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2018 was the year crime became an ideology in the Americas

A customer examines a gun at the Top Gun shop in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, on 21 January 2019, the day that President Bolsonaro passed a law easing access to firearms in Brazil. Photo by Cris Faga/NurPhoto/Sipa USA. PA Images. All rights reserved

2018 was a year in which political issues were still often framed as left or right in the Americas, but the only ideology that mattered was organized crime.

Some of the worst news came from Colombia, where coca
and cocaine production reached record highs amidst
another year of bad news regarding the historic peace agreement with the
region’s oldest political insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The demobilization of ex-FARC members has been plagued by government
ineptitude, corruption, human rights violations,
and accusations of top
guerrilla leaders’ involvement in the drug trade. And it may have contributed
directly and indirectly to the surge in coca and cocaine production.

Duque and Uribe's alliance in Colombia could impact not just what's left of the peace agreement but the entire structure of the criminal underworld.

It was during this tumult that Colombia elected right
wing politician Iván Duque in May. Duque is the protégé of former president and
current Senator Álvaro Uribe.

Their alliance could impact not just what’s left of the
peace agreement but the entire structure of the underworld where, during 2018, ex-FARC dissidents reestablished
criminal fiefdoms or allied themselves with other criminal factions.

The
last remaining rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), filled power
vacuums in Colombia and neighboring Venezuela, making it one
of out of three criminal winners last year.

Meanwhile, a new generation of
traffickers emerged, one that prefers anonymity to the large, highly visible
armies of yesteryear.

Also of note in 2018 was a surge in synthetic drugs,
most notably fentanyl. The synthetic opioid powered a scourge that led to more
overdose deaths in the United States than any other drug.

Fentanyl is no longer
consumed as a replacement for heroin. It is now hidden in counterfeit
prescription pills and mixed into cocaine and other legacy drugs. It is
produced in China and while much of it moves
through the US postal system, some of it travels through Mexico on its way
to the United States.

During 2018, the criminal groups in Mexico seemed to be
shifting their operations increasingly around it, especially given its
increasing popularity, availability, and profitability.

The result is some new
possibly game changing alliances, most notably between
Mexican and Dominican criminal organizations.   

Among these Mexican criminal groups is the Jalisco
Cartel New Generation (CJNG), another of the
three criminal winners for 2018.

The CJNG has avoided efforts to weaken it with
a mix of
sophisticated public relations, military tactics and the luck of
circumstance – the government has simply been distracted.

That is not
the say it is invulnerable. The group took
some big hits in its
epicenter last year, and the US authorities put it on its radar, unleashing a
series of sealed indictments against the group.

2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy as a foreign policy hammer may be nearing an end.

Mexico’s cartels battled each other even as they took
advantage of booming criminal economies. The result was manifest in the record high in
homicides this year.

The deterioration in security opened the door to the July
election of leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he is
affectionately known, did not necessary run on security issues, but he may
have won on them,
and in the process, inherited a poisoned security chalice from his predecessor.

While Peña Nieto can claim to have
arrested or killed 110 of 122 criminal heads, AMLO faces closer to a thousand
would-be leaders and hundreds of criminal groups.

The rise in the availability of cocaine and fentanyl
greatly impacted the United States, which remains one of the world’s largest
consumers of drugs.

But 2018 showed that the days of the US using drug policy
as a foreign policy hammer may be nearing an end.

In the run-up to the United
Nations General Assembly, for example, the Trump administration’s four-pronged
“Call to Action” went largely unanswered by other
countries in the region.

Canada, meanwhile, legalized marijuana, and
Mexico’s newly elected president considered a radical departure from the law
and order approach the Trump administration promotes.

Still, two years of Donald Trump’s strange, haphazard
foreign policy has had a devastating impact on foreign relations in the region
and has opened the door to transnational organized crime.

To begin with, Trump
has largely abandoned years of anti-corruption efforts in Central America,
while his administration faces near constant accusations of corruption inside
his own regime.

Specifically, 2018 will be remembered as the year the
US government stopped supporting the
International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the UN-backed
adjunct prosecutor’s office in that country.

During nearly 10 years in
Guatemala, CICIG-led cases have imprisoned presidents, vice presidents, vice
presidential candidates, former ministers, bank owners, hotel owners, and many
more.

But this year, current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales – who is
also under CICIG investigation – began lobbying the White
House and its allies directly and eventually succeeded in cobbling together a
coalition of accused elites.

Morales sidelined the CICIG
and exiled its
celebrated Colombian commissioner, despite pressure from US
Congress to keep the judicial adjunct in the country.

Other presidents, most notably Honduras President Juan
Orlando Hernández, has played a similar game and largely succeeded in
neutralizing that country’s version of the CICIG, the Support Mission Against
Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH).

In February, Juan Jiménez Mayor,
the head of the MACCIH, abruptly resigned. In an open
letter published on his
Twitter account, Jiménez said he left because of lack of support from MACCIH’s
progenitor, the Organization of American States (OAS), and concerted efforts by
the Honduran congress to undermine the Mission.

In both Honduras and
Guatemala, there have also been constitutional challenges to the MACCIH’s and the CICIG’s mandates.

