This Is how the cartels in Latin America win

Since President Trump returned to office, Washington has been steadily recasting organised crime in the Americas as a paramount national security threat, culminating in the capture of Nicolás Maduro. By framing the raid in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, as a law-enforcement operation against a “narco-terrorist network,” the administration has asserted an aggressive new justification for unilateral force — one that Trump has already threatened to extend to targets in places like Mexico and Colombia.
Should the president pursue this strategy, it could transform Latin America into a testing ground for a new, violent American doctrine of intervention. It also wouldn’t work. Trying to crush cartels through blunt force rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern criminal organisations actually operate. Organised crime is now one of the most consequential transnational political forces in the region. The world’s most powerful gangs aren’t anchored to a single territory or port. They are embedded in global illicit supply chains that combine trade, finance and technology, span continents and can outlast any single government.
In Latin America, groups like Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital, Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua and Mexico’s Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación increasingly decide who controls neighbourhoods, prisons and local economies in their countries of origin. But they are no longer confined within those borders. Today, Latin American criminal organisations operate on a global scale, with investigations by US and European authorities suggesting coordination with Balkan syndicates in Antwerp; and the sourcing of precursor chemicals for synthetic drugs from manufacturers in China.
On the right, leaders promise iron-fist crackdowns that fill cemeteries but that often barely touch cartel bank accounts. On the left, leaders are less inclined to force, offering social programmes that can be easily outspent by criminal recruiters. Neither side has an answer for foes that are wealthier than some small nations and more agile than many government bureaucracies.
At its heart, the rise of transnational crime is actually a story about governance, not lawlessness. In the legal economy, cross-border trade depends on courts, contracts and law enforcement to guarantee payment, resolve disputes and punish cheating. None of that applies to illicit commerce. When criminal groups operate across borders, profitability depends on building shadow arrangements that substitute for legal enforcement. Whether they run operations themselves or work with local partners, the risks are constant: operatives can double-cross, defect or steal, and allies have incentives to renege when no court can enforce a deal. Governing an illicit transnational network, in short, is extraordinarily difficult — and inherently fragile.
Take Brazil’s PCC. In Paraguay, it has often chosen to run operations directly. From prisons in São Paulo, leaders can track shipments, send personnel, discipline members and settle accounts thousands of miles away, displacing or clashing with rival gangs in the process. But in many parts of Europe, the PCC acts more like a business partner. To move drugs through hubs like Valencia or Rotterdam, it has worked with entrenched criminal brokers such as Italy’s ’Ndrangheta, which dominates access to ports, trucking networks, financial channels and the corrupt officials who protect them. Governance here takes the form of reputations, intermediaries, shared profits and credible threats — mechanisms intended to keep a delicate partnership from unravelling.
Global gangs adapt their style to the local terrain. Where they have no reliable allies, they use brute force to seize control. Where they can find established partners, they quietly share power. Either way, these networks rely on a hidden set of rules that allow criminals to cooperate across borders.
This is why Washington’s current approach misses the mark. Treating organised crime as a battlefield enemy assumes that you can dismantle networks by destroying geographic hubs and killing leaders. You cannot bomb a drug supply chain that stretches from California to Guangdong. As long as global demand for drugs remains high, military strikes mainly raise the risk premium, making criminal markets more profitable and their operators more adaptable. They often also simply redirect supply rather than eliminate it; when the US intensified pressure on Colombian cocaine production in the early 2000s, for instance, cultivation merely migrated to Bolivia and Peru. Today, as enforcement evolves, production patterns are shifting again — not disappearing, but adapting to new pressure points.
But organised crime’s global reach also makes it vulnerable. No single group can govern a transnational supply chain alone. Cooperation across borders depends on thin trust, incomplete information and constant fear of betrayal. Exploiting those weaknesses requires something no country possesses on its own: collective, integrated intelligence that connects financial data, shipping records, investigations and surveillance across jurisdictions. If authorities were to discreetly disrupt a shipment, it could trigger a cycle of internal purges and mutual suspicion that would destroy the network from within.
The solution is clear — even if US policy is pointing in the opposite direction. If Washington is as serious about drug cartels as it says it is, it should use its diplomatic weight to help build an intelligence coalition capable of exploiting the links that hold transnational crime together. Institutions like the European Union’s Financial Intelligence Unit network and joint investigation teams have shown what’s possible, but they need significant expansion: dedicated task forces with real-time access to shipping data and bank records, harmonised laws that allow authorities to seize assets and close fallback routes, and treaties that allow the prosecution of intermediaries across borders.
The US is not a distant observer of these networks. It is one of their largest markets, where criminal organisations rely on local partners to distribute drugs, launder profits and move goods through illicit channels. The goal should be simple: make it impossible for criminal groups to coordinate. Authorities should weaponise the instability inherent in criminal deals, making every partner fear that the other is about to flip.
Turning Latin America into a theatre of war will not weaken transnational crime; it will entrench it. Force may scatter criminal networks in the short term, but it will ultimately make them harder to see, harder to track and harder to stop.

Matias Spektor and Oto MontagnernThe authors are Brazilian political scientists