Latin America has a gang problem. The violence of the region’s drug cartels is well known to the point of Hollywood cliché, but the violence of newer gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Central America, or First Capital Command in Brazil, has been less appreciated. With levels of violent crime across the region soaring, this is starting to change.
Together, the gangs and cartels have helped make the region the murder capital of the world, far surpassing any competitors. Worse, these gangs have corrupted the often fragile institutions of the states in which they reside. By overthrowing the state’s monopoly on the lethal use of force and co-opting or intimidating local law enforcement and the justice system, these gangs have in many places created a state-within-a-state.
Gangs extort the businesses and individuals within their territories for revenues and conscript unwilling young men into membership, aping the government’s power to tax and raise armies. If anyone disobeys, the gangs enforce their will by terror tactics: arson, rape, torture, dismemberment, summary execution, beheadings, and worse.
The violence is only increasing. Mexico’s cartel wars have seen murders triple over the last decade, and murder rates across the region rose almost 50 percent in the first dozen years of this century. Although there is much variation between countries, the murder rate continues to rise, and the rate for the region is projected to be another 60 percent higher by the end of next decade.
Citizens of the region have had enough. In Mexico, the newly elected president proposes to end the violence by legalizing drugs. In Central America, it is gang violence that propels the recent waves of migration northwards. In Brazil, recently elected President Jair Bolsanaro and his law-and-order platform won in a landslide. Already, Bolsonaro has loosened Brazil’s restrictions on firearm ownership to facilitate self-defense.
There is a further response deserving consideration: make membership in designated drug cartels and similarly violent gangs a capital crime by treating is as what it is — treason against the state, and justly punishable by death.
Latin America’s present “war” against the gangs and cartels is no mere metaphor. Mexican drug cartels are estimated to have 100,000 “footsoldiers,” approaching the strength of the regular Mexican army. And since 2000, 2.5 million people have been murdered in Latin America, compared to 900,000 who have died in the wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. In giving their allegiance to the gang, gang members participate in the gang’s efforts to supplant the lawful government.
The death penalty, a just and customary punishment for treason, is also the only adequate deterrent to gang membership in many situations. The penalty for refusal to join a gang is often death, whereas the the penalty for joining is currently only imprisonment. And since in many places the prisons themselves are run by gangs, gang leaders are able to direct their criminal organizations’ activities from within. When imprisonment fails at its most basic function of incapacitating criminals, more severe measures are not only warranted but required as a matter of justice for the innocent.
Where the law fails, the desire for justice is perverted. Adding to the region’s violence, Latin America has now become the lynching capital of the world. Better tough justice by legal processes than to reawaken the endless cycle of personal vengeance that the law was created to prevent.
At present the innocent are dying yearly by the tens of thousands. The criminal penalty for their tormentors must be raised until their predation on the innocent loses its appeal.
James N. Iredale is an attorney living in North Carolina.
