The crime wave is threatening the young democracies many have worked hard to build.

October 21

Mexico’s transition to multiparty democracy a quarter of a century ago was a good news story, generally, but with a big asterisk: an explosion of organized crime.

Breaking the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s decades-long control of government destabilized a system under which the PRI, as it was known by its Spanish initials, contained drug cartels by negotiations and private understandings. As government power fractured, however, the criminal ecosystem took advantage and escaped these tacit limitations.

Similar processes have shaped the growth of organized crime across Latin America. In places such as El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil, the democracies that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, ending decades of authoritarian rule (punctuated by guerrilla insurgencies and repression), find themselves besieged by powerful criminal gangs.

Armed to the teeth (mostly with weapons bought in the United States) and exercising control over billions of dollars and swaths of territory, criminal organizations arguably pose as much danger to liberal democracy today as power-hungry military officers did in the 1960s and 1970s. They are terrorizing the citizenry. According to U.N. statistics, Ecuador suffers 27 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants; Mexico, 26; Brazil, 21. The world average is 5.8.

The gangs are broadening their reach across economies. The research group Global Financial Integrity estimated that criminal organizations in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia earned between $68 billion and $170 billion in 2021. This includes proceeds from such transnational crime as drug trafficking and human smuggling — and from illicit activities carried on within domestic markets. Crime groups engage in sex trafficking, fuel theft, and illegal mining and logging. They sell protection to domestic industries. They operate ostensibly legitimate businesses, too. And they are murdering their way into politics, especially at the municipal level, installing friends in power to take a share of public works budgets.

To the extent that organized crime co-opts or destabilizes governments, it poses a direct risk to democratic governance. It threatens democracy and the rule of law in an indirect way, too: Voters’ desperation for a quick fix to crime and violence is creating popular demands for illiberal rule, tempting civilian governments to hand over powers to the military or to implement iron-fist strategies that undermine civil liberties and the democratic separation of powers.

That crime took off in Latin America is explainable. Political transitions disrupt the old deals that govern illicit business and tend to decentralize and fragment government power. This offers opportunities for criminal groups to expand their activities and creates new contested turf to fight over. Research suggests that countries emerging from autocracy into democracy suffer more violent crime than either autocracies or well-established democracies.

But the overpowering, persistent nature of the crime wave besetting Latin American countries, decades after the advent of democracy, reveals a critical flaw in the region’s transition: It failed to guarantee the rule of law. Though they crafted new constitutions and built institutions to underpin their newfound democracies, new Latin American democracies largely left in place criminal justice systems from old authoritarian regimes, sometimes in cahoots with organized crime groups themselves, and with little investigative or prosecutorial capabilities.

According to the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, Bolivia’s criminal justice system ranks 141st among 144 countries. Mexico’s is 132nd; Colombia’s is 115th; Brazil’s is 114th; Ecuador’s is 109th. When crime rose, they had little justice to offer.

In the absence of justice, the state has been largely unable to deter crime. Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s deployment of the Mexican military in 2006 ultimately exacerbated conflict by splintering large drug cartels into dozens of smaller, more violent outfits that have fought each other and the state for years — branching out across markets and territories to finance their battles.

Even where militarized crackdowns on crime in the region succeed, they come at a high price. President Nayib Bukele’s summary mass jailing of suspected criminal gang members in El Salvador has dramatically reduced homicide rates — and made Mr. Bukele a folk hero in his country and elsewhere around the region. It has also undermined government checks and balances and resulted in human rights’ violations. Attempts to replicate the Bukele approach in bigger, more populous Ecuador have largely failed to break its gangs.

Eradicating or limiting organized crime in Latin America is not a short-term project. It will undoubtedly require rebuilding criminal justice systems: prosecutors with the ability and the independence to prosecute crimes; police forces, especially at the state and local level, with higher wages and better equipment to resist corruption and stand up to criminals’ stupendous arsenals; prisons that no longer work as recruiting grounds for organized crime.

In time, Latin American governments might recover the capacity to deter. That is the only way to reestablish control over the rules governing their societies. They are unlikely to eradicate crime. No country has. But it is imperative that they constrain it.

By the Editorial Board

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