their potential in combat.

Indeed, the long history of bombings in Colombia means that many of the groups still active today have a wealth of expertise when it comes to explosive design. Recently Colombian security forces reported the arrest of two men each with around 7 years of experience as bombmakers and drone operators for a FARC dissident faction.

This may also help explain why Colombia has seen such an explosive growth in illicit drone use. The country recorded its first lethal drone incident in July 2024, while in 2025 sustained multiple significant drone attacks that injured or killed dozens of civilians and security personnel alike. More, Colombian groups are now adopting fiber-optic drones that have come to characterize the battlefields in Ukraine. Colombian groups’ familiarity with bombmaking seems to have allowed them to quickly scale up the deployment of weaponized drones in combat.

By contrast, in Mexico it seems as though there may be more of a parallel evolution in drone use and explosive manufacturing. While improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been used by Mexican criminal groups for decades, the rise in drone incidents has coincided with a dramatic increase in the employment of more conventional explosives and mines.

In comparison to early examples of weaponized drones like the 2017 seizure of a “papa bomba” explosive equipped UAS widely regarded as the first public instance of this technology appearing in Mexico, today cartel drone munitions feature innovations like fragmentation liners, and 3D-printed stabilizer fins. Large seizures of drone-dropped munitions also show a significant degree of design standardization (though variation persists).

Conventional explosives have also become more sophisticated, as evidenced in June of 2023 when a Mexican army patrol vehicle was targeted by two bounding mines set by the CJNG, killing three soldiers. The mines, fashioned from commercial fire extinguishers, were designed to “jump” up when triggered and then explode outward, maximizing damage to passengers in the truck bed. One analysis of the incident notes how drone tactics and IED design feed into one another stating that, “CJNG bomb-making cells are also involved in weaponized aerial drone attached IED (single use drone strike) and IED bomblet design and manufacturing, with cross overs seen with general IED / IED land mine and weaponized drone IED designs.”

Technical insights gleaned by one group seem to diffuse rapidly to rivals who must adapt or die in the Hobbesian world of criminal armed conflict. While the CJNG are widely reported to have adopted armed drones the fastest, a recent report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center found that their regional competitor, La Familia Michoacana, came in a close second.

Similarly, according to an analysis by InSight Crime, IED seizures by the Mexican government have skyrocketed since 2020, with 40 percent of all seizures taking place along the border between Jalisco and Michoacán, where conflict between the CJNG and its rivals is fierce.

The threat posed by criminal drones has led governments in the Americas to take steps towards regulating their sale on the civilian market. While these efforts have seemingly failed to put a dent in criminals’ ability to acquire UASs, if they bear fruit in the future it seems likely that these groups will not simply relinquish this capability but instead potentially turn to manufacturing their own drones, or at least drone components. Demand for 3D printed components for these artisanal UASs is likely to grow significantly under this scenario.

(Narco) Subs and Tanks

Perhaps nothing captures the idea of criminal innovation better than the sleek, low-profile hull of a narcosubmarine.

This catch-all term for a host of semi- and even wholly submersible artisanal boats regularly captures media attention, giving the impression at times that these are bespoke, even rare, vessels. In reality, while narcosubmarines indeed a represent a small fraction of the total number of drug-running ships, they are produced on an impressive scale.

The first documented appearance of such a vessel was in 1988 when an empty hull washed up on the Florida coast. Since then, criminal groups have had decades to refine their craft. Between 2020 and 2024 at least 93 of these vessels have been seized, mostly in the Pacific. At least four of the 54 strikes conducted by U.S. forces in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since September 2025 have targeted semisubmersible craft.

H I Sutton with Covert Shores, in 2021 noted that narcosubmarine production appeared to be entering a new epoch. Whereas previously production had converged on a set number of designs built largely to the same specifications which suggested relative stability among manufacturers, the emergence of new nonstandard designs suggested a period of flux in the illicit shipbuilding industry. Often these appeared as inferior copies of existing designs, suggesting that workers who may have previously been operating under the guidance of more seasoned builders were striking out on their own.

Sutton deemed this a new epoch of narcosubmarine design, where the technology and processes required to build these vessels has itself become commoditized. This also makes halting their construction far more difficult. A decentralized network with more actors participating in the industry not only means more clandestine shipyards, it could allow builders to experiment with new and stealthier designs.

The natural next front for narcosubmarine development is almost certainly transitioning these platforms from crewed to uncrewed designs. Roberto Uchôa has written an excellent article for Small Wars Journal outlining why this is the case. The absence of a human crew can greatly reduce the signature of these vessels, and allows them to loiter for extended periods of time off the coast waiting for patrols to pass. Notably, it also directly undermines the deterrent mechanism the United States is relying on to reduce seaborne drug flows through lethal airstrikes.

The first reported instance of an uncrewed narcosub came in July 2025 when Colombian forces seized one such vessel in the Caribbean. Last week, a small uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) fitted with a camera and antenna, was found by Spanish authorities off the coast of Gibraltar. The drone was empty upon capture, suggesting that its cargo had already been offloaded, or potentially that this was another trial run of the technology.

This latest innovation is made possible thanks to the long history of crewed narcosubmarine production. From an engineering perspective, building the hull is largely a solved problem, the main limitation to narco-USV (or even UUV) deployment instead is how to configure remote navigation, which at the moment seems to lean heavily on Starlink terminals to ensure connectivity on long transoceanic voyages.

While narcosubmarines slink through the seas, on land improvised armored fighting vehicles (IAFVs) otherwise known as narcotanks or “monsters,” have become a mainstay in Mexico’s criminal armed conflict. Like narcosubs, these vehicles have a long history of their manufacture, with sources widely crediting the Zetas for popularizing the vehicles in the early 2010s.

As with drones today, the Zetas’ use of narcotanks spurred rival groups to build their own IAFVs to fight back. However, many early monster designs are more useful for propaganda purposes than combat operations. Groups would compete to possess the largest, or most intimidating combat vehicle, repurposing dump trucks and fitting them with heavy slabs of metal. The results were weapons that, while impressive and difficult to answer with small arms, were vulnerable to becoming immobilized and seized, either by rival groups or Mexican security forces.

But the utility of mobile, protected, firepower remained, and so too did demand for new and improved narcotanks. Cartel armorers began using lighter steel armor to improve maneuverability, and repurposed SUVs and pickup trucks with mounts for light machine guns or .50 caliber rifles. Some modern designs even sport anti-drone “cope cages” or electromagnetic jamming equipment.

There is less open source data on narcotank seizures than there is on narcosubmarines, but the Zetas’ early adoption seems to have created a geographic production cluster around Mexico’s northeast, particularly Tamaulipas state. While narcotanks have by now made their way into virtually every major cartel’s arsenal, from January 2018 to June 2022, authorities in Tamaulipas decommissioned 153 IAFVs, the most of any Mexican state. Michoacán and Jalisco were distant second and third, with 33 and 25 seizures each.

More recently Mexico’s attorney general reported the destruction of 18 such vehicles between December 2025 and February 2026 alone. Videos and images from recent seizures show remarkable similarities in the design of these vehicles. It seems likely that Tamaulipas mechanics and craftsmen in the employ of criminal groups have converged on a common set of designs. Proximity to the U.S. border and the massive flow of automobiles and car parts that cross this every day almost certainly helps fuel these illicit factories.

Contested Logistics and Criminal Innovation

There are clearly many more facets to the phenomenon I’m describing. Illicit fuel refineries, artisanal firearms assembly lines, and of course drug production labs themselves all constitute aspects of the criminal industrial base in my view.

