Criminal organizations in Central America and Mexico are striving to stay strong despite a slowdown in human smuggling, finding ways to make money and grow their power that will ensure they remain a threat in the future.
The cartels are expanding control over their local territories by extorting vulnerable populations and aiding others to gain favor and potential recruits.
Ryan Berg, an expert on transnational crime in Latin America at the American Enterprise Institute, said Mexican cartels were unable to collect extortion fees to their normal extent because businesses and individuals are not operating. Cartels are also unable to make money running desperate migrants to the U.S. border. As a result, some gangs have turned to “buying the goodwill of quite a few populations so that when things do open up again, they can continue to govern spaces that are untouched by the state.”
“You have MS-13 [in El Salvador] particularly and a few other groups … seeing these spaces the governments have abandoned as they deal with the virus,” said Douglas Farah, senior visiting fellow at the National Defense University’s Center For Strategic Research in Washington and president of IBI Consultants.
Berg predicted the tanking economies in Latin America could prompt many to turn to the same cartels who helped them during the pandemic for work. Berg and Farah said as the criminal groups strengthen with more members, overcoming them after the virus would be more challenging for both Central America, Mexico, and the U.S. government.
“These cartels, at their core, it’s a criminal organization, they’re going to continue to find opportunities to corrupt officials, to smuggle, to do what they need to do to continue that revenue stream,” said Ron Vitiello, former deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Violence is soaring in some parts of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as massive criminal gangs, or cartels, fight for control of neighborhoods, cities, and states that the poor, unorganized governments lack the ability to run amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The state is so weak and so corrupt in some of those spaces that it doesn’t take much to provide above what the state can provide in terms of criminal charity,” Berg said, noting homicides rose in Mexico last month despite tens of millions being ordered to stay indoors.
Cartels, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, whose leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes is on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most wanted fugitives list, have been giving aid to residents in the Jalisco state, home to 8 million residents and Mexico’s second-largest city of Guadalajara. The large criminal gangs provide security on the streets by day, and at night hand out packages of food, filling the role of the state. The daughter of Sinaloa Cartel leader El Chapo, Alejandrina Guzman, was observed earlier this month giving out food to poor residents, even as her father sits in a U.S. prison.
Berg said half of Mexicans work in the informal sector, including street vendors or personal businesses, and are most vulnerable to the stay-at-home orders because they cannot run their businesses, creating a vulnerability for millions of people unable to generate money.
“They don’t have access to formal state benefits,” Berg said. “They don’t have any formal protection, which is why they are at risk of extortion [from cartels], if you live in an area where the state is very weak, you are pretty vulnerable to criminal extortion. DTOs [drug trafficking organizations] are having a field day with these workers that are, by and large, forced to continue working.”
A senior Trump administration official said the gangs were having their own revenue crisis, which has led to “more competition by increasingly desperate criminal gangs.”
“The police, the security forces are concentrated in cities, there’s very little state capacity out of them,” Farah said. “The MS-13 has long been trying to expand to rural areas, and now they have the real opportunity to expand. [Particularly] in Honduras and El Salvador, [they are trying to] establish themselves as the state, so you see them enforcing curfews.”