But,
on a positive note, the re-election of the
relatively active attorney general in Honduras may make efforts to neutralize
anti-corruption forces there moot, most notably on one investigation that
inches very close to President Hernández himself.

None of this seems to bother Trump, who spent 2018
engaged in a near permanent political campaign in the US, much of which
revolved around conflating immigrants fleeing
criminality with the actual criminal groups going after them, like the Mara
Salvatrucha (MS13).

Even worse, his administration’s border policies are
actually helping organized crime. And his administration seems to have
abandoned any pretense of pushing for human rights or a free press, even while
the region remains the most dangerous place on
earth to be a journalist largely because of the organized crime, corruption,
and impunity that US allies like Morales and Hernández foster.

If 2018 is any indication, Bolsonaro bullying his way towards a more secure Brazil may not be so easy.

Indeed, Trump’s disregard for law, order and the truth
allowed demagoguery to flourish, and nowhere was this clearer than in Brazil,
where the rightward turn was even sharper than for its Colombian neighbors.

After getting stabbed during a political rally, the military-evangelical
populist Jair Bolsonaro – who was often described as a “Brazilian Donald
Trump” – surged to the
presidency on a racist, xenophobic platform that combined higher
prison sentences, militarization of the war on crime, and turning back regional
efforts to legalize certain illicit substances.

But if 2018 is any indication, bullying his way
towards a more secure Brazil – which saw an
astounding record of 63.880 homicides in 2017 – may not be so easy, even
if it was a popular solution.

The year witnessed another round of fighting in different parts of the country,
including a series of battles between
the Family of the North and the Red Command, which effectively ended a 3-year
pact between the two groups.

However, it was the First Capital Command (PCC),
which continued to pose the
biggest threat, expanding both
within Brazil and the region, and putting it at the top of our list of criminal
winners for 2018.

Ironically, it was the leftist government of El
Salvador that most resembled the militaristic Bolsonaro anti-crime strategy in
2018.

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), effectively green-lit a hardline
strategy that reminds many of the same regimes that FMLN guerrillas once
battled against before it turned into a political movement.

In 2018, the party
also codified its most
draconian measures and largely protected the
intellectual authors of the most egregious human rights violations, even while
the results of these
measures remained spotty at best.

Meanwhile, gangs like the MS13 showed their
ability to adapt in 2018,
and to exert their political muscle in ways that continue to surprise, most
notably in the capital city, San Salvador.

Here the former mayor and current
leading presidential candidate Nayib Bukele – himself a political
chameleon who swapped from the leftist FMLN to a rival centrist party -negotiated with the
gangs so he could start reshaping the city’s Historic Center into a more
family-friendly – or at least, tourist friendly – area.

The approach in many
respects worked; as violence was down, the center got some much-needed
structural upgrades, and new businesses opened.

A drop in
homicides this year suggests that the FMLN and other political operators may
have also noticed the political results and may be seeking to accommodate the
gangs as well in the lead up to the February elections.

Towards the middle of the political spectrum was Costa
Rica, which in April elected Carlos
Alvarado Quesada of the center-left Citizens’ Action Party (PAC) as president.
T

here, the election did not seem to turn on citizen security, but the survival
of the new president’s administration may.

Homicide rates are at record levels,
in large part because Costa Rica
is playing a greater role in transnational criminal activity, but possibly also
because 2018 showed that the country’s security forces may be more deeply involved in crime
than ever.

Venezuela has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests.

On a political spectrum all his own was Venezuela’s
Nicolás Maduro, who was reelected in April in an exercise that seemed to
confirm that he has long since dispensed with any pretense of democracy.

Venezuela
has effectively become a vehicle for criminal interests. The reasons for this
center on the emergence of homegrown criminal groups that are both inside of the
government and connected to it; the
abdication of the state of its duties especially as it relates to prisons; and the death
of any viable economic system to support the corruption and ineptitude that
prevail in the Maduro government.

The result was nothing less than chaos, with thousands
of refugees who flowed
daily into other countries.

The unprecedented refugee crisis brought with
it desperation and,
inevitably, more organized crime. In short,
Venezuela became a regional crime hub in 2018, a
place where everything from stolen fuel to teenage girls and rotten food was for
sale and every space was open for competition.

The government did not seem to
mind. It responded by launching a cryptocurrency tied to its
failing oil industry, even while the First Lady was fighting off accusations of drug
trafficking.

Amid the stark zero-sum political squabbles, there is
an outlier, a beacon of hope even.

In 2018, Argentina seemed to be searching
for some sort of happy medium in the battle against crime.

The government made
a push to improve data collection and intelligence gathering, while it punched up its arrest
and seizure statistics. It has implemented a community policing program, even
while it has flirted with using
a militarized approach along the borders and elsewhere.

The results are coming in fits and spurts. The
dismantling and trial of one of the co.untry’s most violent criminal groups, for
example, was upstaged by its
continued ability to operate from prison.

And a new plea deal law opened a
window into official corruption, most notably
among politicians connected to the former government of Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner.

As Argentina’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich puts
it, the government’s plan is almost perfect. “We set into motion what we call
the 80/20 model: 80 percent intelligence, 20 percent chance,” she says. 
   

It is a
refreshingly candid remark, an admission that not every program is as advertised.

This article was previously published by InSight Crime. You can read the original here.