Dismantling this complex clandestine ecosystem is harder than it looks. In many cases it is nigh impossible to expect governments to be able to track down the inputs that feed the criminal industrial base. It is fairly easy for a mechanic to misreport the quantity of auto parts he or she orders and divert some of those to narcotank manufacturing. Similarly, a fisherman might order a replacement motor for their boat, only to install that on a narcosub instead, and that’s assuming authorities are even looking at these kinds of transactions in the first place.

Emerging technologies like 3D printing further complicate matters by allowing criminal groups to fabricate components that are virtually untraceable. Artificial intelligence may further aid artisans in their ability to refine designs and produce more complex vehicles, equipment, and weapons.

If there is a first step to take against the criminal industrial base, it should be recognizing that it exists, not as a set of discrete behaviors or pathologies, but as part of the logistical apparatus that sustains violent illicit actors. Governments should seek to better understand how the presence of certain kinds of covert industrial activity in their territory fuels further innovation and information dissemination.

Another key action would be to sever the recruitment pipeline for organized crime. Illicit actors depend on a range of skilled and unskilled labor to maintain their industrial activities. In Mexico, cartels have kidnapped engineers in the past and forced them to design clandestine radio networks, and continue to recruit chemistry students to aid in the synthesis of illicit drugs. In Colombia, non-state groups increasingly target children for recruitment as drone operators and maintainers. Depending on the level of skill required, cutting off the supply of labor could have a major impact on criminals’ ability to innovate and fabricate advanced systems.

What the Criminals Can Teach Us

At the risk of ending on a digression, I feel the ongoing war with Iran also carries relevant lessons for our understanding of the criminal industrial base. The United States and Israel rapidly achieved air superiority in the opening hours and days of that conflict, and proved far more adept at hunting down Iran’s road-mobile air defenses and missile launchers than one might have expected.

But even after weathering weeks of sorties, Iranian ballistic missile and drone launches never petered out, and appeared to stabilize at low (but nonzero) rate of daily attacks. Iran, of course, had been hardening its missile infrastructure for decades against a potential U.S. attack, nevertheless it seems that even with vast military overmatch, eliminating an adversary’s defense industrial base remains a dangerous dream.

Even if U.S. forces dramatically increase their strikes against nacrosubmarines in the hemisphere, or expands a land campaign to go after manufacturing hubs for IAFVs, it is likely that the institutional know-how and industrial capacity to continue building will persist.

In fact, there’s probably a lot criminal networks can teach our own armed forces about logistics in contested domains. Maybe this is all the more reason for the United States to pay more attention to the criminal industrial base as a case study in preserving supply chains under fire, as well as understanding how adversaries are likely to respond under similar conditions.

World War III is upon us. At least, that’s what a flurry of op eds have been proclaiming since at least 2022. The most recent of these, an excellent New York Times piece from University of Chicago Professor Paul Poast argues we should view the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Iran as two interlinked theaters of the same great power clash.

Unlike the first and second World Wars, that involved millions-strong armies marshalled by the globe’s great powers invading one another, the logic of nuclear deterrence has (for now) succeeded in keeping the United States, Russia, and China, from direct confrontation. Whether you believe today’s overlapping crises indeed rise to the level of world war, it does seem as though sharpened great power competition is producing a sort of instability cascade where various regional flashpoints are more likely to become internationalized as major powers take interest in their outcomes.

War is disastrous from an economic standpoint. Today’s wars, or war, if you’d prefer, have already triggered shortages and price hikes that tend to fall disproportionately on small and middle powers, which lack the flexibility or fiscal space to insulate their economies and societies.

But even advanced economies are not perfectly insulated from the consequences of war, especially when the fighting is in their own backyard. The outbreak of full-scale conflict in Ukraine spiked energy prices, especially in Europe, exacerbated food insecurity, and even triggered fears of second-order supply chain risks in the semiconductor industry. After more than four years of conflict, however, the world seems to have mostly adjusted. Now, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems to have the makings of a genuine crisis, as it slowly dawns on markets that even successful negotiations cannot avert a prolonged period of economic pain.

Oil and gas production that has been curtailed cannot be restarted immediately. Moreover, confidence in the Gulf states as an island of stability within an otherwise turbulent region seems irreparably shaken, potentially leading investors and governments alike to diversify their investment sources elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the United States is currently wagering more than 2 percent of its GDP (and counting) with a bet on transformative artificial intelligence, a capital and energy-intensive gamble, where even slight discrepancies between projections and reality could be existential for the companies in that sector. One could imagine how another crisis in the Indo-Pacific, say, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, might give the final push needed to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

But there is one region where the storm clouds of war don’t seem to be massing. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) sits at a confluence of resource wealth, strategic geography, and relative geopolitical stability that I don’t see many other places else these days. Maybe, but just maybe, these factors could help the region to guide a battered and bruised global economy through the choppy waters of conflict to safer harbor.

How LAC Can Help

LAC’s advantage lies in relative, not absolute, stability. Countries in the region face a raft of challenges that limit their economic competitiveness, from crumbling infrastructure to regulatory red tape, to rampant corruption and the perennial specter of organized crime. Still, if your risk calculations now include “probability of a Shahed blowing up the datacenter you’re building” LAC now seems like a pretty good bet.

The last interstate armed conflict between LAC nations that gripped the region came during the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru in 1995. At least one state in the Americas has been at war (an interstate conflict resulting in at least 1,000 battle deaths) for just 73 of the 193 years in the Correlates of War dataset for that region which covers 1822 to 2014, though even this is biased towards the bellicose thanks to the United States’ inclusion that total.

The region seems like especially promising for investments in expensive, energy-hungry, and delicate industries like datacenters and semiconductors. These kinds of things don’t do well operating under missile bombardment, while in places like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, they can benefit from access to relatively cheap, and often quite green, electricity, as well as existing education and research hubs in the region.

Datacenters in particular are also hardened against intrastate violence, the type of violence that LAC countries are substantially worse at managing. Unlike mines, refineries, or factories, not much of value physically leaves the datacenter, limiting the opportunities for criminal groups to steal or extort. Simply throw up a few 4-meter electrified fences, post some guards, and you’re golden.

LAC of course has more than just peaceful (interstate) operating conditions to offer prospective investors. The region has been leading non-OPEC oil production growth well before war broke out with Iran and new discoveries suggest that there may still be substantial untapped potential.

To be clear, none of these new finds can substitute for lost Persian Gulf production. Brazil is the only LAC country to rank in the top 10 global oil producers, and even the daily output of Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, Guyana, and Ecuador combined doesn’t reach the amount of crude pumped by Saudi Arabia before the war. But LAC does not need to replace the Gulf in order to grow its relevance to global energy markets.

Countries like Guyana are extremely well positioned to benefit from higher global oil prices, while the fact that some two-thirds of Guyanese hydrocarbon exports flow to Europe means the country is probably the EU’s new best bet for diversification away from Russian supplies. Suriname, Guyana’s neighbor and a former Dutch colony also experiencing an oil and gas boom, could play a similar role.

Venezuela, of course, is also making headlines as another likely beneficiary if oil remains north of $100 a barrel. The country is still nowhere close to being an attractive destination for foreign capital of course. Nevertheless, the fact that Middle Eastern investments look more exposed than ever in the past 3 decades, combined with the Trump administration’s willingness to invest its own political capital to promote Delcy Rodríguez and the rump Chavista regime is still having some effect. Venezuela’s current protectorate status also means Washington can, in theory, steer a 1.1 million barrel per day firehose to other countries feeling the pinch from rising fuel prices (provided, of course, the crude is first refined along the U.S. gulf coast).

