The impact of Donald Trump on organized crime in Latin America
Or to use force with their Latin American counterparts instead of resorting to diplomacy, exerting pressure and threats to obtain the adoption of unilateral policies that have been mostly counterproductive.
The volatility of his administration's strategy over the past four years has left anti-drug allies without a grip, provided political capital to presidents who undermined anti-corruption initiatives, and wasted efforts to bolster regional security by wasting resources on an ineffective border wall. .
Below, InSight Crime highlights five decisions by the Trump administration that impacted organized crime in the region:
1. The US threatens to classify Colombia as non-compliant in anti-narcotics initiatives
In his first memorandum at the White House, addressed to the US Secretary of State at the end of 2017, President Trump broke a precedent that had lasted decades and threatened to declare Colombia a "demonstrable failure to fulfill its obligations under the accords. international anti-narcotics "as a result of the" extraordinary increase in coca crops and cocaine production "in the Andean country. The warning paved the way for limiting Colombia's anti-drug policy to its cultivation and interdiction figures.
2. Trump insists on wrongly linking the MS13 to immigration
At an event in 2018, President Trump traveled to Long Island, New York, to discuss the "MS13 threat." He ranted that the street gang had "violated our borders and transformed our neighborhoods into blood-stained death camps," and that they used "glaring loopholes" to "enter the country as unaccompanied minors." He used the MS13, in part, to justify heavy-handed policies against immigration, although the gang's expansion in the United States is due to a variety of social and economic factors. The Department of Justice under his administration has continued to escalate efforts to "disrupt, dismantle and destroy" the gang despite fully understanding their criminal capacity.
The misrepresentation of the MS13 continued when gang leader Armando Eliú Melgar Díaz, alias "Blue" or "Clipper," was indicted for eight "crimes associated with terrorism" in July 2020, although authorities failed to justify the surprise criminal charges. .
3. Trump's border policies strengthen organized crime
A defining moment in President Trump's immigration policy came with a 2018 executive order, in which he separated families who crossed illegally into the United States. This measure of force at the border, a policy known as “zero tolerance”, pushed people further into the illegal market and into the hands of criminal groups, raised the price of criminal services, such as coyotaje, increased the risk that deportees swelled the ranks of criminal groups and undermined trust between the authorities and migrant communities exploited by criminal groups.
4. The US demands that Mexico redouble its strong-arm strategy against narcotics
In September 2020, after threatening to classify Mexican organized crime groups as terrorist organizations, President Trump used the annual White House memorandum on drug production and trafficking to urge Mexican government officials to action. He demanded that the government "clearly demonstrate its commitment to dismantling the cartels and their criminal enterprises." Or otherwise, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador would run the risk of being decertified for "demonstrable breach of its international commitments on international control of narcotics."
5. The Northern Triangle is left alone in the fight against corruption
A short-lived golden era in which local and international forces joined to combat public and private corruption in Central America, mainly in Guatemala, came to an end when the Trump administration's commitment to the fight against corruption in the region fizzled. US congressmen held hearings to attack corruption investigations and did not lift a finger when the United Nations' International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) ended up being kicked out of the country after more than a decade of work.
