The Trump administration is escalating efforts to crack down on gangs that transfer illicit medicine into the United States, with lethal navy strikes at sea and measures to toughen up borders taking heart stage.
But as the US doubles down on overt interventions, specialists warn policymakers could also be overlooking a key battlefield: prisons throughout the area.
Several of Latin America’s strongest legal organizations weren’t cast in borderlands, the streets, or jungle hideouts however inside the area’s prisons. Overcrowded, under-resourced, and infrequently successfully self-governed, these services have lengthy served as incubators the place armed teams recruit, reorganize, and broaden their affect. Across the area, at least ten organizations have been both created or strengthened behind bars.
That is the case for Tren de Aragua, cited by the Trump administration as the goal of latest strikes on suspected drug boats that escalated tensions with Venezuela’s chief Nicolás Maduro, though there was no sturdy proof of a connection between the boats and the legal group.
Founded inside Tocorón jail in Aragua state in the early 2010s, the group initially sought to impose inner order to safe higher dwelling situations, in accordance with a report by Transparency Venezuela.
“There was a social frustration behind it — resentment at how the state treated prisoners,” Ronna Rísquez, Venezuelan journalist and writer of “El Tren de Aragua,” advised NCS. “The inhumane conditions and lack of state support directly contributed to the rise of the pranes.”
The pranes — an acronym for Preso Rematado Asesino Nato (“a hardened inmate, born killer”) — ultimately turned the de facto rulers of many Venezuelan prisons.
“They had total control. The National Guard and prison directors obeyed their orders,” Rísquez stated. They taxed inmates, managed contraband flows, and even ran exterior extortion and kidnapping operations. The authorities raided Tocorón jail in 2023 and claims the legal group was disbanded, though its leaders, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero,” and Johan Petric, are still at large.
This similar dynamic has been seen throughout the area. In Brazil, organized crime teams equivalent to Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) emerged inside prisons in the late 1970s and 1990s as inmates rebelled towards overcrowding, abuse, and the precarious dwelling situations.
Gregório Fernandes de Andrade, a legal legal professional who spent 16 years in the system for murder, stated cells have been so packed that inmates usually piled up in improvised hammocks hung in the ceilings for lack of house. “I was often in a 4×4 (meters) cell with 40 inmates,” he stated. “We had to take turns sleeping.”
According to federal data, Brazil’s prisons function at 140% occupancy, with greater than 700,000 inmates in services constructed for lower than 500,000 – a standard actuality in Latin American international locations.
Demand was a enterprise for members of organized teams, who promote inmates something from hygiene gadgets to meals, bodily security, and authorized assist.
Andrade, who shared cells with Roni Peixoto, one of the leaders of Comando Vermelho, and inmates linked to the PCC, says becoming a member of isn’t about coercion. “There isn’t a gun to your head,” he stated. “People fight to join out of necessity. These factions welcome you — more than the state ever did.” NCS has reached out to the Brazilian authorities for remark.
By the mid-2000s, PCC dominated São Paulo’s prisons. “They’re present in about 90% of state units, and homicides are practically zero — the system has been ‘pacified’ by PCC for nearly 20 years,” sociologist and Federal University of ABC professor Camila Caldeira Nunes Dias stated.
PCC additionally runs one of South America’s strongest cocaine export networks, supplying European markets via Brazil’s ports, whereas CV dominates trafficking corridors from Peru via the Amazon, according to InSight Crime, a gaggle that research organized crime in the Americas. Experts say the work achieved inside prisons was essential to gangs’ institution in the exterior world.
Gang leaders order drug purchases, territorial growth, and killings from behind bars. “We call prisons the business back rooms,” International Crisis Group senior analyst Elizabeth Dickinson advised NCS. “Many leaders prefer operating from inside because they’re safer there.”
But the disputes over reaching such management of the cells and the inmates inside them might be lethal – particularly in services the place a number of factions coexist.
Across Latin America, jail massacres over territorial management have change into a recurring actuality. In Venezuela’s Uribana jail, a dispute between gang bosses in 2013 led to the deaths of at the least 61 folks. In Brazil, an identical dispute triggered the notorious 1992 Carandiru jail bloodbath in São Paulo, killing 111 inmates and serving to spur the rise of the PCC.