Argentina is a more minor player when it comes to oil production, but makes up for it in spades with natural gas. With the second largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves in the world, Argentina has been steadily ramping production in the Vaca Muerta formation for years. Now, as natural gas shortages promise knock-on effects for the availability of nitrogen-based fertilizers, Argentina is launching two projects aimed at indigenizing production of urea using gas from Vaca Muerta as feedstock. If successful, Argentina’s transformation into a fertilizer producer could benefit not just its domestic agricultural industry, but also bolster regional food security.

Finally, LAC’s exports are generally not at the mercy of geopolitically charged chokepoints. There is no country in the region today, save the United States itself, that could credibly close the Panama Canal, or Strait of Magellan. To the extent that LAC is underperforming when it comes to global trade integration, it is mainly a function of infrastructure gaps. The region remains behind the curve in many places when it comes to port-hinterland connectivity, its air cargo nodes are in deep need of refurbishment, and road and rail links are decaying or altogether nonexistent in key locations.

True, there is concern that some of these choke points and key transit nodes are being captured by China, and fears persist over the future of the Panama Canal (I share some of them), especially after a recent explosion under one of its bridges. But in the case of Panama, the waterway continues to see record traffic as conflict in the Middle East rewires global shipping routes, increasingly in the direction of the Americas.

Waiting on the World to Change

There are real opportunities for LAC to chase, but the road towards them is littered with pitfalls. Not every country will benefit, and a fair number are at risk of a serious downturn if conflicts in other regions don’t cool off soon, let alone escalate.

While I extolled the benefits of rising oil and gas prices for some countries, only a subset of the region will reap these. For countries that don’t have sizeable domestic energy reserves the Hormuz crisis is potentially disastrous. Chilean President José Antonio Kast has already seen his honeymoon period come to an unceremonious end, as his approval ratings tumbled by double-digit percentage points over cuts to fuel subsidies. Central American countries are heavily dependent on fuel imports for transportation and power. Even Mexico, ostensibly another oil producing country primed to benefit, is merely treading water to control domestic fuel prices.

Setting aside the perhaps uniquely mismanaged case of PEMEX, even countries like Guyana and Brazil that are in much better shape to capitalize on the rewiring of the global energy economy may still get it wrong. Countries could squander their current windfall on a spending spree that does little to address macroeconomic needs, drag their feet on boosting production and get surpassed by competitors, or even overestimate future demand and run headfirst into a price collapse. Running a petrostate is not easy, and the gulf monarchies are the exceptions, not the rule when it comes to governance quality.

With respect to agriculture, another sector where LAC harbors great potential amid disruption, dangers still luck. Soybeans, one of the most important export industries for Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, do not require much fertilizer, making them remarkably resilient in the face of ongoing tensions in the gulf. But this may come back to bite the South American agricultural titans as conflict grinds on. Other countries may start substituting fertilizer-dependent crops with soy, resulting in increased competition and driving down already razor thin margins for farmers.

There’s another question of whether the United States is the real winner in a more conflict-prone world. The United States is similarly far from global hot spots, with pacific (albeit increasingly frustrated) neighbors to the north and south. The United States is also now the world’s largest oil producer, has a surfeit of natural resources, and is home to the world’s leading AI and advanced tech companies. Why should the United States care about bolstering supply chain security in LAC, when it can do everything at home?

In some sense it’s not the United States that benefits most from closer ties to LAC, it’s everybody else. Europe and Southeast Asia in particular should be seriously considering how they can strengthen trade ties with the region. Washington should still care, if not for itself, then for its allies who are more exposed to conflict-related disruptions in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific, Africa, and, well, everywhere but the Americas.

The Trump administration claims these strikes have been wildly successful, reducing the volume of seaborne drug trafficking by more than 90 percent. Analysts have largely dismissed this claim, but it is harder to categorically reject it than one might expect. In February, Politifact queried the White House about this claim and were directed to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data showing a 98 percent drop in air and marine drug seizures from July to November 2025. However, maritime drug interdiction is primarily handled by the Coast Guard, which just reported a record volume of cocaine seized during the 2025 fiscal year.

Further complicating the deterrence narrative, Adam Isacson and John Walsh with the Washington Office on Latin America has done more work than most showing that total cocaine seizures by CBP have been largely unchanged since the start of lethal boat strikes.

Last month, more than 5,500 pounds of cocaine was seized by CBP. In 2025 that figure was 5,300 pounds, and in 2024 it was about 4,200 pounds. Assuming CBP seizes roughly the same fraction of drugs crossing the border, that suggests the volume of drugs bound for the United States has not decreased in any appreciable way (and may even be increasing). But while this chain of logic makes sense, without knowing the total volume of cocaine being trafficked each month, we can’t definitively say that boat strikes have had no effect.

To illustrate this, let’s say that before the start of lethal boat strikes, 100,000 pounds of cocaine was being trafficked to the United States each month. Now, using one of the more conservative estimates offered by the Trump administration, let’s say the strikes have deterred 90 percent of traffickers who would otherwise be barreling towards the United States. Now traffickers are only trying to move 10,000 pounds of product into the U.S. per month. That would mean in March, CBP intercepted more than half of all cocaine before it entered the United States, a remarkable feat.

My every intuition is telling me that’s not what is happening. Instead, even if seaborne trafficking is down, criminal groups are pivoting to air and overland routes, hiding narcotics in legitimate shipments, or turning to uncrewed systems to keep the cash flowing without relying on human crews. Still, getting good estimates about the size of illicit economies at large seems virtually impossible. In most cases we know the numerator, how much we are seizing, but the denominator, how much is really out there, remains infuriatingly opaque.

How Illicit Economies are Estimated

There are a handful of reports that attempt to figure out the denominator of organized crime. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime for instance periodically puts out documents on drugs, trafficking in persons, firearms, environmental plundering, and crime writ large. The NGO Global Financial Integrity (GFI) also provides estimates for the retail value of various transnational criminal activities, with the overall “market for crime” being valued at between $1.6 and $2.2 trillion. Unfortunately, these estimates from GFI are from their 2017 report on Transnational Crime and the Developing World and almost certainly outdated by now. Nevertheless, the $1.6-2.2 trillion figure continues to be cited by virtue of the fact that without it there are precious few hard numbers to benchmark the market for crime against.

I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive review of how all types of illicit activity are (or are not) estimated in a blog post, but want to give some color of how I think about these challenges when it comes to narcotics and arms trafficking in the Americas.

Drugs

Of all the types of illicit commercial activity, drug trafficking probably receives the most attention. However, the sheer variety of illicit substances, and their variable modes of production, makes getting a good estimate difficult. GFI uses two methods to estimate the sum value of cannabis, cocaine, opiates, and amphetamines, giving a range of between $426-$652 billion. Both methods, however rely on older UNODC estimates, in some cases from 2003, and extrapolating out from there.

Value estimates also can’t tell us much about whether the volume of narcotics we’re seizing is making a dent in overall supply. Drug prices fluctuate by region, and street prices are liable to be even more inconsistent as individual dealers are subject to highly uneven levels of overhead, supply chain security, and competition.

Nevertheless, plant-based drugs, and cocaine in particular, may be some of the easier drugs to estimate total production for. Coca leaves, the base ingredient for cocaine, occupy large swathes of territory that can be identified and mapped by land, from the air, or by satellite. The UNODC periodically releases fairly reliable estimates of coca cultivation in the world’s three largest coca producers, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. If you know how many acres are under cultivation, you should be able to calculate how much cocaine could be produced if all the coca leaves there were to be harvested.

Indeed, the UNODC’s 2025 World Drug Report found that coca cultivation in 2023 hit record highs, with more than 350,000 hectares under cultivation. Meanwhile, cocaine production was estimated at 3,708 tons, a 50 percent increase from the 2022 estimate.

Much of this was driven by Colombia, which not only saw increased cultivation, but higher yields from coca bush under cultivation thanks to the introduction of new and more productive strands as well as more sophisticated processing that allows drug traffickers to get more out of a harvest. The report was not received well in Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro threatened to pause collaboration with the UNODC in favor of an alternative methodology.

So, it seems possible to measure the total volume of cocaine being produced every year, but even with that impressive feat under your belt, obtaining the level of fidelity needed to determine whether certain policy interventions are working to disrupt traffickers remains elusive. InSight Crime illustrated this in an excellent way with their recent investigation into the Brazilian port of Santos. Long the capital for Brazilian cocaine exports to the world, seizures of the drugs at the port have fallen precipitously in recent years, even as global cocaine production exploded.

A recent investigation suggests that a combination of better inspection at ports, and the fact that Brazilian authorities are increasingly seizing cocaine shipments before they get to port is genuinely making a difference at Santos. But as one outlet has closed, others have opened, especially in the northern state of Bahia, and southern port of Paranaguá. Overlaying all of this is the fact that we still don’t really know how much cocaine is passing through Brazil, even if we know how much is being produced in a given year.

Turning to synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl the picture gets even fuzzier. While coca fields occupy acres upon acres, meth labs can be crammed into cramped and unsafe houses or even mobile labs making them difficult to track. Notably, while UNODC’s World Drug Report featured production estimates for cocaine, opium, and heroin, it sticks to reporting seizure numbers for most synthetic drugs. The sheer potency of these drugs also means that a much higher percentage of the total volume needs to be interdicted to make a dent on the supply side.

Guns

The conversation around arms trafficking is a good example of how a credible-sounding estimate can end up being propagated well past its useful expiration date.

Last year, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime put out a report scoping the various estimates around illegal arms transfers. One of their citations was to the 2017 GFI report, which estimated the value of the arms trade at $1.7-$3.5 billion. This in turn is a back calculation based on the claim that the illicit arms market is about 10-20 percent of the licit arms market. The 10-20 percent figure appears in a number of reports going back years, but to the best of my knowledge has its origins in a 2001 estimate by Small Arms Survey. We could be calculating the size of the modern illicit arms market based on data that’s a quarter of a century old.

Another data challenge comes from government opacity. The Mexican government’s recent lawsuit against U.S. arms manufacturers alleges that “between 342,000 and 597,000” guns are trafficked into Mexico from the United States each year. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report, citing Mexican government estimates, said that 200,000 guns are trafficked per annum. Meanwhile, Project Thor, an ATF-led initiative against gun trafficking, estimated that between a quarter of a million and 1 million guns are trafficked each year. To the best of my knowledge, the statistical methods and estimation strategies used to arrive at these figures have never been released.

In the open source, Topher McDougal and Sean Campbell recently applied a capture-recapture methodology to try and estimate the yearly flow of weapons into Mexico. This is typically used for estimating wildlife populations where the total population is unknown. Researchers capture a sample population instead, tag and release it, and at a later date capture a second independent sample. Based on the proportion of previously tagged individuals in the second sample, it should be possible to get a sense of how large or small the underlying population is (i.e. if there are very few tagged individuals in the second sample, the population is likely much larger).

In the case of illicit firearms, McDougal and Campbell use two datasets of firearms seizures, one consisting of leaked data from the National Center for Planning, Analysis, and Information to Combat Crime (CENAPI) supposedly containing records of firearms seized by Mexican authorities at the federal, state, and local levels, and one consisting of data on only arms seized by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). In theory, the proportion of guns captured by SEDENA in the CENAPI dataset should be the same as the proportion of guns in the CENAPI dataset to the total “population” of illicit firearms in Mexico.

However, by the authors’ own admission, these data “present an imperfect application opportunity because they are not independent, sequential attempts at the same capture process.” On top of this, while in theory all guns seized by SEDENA should also appear in the CENAPI dataset, just 26.5 percent of the SEDENA records are duplicated, making the SEDENDA dataset larger than the CENAPI dataset and not the other way around. Despite this, McDougal and Campbell argue the data still “represents a relatively independent attempt to capture (a) all illicit guns in circulation in Mexico, or alternatively (b) a sampling of the total guns intercepted by Mexican authorities.”

My goal isn’t to cast aspersion on the researchers, or any of the organizations mentioned above for that matter. The people working in this space are incredibly forthcoming about the limitations of their data, and the challenges associated with measuring black market trade. Notably, the average that McDougal and Campbell arrive at is much more conservative than many of the less methodologically transparent estimates, suggesting to me their research isn’t wildly overestimating the problem.

If anything, I think we need more efforts to apply different estimation methods, and replicate or update existing studies as new data become available. I also think we should be less credulous towards government figures when reported without at least some methodological color. While I am willing to acknowledge states likely possess important non-public information about various illicit economies, the quality of their publicly available data often leaves much to be desired and suggests to me that what’s happening behind the scenes may not be much better.

Drawing Good Lessons from Bad Math

I’m doubtful that we’ll ever be able to produce an estimate of total criminal activity that is unimpeachable, but I still believe there is merit in trying. Being open about your data sources and methods is a useful exercise in thinking through issues in a more structured manner as opposed to relying on intuition alone. Continued advances in commercial satellite imagery and artificial intelligence-assisted data analysis could also help us arrive a better estimates in the near future.

The question remains, however, if we can never know the denominator when it comes to things like narcotics or arms trafficking, how can governments know when they’re making progress against these issues?

Personally, I think part of the answer comes from thinking about outcomes instead of activities. The sheer quantity of narcotics trafficked each year matters only insofar as it correlates with bad outcomes like violence and drug overdoses. Our goal therefore shouldn’t necessarily be to maximize drug seizures, but minimize violence and overdoses. Even the crudest and most corrupt states can pull off “record” drug seizures from time to time, but there isn’t really a substitute for the hard work of building state capacity.

This is also why I’m skeptical that lethal strikes on alleged drug boats are all that effective even if we assume they are having the desired deterrent effect. Looking around the Americas today, it seems as though criminal groups remain firmly ensconced, growing rich and dangerous thanks to increasingly diversified illicit revenue streams that can’t be blown up with a single missile.

To be sure, I think most people working on hemispheric security issues recognize this. SOUTHCOM commander General Francis L. Donovan even acknowledged the need to apply “systemic friction” to criminal organizations, and noted that traffickers have adjusted their routes in response to U.S. strikes as well as increased maritime interdiction. So while I’m still hopeful that the United States renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere represents more opportunity than it does risk, we need to remain humble about what we do, and don’t know, and focused on driving the outcomes that genuinely better the lives of those in our shared neighborhood.

As missiles and drones crisscrossed the Strait of Hormuz, the United States convened an assemblage of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) leaders for the inaugural “Shield of the Americas” Summit. Earlier that week, the United States announced it was undertaking joint military operations with Ecuador against drug trafficking organizations. Donald Trump has also steadfastly insisted that, once the current unpleasantness with Iran is wrapped up, “Cuba is next.” It seems that even if LAC ends up playing second fiddle to the Middle East for the rest of the Trump administration, it will still receive far more attention than has been the norm historically.