In Ecuador, that dynamic has change into much more explosive. Because of its strategic function in world cocaine exports, areas like Guayaquil allowed foreign actors — Mexican cartels, Colombian dissidents — to embed themselves in native gangs. When their leaders have been jailed, the combat for management migrated immediately into penitentiaries.
Daniel Pontón, dean of the School of Security and Defense at Ecuador’s Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN), says Ecuadorian prisons are sometimes structured in cellblocks managed by totally different teams, which incites battle.
“Each block had its own economy and leadership — everything privatized and controlled by the gang,” he says. “If I have a dispute with a criminal leader, I go after his block, kill him, and take over his criminal structure.”
That actuality was harshly uncovered after the 2020 assassination of Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña,” longtime chief of Los Choneros. His dying shattered the stability he maintained amongst rival factions. Los Lobos, Los Tiguerones and others splintered and commenced battling for dominance, triggering massacres that killed greater than 400 inmates throughout a number of provinces in lower than three years, according to InSight Crime.
To gang leaders, the bloodshed is justified by earnings. Ecuador’s jail markets are actually value over $200 million yearly — greater than double the federal working funds for SNAI, the organ overseeing the jail system, which was roughly $99 million in 2021.
And the prisons have change into key nodes in the world cocaine chain, providing storage, logistics, and safety for traffickers shifting shipments via Guayaquil’s ports. NCS has reached out to Ecuadorian authorities for remark.
Across Latin America, hardline mano dura (“strong hand”) campaigns have change into a political point of interest, with politicians working on guarantees of harsher sentences, mass arrests, and expanded navy roles.
In 2024, Ecuadorian voters authorised navy involvement in policing and longer sentences after a wave of assassinations and jail massacres. On November 18, lawmakers in Brazil voted to approve laws to label teams equivalent to PCC and CV as terrorist organizations, aiming at considerably extending jail sentences for these convicted underneath the statute.
Brazil’s government department, nevertheless, has rejected the concept of classifying PCC and CV as terrorist teams. During a high-level safety dialogue in Washington in March 2024, Brazilian representatives advised their US counterparts that PCC and CV are profit-driven legal organizations somewhat than ideological teams and subsequently don’t meet Brazil’s authorized standards for terrorism.
In that vein, El Salvador’s “Bukele model” — constructed on mass detentions and the opening of CECOT, a mega-prison with capability for 40,000 inmates that places it amongst the world’s largest — has change into the political reference level, particularly for right-wing leaders in Latin America. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa to Paraguay’s Santiago Peña and Argentina’s Javier Milei have vowed to copy the Salvadoran mannequin.
Several international locations in the area are equally investing in a brand new wave of jail building. In Ecuador, the authorities started working El Encuentro, a US$52 million maximum-security facility in Santa Elena constructed to deal with round 800 high-risk inmates and outfitted with biometric controls, sign jammers, and bolstered surveillance techniques – however violence stays. In 2024, Honduran President Xiomara Castro introduced a mega-prison with a capability for 20,000 folks, as half of a broader gang crackdown – together with elevated arrests, designation of gang exercise as terrorism, and expanded function for navy and police forces.
Human rights teams and safety analysts warn that President Nayib Bukele’s mass incarceration method in El Salvador isn’t simply transferable, particularly in international locations with fragmented legal markets and weaker state establishments.
“When you have an overcrowded prison, and there’s disorder and lack of resources, you create an opportunity for criminal groups to manage that,” stated Dickinson of the Crisis Group. “What ends up happening is that many individuals, especially low-level offenders, become victims of this extractive economy. Many end up allying with a faction just to get through the experience.”
Andrade, who was 22 when he was arrested, argues that the reply lies in breaking the cycle.
“I had many more opportunities to join crime than to make an honest living,” he stated. “It’s easier for a kid to get a bag of drugs and a gun than a book and a pen.”
“There are good, smart people in there who can’t even fathom a second chance at society because they were never even allowed a first one,” stated Andrade, who ultimately earned a grasp’s diploma and have become a legal legal professional. “If we keep brutalizing people inside, eventually they become the soldiers of crime outside.”