But for all this unprecedented focus on the Americas, I’m increasingly left with the feeling that the “Donroe Doctrine” is failing to live up to the hype. This assessment isn’t new, when the 2025 National Security Strategy came out, I wrote that:

“it seems profoundly unclear what new dimension the Trump Corollary brings to the table. Instead, the NSS lays out a grab bag of things it doesn’t want to have happen in the Americas. We don’t want countries trafficking drugs, or migrants, we don’t want China controlling critical infrastructure, we don’t want to lose access to the Panama Canal. But are those things preconditions for the use of military force? Or does a country need to check several of those boxes (like Venezuela) before bombs start dropping? If countries work with the United States to stop those things from happening, will it be rewarded, and if so, in what way? These are fundamental questions about how you connect means with ends, the exact thing the NSS promises to do, but I feel myself having to fill in the blanks left in the document.”

Now, about four months later, I think that assessment holds up. While I do believe Washington’s foreign policy apparatus is trying to approximate a cohesive doctrine, at the strategic level the Trump Corollary has remained mostly a branding exercise.

This lack of coherence has caused the diminishment of the Donroe Doctrine from a sweeping hemispheric program, to a series of one-off engagements, and caused the United States to overinvest in counter-crime initiatives while ignoring for the most part China’s still deeply entrenched influence in the region. This is a problem because a Western Hemisphere focus is genuinely overdue, but the current U.S. approach risks sabotaging the long-term viability of such a strategy.

From Hemispheric Defense to “Greater North America”

The most recent downgrading of the Donroe Doctrine came with Pete Hegseth’s remarks to LAC dignitaries at the March 5 Americas Counter Cartel Conference. There, Secretary Hegseth articulated a vision of “Greater North America” encompassing “every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana.” These countries, bounded by the Amazon and Andes mountains to the south, constitute the United States’ “immediate security perimeter.”

I understand the United States’ rationale for this to an extent, strategy means prioritization, and if you have to draw a line somewhere, Greater North America seems pretty good. Through the lens of U.S.-China competition, Beijing has advanced the furthest in countries south of the Equator, while the United States remains ahead from Ecuador on up.

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule, but the United States has been cleaning house this past year to shore up its north-western hemispheric dominance. Venezuela, previously a bastion of Chinese and Russian influence in the Americas, is now a de-facto U.S. protectorate. Panama, the first LAC country to accede to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2017 has been actively curtailing Chinese influence in and around the Panama Canal, much to Beijing’s displeasure. Cuba is rhetorically defiant, but in no position to sign any provocative new economic or security deals with U.S. adversaries, and Nicaragua, which has stayed out of the spotlight for now, remains massively exposed economically to U.S. sanctions.

It’s not necessarily a bad idea to double-down on areas of comparative U.S. advantage, but drawing a security perimeter that includes only half of the Western Hemisphere is a deeply flawed approach. From a U.S.-China competition perspective, Greater North America does little to obstruct China’s access to Latin American raw materials or markets. Indeed, if the Donroe Doctrine truly ends at the equator’s edge, it would mean giving China unfettered access to some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, agricultural powerhouses, oil and gas deposits, as well as critical Antarctic gateways.

Now, clearly the United States is not just ignoring the rest of South America, but its moments of focus have been more episodic than strategic. The Trump administration cancelled visas for Chilean diplomats to protest a planned Hong Kong-Chile fiber optic cable, and continues to raise alarms over the Peruvian port of Chancay. These efforts have certainly rattled China, however, to date they seem insufficient to compete with, let alone outcompete, China in the countries where it still holds a few cards.

In Panama, whose recent Supreme Court decision to cancel the leases held by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison for two ports along the Panama Canal was hailed as a geopolitical win for Washington, the United States may have been its own worst enemy. Rhetoric about “taking back” the canal, by force if necessary, placed the government of José Raúl Mulino in the unenviable position of having to placate Washington’s demands, and fend of nationalist protest at home. In the end, it was Panamanian political will, more than U.S. strategic savvy that carried the day.

In the case of Venezuela, the geopolitical rationale for U.S. intervention is looking weaker as the United States continues pass Venezuelan oil along to China (albeit now at market rates). Further south, Argentina has been steadily increasing its grain exports to the PRC. China’s supply chains for oil, minerals, and foodstuffs from the Americas seem to be relatively untouched, whether their source countries fall within or outside the United States’ declared security perimeter.

Maybe I’m also blowing the “Greater North America” concept out of proportion. Hegseth’s speech was mainly focused on security and organized crime in particular, so perhaps the hemispheric Donroe Doctrine is alive and well, just with the countries of Greater North America getting a bit of extra attention.

But that argument still means the United States will be leaving several erstwhile allied governments in the lurch. Fully one-third of the 12 LAC leaders who attended the Shield of the Americas Summit hail from countries south of Greater North America. Even if unintended, revising the Donroe Doctrine from a hemispheric to half-hemispheric strategy signals that the rewards for being a staunch U.S. ally in South America are likely to be limited.

Towards a True Hemispheric Strategy

It is telling that, less than four months out from Operation Absolute Resolve, people are already starting to question how long U.S. interest in LAC will hold. U.S. midterm elections are on the horizon, and likely signal the end of the Trump administration’s blank check on foreign policy. Most analysts seem to implicitly or explicitly assume the Trump Corollary has an expiration date of January 2029, if not sooner.

I think that these assessments are directionally correct, but at the same time I believe we still haven’t hit peak Donroe Doctrine yet.

In the days following the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran for instance, I saw lots of speculation that, much like the perpetually deferred “Pivot to Asia” before it, the current pivot to the Americas may end up falling victim to runaway escalation in the Middle East. The most extreme version of that argument is unlikely for a few key reasons.

First, by this point the United States has created tethers to the region that will lock in a greater focus on hemispheric affairs for the foreseeable future. Managing Venezuela, figuring out what to do with Cuba, controlling migration, and maintaining drug interdiction efforts all demand continued attention, and impose reputational costs if they fall through the gaps.

Second, the cost of power projection in the Western Hemisphere is extremely low. The military and economic imbalance between the United States and its neighbors, along with the emergence of a like-minded bloc of countries means that it seems to be only getting easier for Washington to throw its weight around.

For a useful comparison, look at Operation Absolute Resolve versus Operation Epic Fury. In the first case, U.S. forces were in and out of Venezuela in a matter of hours, suffered zero killed in action, and left with a pliant successor firmly in place. In terms of munitions the operation was remarkably parsimonious, the majority of strikes on Caracas being conducted with lower-end, and easier to replace platforms.

That has clearly not been the case with Iran, and even though I think the United States has exceeded its wildest dreams in terms of military overmatch, Washington has no clear path to translating tactical success into strategic victory. While a tenuous ceasefire prevails for now, war with Iran has already resulted in U.S. deaths, depletion of critical interceptors and strike platforms, and a price tag in the billions.

Finally, it seems like a focus on the Western Hemisphere plays well with all the disparate factions of the modern Republican party in a way that other foreign policy adventures doesn’t. Isolationists still like the idea of blowing up drug traffickers at sea before their illicit cargoes can reach U.S. victims. Prioritizers are convinced that a new Monroe Doctrine will help secure the United States’ homefront for the coming war with China. Meanwhile primacists see no reason why the United States should have any more compunctions about intervention in its own neighborhood than it has in more distant lands.

The fact that all these groups can find common cause could even lead to increased action in Latin America as a way of scoring quick wins in response to foreign policy setbacks in the Middle East.

So the Greater North America focus at least isn’t going to change dramatically until 2029, but what happens after that? I’ll avoid speculating on likely electoral outcomes, but suffice it to say with the sole exception of a Rubio presidency, I would expect the next administration to seek to curtail Western Hemisphere activities across the board.

I understand this temptation, but viewing the Donroe Doctrine as merely a costly diversion from more important geographies is still throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, we should recognize that the germ of the idea, a belief in the need to reprioritize the Western Hemisphere, is a good one, even if the form it took proved lackluster.

It may be instructive to look to another period where the United States confronted a world order in decay. On the precipice of the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood the importance of a truly hemispheric strategy. Fearful that the rising tide of fascism could engulf the Americas in whole or piecemeal, FDR breathed new strength into the Inter-American system.

Notably, FDR and his advisors saw a “quarter-sphere of defense,” in other words Greater North America, as untenable for the United States. To avert this possibility, Washington worked with a diverse coalition of partners to secure critical supply chains, and present a united front against the Axis powers.

In Mexico, left-wing Lázaro Cárdenas cut off oil exports to Germany, Italy, and Japan in due time after nationalizing the country’s oil sector. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ autocratic government funneled raw materials to support Washington’s defense industrial juggernaut, and even dispatched Brazilian soldiers to the Italian campaign. Countless other countries furnished materiel and manpower to help the allied cause, while remaining insulated from the heaviest fighting taking place oceans away.

If the United States truly wishes to replicate the herculean efforts that carried it to victory in 1945, the worst thing it can do is turn its back on the Americas at large. Instead, I hope that we can learn the right lessons from our present moment that a Western Hemisphere focus harbors great potential, but also that alliances built on fear and encompassing only half the hemisphere are doomed to fall short.

Already notorious among Latin America watchers, the facility reached new levels of notoriety, after the United States shipped more than 200 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang there in February 2025. Later the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a U.S. resident who was rendered to CECOT without due process as a result of an “administrative error,” captured public attention and earned national, as well as international opprobrium.

But while Trump and Bukele’s scheme to position El Salvador as a hub for Prison as a Service failed, CECOT continues to garner admirers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Most recently, Chilean president and anti-crime crusader José Antonio Kast toured the facility prior to his inauguration.

Indeed, perhaps the single most remarkable part of El Salvador’s journey from one of the most homicidal countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the most peaceful is the fact that the country was able to maintain control over the prison system even as incarceration rates skyrocketed. That hasn’t happened more or less anywhere else in the hemisphere.

This feat is all the most impressive when you look at the state of prison systems in most other Latin American countries. As a rule, these tend to be violent, overcrowded, and porous, sustaining all manner of illicit economies within their walls. Some of the hemisphere’s most feared gangs, like the Brazilian First Capital Command (PCC) and Venezuelan Tren de Aragua got their start within these sordid carceral facilities.

Most of us are familiar with this problem at some level. Stories abound of prisons-turned-resorts for their inmates, where booze, drugs, and even exotic pets flow easily in and out. But it strikes me as well that prisons should, in theory, be one of the easiest problems to solve. Unlike the ever-shifting drug trafficking routes, or the thorny task of community policing in dense urban agglomerations, prisons represent a finite number of static locations that should possible to secure one after another.

Unlike most other aspects of the illicit economy, locking down a prison isn’t like squeezing a balloon. If the state can achieve lasting control over one facility, inmates housed there won’t just be able to migrate to another site with weaker supervision. Meanwhile, governments have far more tools at their disposal to disrupt the power of gangs once their members are already behind bars.

Now, just because prison reform seems like it should be easier than other counter-crime interventions, that doesn’t mean it’s easy by any stretch of the imagination. Vast amounts of blood and ill-gotten treasure have been spent keeping Latin America’s prisons overcrowded, under-resourced, and riven by corruption. Often the key links in these networks are prison administrators themselves, who line their pockets handsomely with the kickbacks that come from turning a blind eye to prison-based smuggling networks.

So even though on paper prisons seem like natural starting points for combatting criminal gains, in practice there’s an overwhelming sense that the system in some countries may be so rotten that nothing short of throwing it out and starting over from scratch has any chance of success.

Still, I think it’s too early to throw our hands up in defeat at this prospect however and hope to outline in this post why prisons throughout Latin America have failed, why I think prison-based gangs are still weaker than we might assume, and how governments could begin to course-correct.

How Prisons Fail

It’s easy to understand how prisons can become breeding grounds for organized crime. Keeping hundreds, or even thousands of lawbreakers under one roof is a challenging task even for well-resourced states. In the United States for instance, prison gangs remain some of the most resilient and brutal illicit organizations around.

The logic of prison-based gangs is simple. Leadership remains on the inside, sending orders to foot soldiers and lieutenants on the outside. These lower-level gang members obey their incarcerated bosses because failure to do so risks forgoing the gang’s protection if and when they themselves are arrested and jailed. For gang leaders, running things from behind bars is also appealing, you’re already locked up so there’s no need to worry that getting arrested will compromise your operation.

Meanwhile, prison guards and administrators allow their charges to have free reign within their cells, and overlook (or even facilitate) smuggling into prisons in exchange for a promise by the gangs to maintain a modicum of order. Failure to strike this deal tends to unleash bloody riots and massacres that most facilities are unable to contain.

The Tren de Aragua gang exemplifies this phenomenon. In 2011, Venezuela adopted the “pran” system in its correctional facilities, devolving responsibility to individual inmates to reduce conflict and violence among various prisoner factions. Tocorón prison, in Aragua state, was a model of this new system, and over time morphed into an inmate-run playground for criminals.

When, in 2023, the Venezuelan police and military raided Tocorón, they found quarters for inmates’ families, artillery shells, a swimming pool and even a private zoo on the grounds. These discoveries made for lurid headlines, but the raid did little to disrupt the Tren de Aragua’s actual operations, as the group had long since metastasized into a truly transnational outfit with tendrils snaking through Colombia down into Peru and Chile, among other geographies.

Reform in this environment is a wicked problem. In order to successfully manage their operations on the outside, prison-based gangs have successfully co-opted virtually every layer of the carceral system. Guards turn a blind eye to violence and illicit commerce, wardens are either on the take or under the gun, and any attempt to reassert state control is met with fierce resistance both within and outside prison walls.

In 2024 for instance, Elmer Fernandez, the newly appointed director of Colombia’s La Modelo prison was gunned down in Bogotá after pledging to crack down on gang activity in the penal system. In Ecuador, the spate of violence that saw gunmen take over a live TV broadcast was precipitated by the escape of José Adolfo Macías Villamar, leader of the Choneros gang, as he was about to be transferred to a new prison. The brutality, coordination, and resources of these gangs tend to far outstrip a conventional law enforcement approach to securing prisons.

More recently, Guatemala declared a 30-day state of siege following coordinated riots that took over three prisons. The violence was reportedly aimed at securing more favorable conditions and transfers to lower-security facilities for Barrio 18 gang leadership. While Guatemalan authorities quickly regained control over the facilities and seem to have stabilized the situation relatively effectively, it remains unclear how durable any gains in prison security will prove.

Inability to reform the carceral system in my view undergirds virtually every failed “mano dura” campaign in Latin America over the past two decades. Politicians, wanting to show they are tough on crime, send the military and police to the streets, where they usually end up arresting a lot of people. But expanding the prison system costs money and takes time, things that aren’t very politically expedient, so the influx of prisoners exacerbates conditions within the carceral system and strengthens the hand of gangs that run these facilities.

The prison, intended to sequester violent individuals from society, is paradoxically at the heart of the violence plaguing several Latin American countries.

The El Salvador Exception

El Salvador stands out as perhaps the only country in recent history to have effectively dismantled its own prison-based gangs and restored state control over the carceral system. It has done so despite nearly tripling its prison population in the space of four years. This is partially a consequence of policy and partially happenstance.

Policy-wise, the Bukele government implemented a number of draconian measures intended to limit the ability of gang leadership to coordinate with their forces on the outside. This included shutting off cell phone reception on prison grounds, limiting family visitation rights to prevent the smuggling of contraband, and housing members of rival gangs in the same blocks. Such practices are avoided elsewhere in the hemisphere as they tend to exacerbate violence within prison facilities.

However, in El Salvador’s case, the speed and scale of the crackdown proved sufficient to catch prison-based gang leadership off guard. This is more a matter of coincidence than a coherent strategy. Several reports now indicate that Nayib Bukele’s government negotiated with gangs, including MS-13, to keep levels of violence within acceptable bounds. When the initial state of exception was declared, gang leaders allegedly ordered their members to lay low, believing it best to wait out the crackdown before returning to business as usual.

By the time it was evident that there would be no such restoration of the status quo, it was too late, while thanks to their negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the Bukele administration conveniently had a rather comprehensive picture of what the gang leadership structure within its prisons looked like. Finally, the construction of new facilities, like CECOT, gave the government expanded capacity to transfer gang leadership and break up networks of command and control.

However, it is still worth noting that most of El Salvador’s prison population is not housed in CECOT, and while the facility has been the subject of harrowing stories of abuse and deprivation, it seems like inmates in other penitentiaries may have it even worse. According to a recent report from the NGO Humanitarian Legal Aid, 40.9 percent of the 470 deaths recorded in Salvadoran prisons since March 2022 have occurred in Izalco prison, while another 18.9 percent were documented in the La Esperanza Center.

While CECOT’s doors are open to a rotating cast of international media outlets, the rest of El Salvador’s penal system is far more opaque, and gang influence there runs deeper. Izalco for instance was populated initially by Barrio 18 members, and even split into two sections to separate rival factions when the gang fragmented between 2009 and 2010. For Bukele’s prison strategy, breaking the power of criminal networks at facilities where the gangs are more entrenched has seemingly required a higher dose of state brutality.

As with most elements of El Salvador’s crime crackdown, the more layers you peel back of the narrative concerning the country’s success at controlling its prison system, the more complicated, and less replicable it appears. However, the dream of replicating Bukele-style policies remains tantalizing for countries grappling with seemingly intractable criminal networks. When Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced the construction of two new maximum-security facilities, he made sure to note “For all the Bukele lovers, it is an identical prison [to CECOT].” Noboa was not exaggerating, Ecuador is currently contracted with the same Mexican Salvadoran firm that built the now infamous detention facility.

The Weaknesses of Prison Gangs

El Salvador’s story also reveals something that may seem counterintuitive at first, while prisons-based gangs can appear implacable, this criminal organizational model is weaker than it lets on.

Prison-based gangs are something of an evolutionary dead-end for organized crime. The structure confers a number of advantages, such as built-in shelter, and recruitment mechanisms, but these ultimately don’t make up for the liabilities in the face of a sufficiently determined government. Command and control is especially susceptible to destruction at either the individual level by transferring individual prisoners, or system level, but blocking cellular communications or housing members in the same cell blocks as their rivals.

El Salvador illustrates how this can genuinely put criminals on the back foot. When Bukele’s crackdown began, MS-13’s prison-based leadership council, the Ranfla Nacional, quickly found its ability to communicate with the outside world cut off, leaving their followers disoriented and vulnerable to being mopped up piecemeal by police and military operations.

Notably, Mexican cartels, arguably the most successful transnational criminal groups in the Western Hemisphere, are not prison-based. In fact, the cartels go to pains to get their top leaders released from captivity or otherwise escape from prison when they are captured. Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from prison not once but twice, in 2001 and 2015. The Sinaloa cartel would later use the threat of mass violence and unrest to successfully spring El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzmán in 2019, and again (unsuccessfully) 2023.

This isn’t to say that Mexican cartels don’t exert massive influence within the country’s prison system, they assuredly do. Rather, controlling prisons seems to be more like the byproduct of the cartels’ efforts to penetrate and co-opt as many institutions as possible, not an integral feature of cartel organization.

Of course, the second most successful criminal groups in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil’s PCC and rival Red Command (CV), among others, are prison-based. PCC leader Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, alias “Marcola,” has been incarcerated since 1999 while his network has proven resilient despite cycling through multiple different penitentiaries.

My sense with these organizations however is that they benefit most from Brazil’s sprawling and under-resourced carceral system. According to World Prison Brief, Brazil’s incarceration rate has grown more than 90 percent between 2014 and 2024. Without commensurate spending on renovations, new facilities, and better wages for guards, shuffling gang leaders around often simply means opening new vectors for recruitment or violence.

On top of this, groups like the PCC and CV also control territory in urban centers and along key drug trafficking routes in the Amazon and Triple Frontier regions. The CV has also benefitted from a franchise model that delegates significant authority to local bosses, making it resilient to senior leadership decapitation.

A similar phenomenon could be said of the Tren de Aragua, which by the time of the raid on Tocorón, had long since franchised out its name to a coalition of gangs ranging from Arizona to the Andes. Ultimately, it seems as though the more a group grows in power, the less it tries to rely on control over prisons.

Making Prisons Work

The greatest enabler of prison-based criminal groups is state neglect. Governments don’t like spending money on prisons, lest they be accused of lavishing more funding on outlaws than honest citizens. In Ecuador for instance, then-president Lenín Moreno slashed the nation’s prison budget by 15 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic, just before a string of prison massacres would herald the country’s spiral into insecurity.

Even when new prisons get built, there is a disconnect between the time it takes for those facilities come online and the desire to show immediate results, especially arrests, and without constant attention it is easy for the same pathologies of corruption and mismanagement to crop up.

I’m not going to pretend I can offer a step-by-step guide for carceral reform that works in all circumstances. But I do think the region’s security forces should think critically about how to turn the structural weaknesses of prison-based gangs to their advantage, namely the fact that the locations of gang leadership are known at all times and restricted to a finite set of facilities.

In this regard, I think the first step towards reform starts with a six-month to one-year pilot program in moderate-risk facility. The program should involve a comprehensive audit by federal authorities of the prison administration, and endeavor to root out any possible graft within the system and replace corrupt personnel.

Staffing numbers should be increased with clear objectives to reduce, and ideally eliminate, violence within the facility. When sufficient staff levels have been reached, guards should lead targeted seizures of contraband, especially weapons, drugs, and cell phones, and relocate known gang leadership cells to different wings of the facility. The overall goal should be to ensure that the state has complete visibility into goings-on at the pilot prison.

Ideally, states could implement the pilot program at the same time that they build new and more modern maximum-security prisons. Upon completion of both, the trainings and best practices from the pilot facility could be rolled out to other prisons in the system, while the new prisons would help alleviate overcrowding and contain the highest-risk inmates. Then, rinse, and repeat the same program in another facility or two.

Implementing this is likely to trigger a violent response from gang members within and outside the facility. Governments should expect and prepare to contain a spike in violence outside the prison walls while pressing on with reforms in the pilot facility.

Notably, I don’t think Bukele-style violence is necessary to achieve control over prisons. If anything, the culture of impunity and brutality El Salvador has cultivated is undermining El Salvador’s progress in carceral reform. Outside CECOT, some prison administrators in El Salvador seem to have picked up where the gangs left off when it comes to operating smuggling networks behind bars.

Above all, the region needs better prison administrators and guards. Latin America is littered with the bloodstained and hollowed-out remains of what were once state-of-the-art prisons. While I do believe that the region also needs to build more prisons as an essential step towards reducing overcapacity, simply building your own CECOT is clearly no silver bullet.

The problem with running comprehensive carceral reform is that it takes time and costs money, neither of which are popular with electorates. Nevertheless, I’m increasingly convinced that there is no credible path to combating organized crime anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that does not first run through the carceral system.

For those of you uninitiated into this discourse (lucky you), the idea rests upon Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” In the early years of the United States, Letters of Marque and Reprisal were issued primarily to seafaring raiders to plunder the ships of enemies of Washington, in essence making them legal pirates.

Recently, the concept has come back into vogue as the United States looks to wage war against an expansive host of criminal actors now designated as foreign terrorist organizations. One notable proponent is U.S. Senator Mike Lee who introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act last December aiming to authorize the President to issue letters of marque against “any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization.”

In theory, issuing Letters of Marque would be a cheap force multiplier for counter-cartel efforts in the Western Hemisphere at a time when runaway escalation in the Middle East is straining military resources. Elite bands of formalized privateers could deploy to the region to interdict drug boats, liberate trafficked persons, and dismantle fentanyl labs. The system would in theory pay for itself, by allowing participants to self-finance by seizing the ill-gotten booty of the cartels for their own enrichment.

Now to be clear, I don’t think any of the current policy proposals for Letters of Marque are going anywhere, but I’ve yet to see a clear rebuttal of the idea from an operational perspective. Today, I hope to provide a quick take on why Letters of Marque are more trouble than they’re worth when it comes to the fight against organized crime.

I should give credit where it is due, this is a creative idea. Other proposals to modernize Letters of Marque for cyber operations or sanctions enforcement could have some utility so I do think we should encourage more out-of-the-box thinking. But at some point we need to also ground that in reality. The impression I get is that the most vocal proponents of Letters of Marque for cartels started off with the assumption that this is a genius hack for getting after organized crime and never looked back.

My central gripe with the way Letters of Marque are presented from a policy standpoint is that the juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. Proponents seem to think there is a legion of expert operators champing at the bit to sink their teeth into the cartels were it not for our pesky laws against private citizens crossing international borders to kill people. And why not? Americans are the most heavily armed citizenry on the planet, and we have ample Special Forces veterans sitting around waiting for the call of duty (at least, that’s what they tell me on their podcasts).

But my suspicion is that the vast majority of people with both the desire and capability to fight the cartels are either (a) already serving in the U.S. military and law enforcement, or (b) working for private security contractors which can do this work under existing legal frameworks without the need for Letters of Marque.

The first argument against Letters of Marque for cartels is that private U.S. actors don’t actually have a good track record employing violence on foreign soil without hefty assistance from Washington.

In May 2020, a group of Venezuelan expatriates and military contractors organized by private security firm Silvercorp USA launched an abortive invasion of Venezuela. Known as “Operation Gideon” the attempt at toppling Maduro’s regime proved short-lived, and most of its participants were either killed or captured by Venezuelan forces. Overall the operation was a bizarre boondoggle and furnished Maduro with U.S. hostages to use as bargaining chips in future negotiations with Washington.

Last month, the Cuban coast guard engaged in a firefight with a boat full of armed individuals that sailed from Florida with the goal of sparking an uprising on the oil-starved island. While the Cuban government accused the group, which included at least two U.S. citizens, of being agents provocateurs, the fact that Trump Administration officials seemed quick to downplay the incident suggests that it was probably not part of a wider conspiracy.

Erik Prince’s intervention in Haiti is likely the best example of a private U.S. entity taking the fight to foreign criminal organizations. But it is telling that Prince and his organization were able to set up shop in Haiti without a Letter of Marque. Instead, reports indicate that Prince and his company entered into a somewhat ingenious arrangement with the Haitian government to get a cut of the country’s customs and tax revenue in exchange for their services. While there is much to criticize about this arrangement, and Prince’s use of unrestricted drone warfare in Port-au-Prince, clearly the absence of Letters of Marque isn’t preventing U.S. security entrepreneurs from expanding abroad.

Another success story, Operation Golden Dynamite which exfiltrated Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado ahead of her planned receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, demonstrates a nonlethal use-case for private sector actors in the security space. Led by Grey Bull Rescue, a private firm comprised of Special Forces veterans specializing in high-value extractions, the operation still required coordination with U.S. forces, and indeed may have benefitted from simultaneous air patrols in the southern Caribbean which may have distracted Venezuelan military units while the Nobel laureate slipped through.

In general, I’m willing to accept that private entities can play a role alongside U.S. uniformed services, but just not in the way advocates of Letters of Marque think. Indeed, the more you dig into the kinds of requirements for the fight against organized crime, the more it looks like what the U.S. really needs is contractors, not freebooters.

This doesn’t just apply to kinetic operations, the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance stack that is needed for effective counter-cartel ops is more significant than most people think. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific for instance, the United States has access to powerful surveillance aircraft, satellites, and naval platforms to look for small drug trafficking boats. While President Trump’s claims of a 95 percent reduction in maritime trafficking are doubtless exaggerated, lethal strikes on drug boats have most likely caused criminals to pivot towards more covert methods, which means finding illicit activity in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific is even harder for less well-resourced private actors. Of course, the U.S. military could set up new partnerships with some of these entities to bolster their manpower and maybe allow for more seizures of smuggling vessels in lieu of airstrikes. But that looks a little different from the dream of privateers on the open seas.

This is not to mention the moral hazard questions Letters of Marque introduce. Let’s say, for instance, that one of our enterprising lawful pirates gets himself captured while poking around Culiacán. Does the United States fly in Delta Force to rescue them? Alternatively, what if some freebooters patrolling the southern Caribbean decide to seize a fishing boat and get rounded up themselves by the Colombian navy? Even for a White House that is increasingly willing to throw its weight around against Latin American governments, this seems like a recipe for headaches. Far from being a force multiplier, opening the door to private counter-cartel operations could therefore end up being a drain on U.S. military and diplomatic resources if the privateers bite off more than they can chew.

Another part of the problem is that the stuff cartels traffic in, illicit drugs, is illegal to sell in the United States. It’s not like our hypothetical privateers will be able to turn around and sell their captured booty for its market value. Of course, proponents argue, that’s what prize courts are for, to adjudicate the value of the loot and dole out their just rewards. That however puts the U.S. government in the somewhat odd position of setting prices for illegal narcotics.

At first blush it seems like this kind of arrangement is ripe for unintended consequences, set the reward too far below the street price, and privateers might be incentivized to get into the drug game themselves for greater rewards, set the price too high and the cartels might be able to use that to justify jacking up their own prices, increasing criminal profits. Now it is true that the cartels don’t only traffic in drugs, these days cartel portfolios are remarkably diversified, and include illicit gold, timber, wildlife, and more. But that probably also creates even more headaches. How should a prize court adjudicate the seizure of people being trafficked, for instance?

I’m not saying you couldn’t figure all this out, and there have been efforts to sketch a legal architecture for modernized prize courts, but it sure seems like an awful big headache to resuscitate a jurisprudence that’s been comatose for two centuries in the pursuit of nebulous gains. This is the fundamental problem with Letters of Marque as a policy, the United States already has much better tools to fight the drug cartels without them.

Maybe some readers will accuse me of being insufficiently agentic, or having a so-called “cheems mindset” by making this argument. Before you rush to the comments section, know that I have identified my own ingenious alternative for any sensitive young men or women looking for another way to fight back against the cartels. You can read more about that idea here.