Increased cocaine production delivered an extra $25 billion in earnings to transnational organized crime in 2024, ensuring greater criminal sophistication and state penetration which, combined with a new Trump administration, will have profound effects on criminal dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025.

In Colombia alone, cocaine production increased by up to 1,000 tons, yielding a supply worth $66.6 billion at wholesale prices of $25,000 per kilogram. The previous year’s total was worth $43.5 billion. While synthetic drugs now garner most of the headlines, it is cocaine that underpins Latin American organized crime and remains the ultimate criminal accelerant. It transformed Pablo Escobar from a small-time contraband smuggler into the most powerful criminal on the planet in just over a decade. It turned Mexican crime groups into a “criminal insurgency,” and Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta into Europe’s most powerful mafia. It is now giving the Albanian mafia an unprecedented boost. 

This article is part of our Criminal GameChangers series for 2024. Read the other articles in the series here.

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To give an idea of the scale of the increase in cocaine production, just the 2023 increase of 1,000 tons is double what Colombia produced in all of 2015. Add to that smaller increases in the other two major cocaine producers, Bolivia and Peru, and the appearance of industrial-scale coca plantations in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, and we find ourselves in the greatest cocaine bonanza in history. Record seizures have been registered across the world, including in Colombia, but they are not keeping up with production. 

Last year we talked about the flash-to-bang between cocaine production and supply chains. That gap has now been closed with Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) increasing the volume of cocaine they can handle and developing new routes out of the region, pushing into countries that have previously escaped narco violence, like Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile.

Yet, it is relationships between the Latin DTOs and European mafias that have really transformed the cocaine business, heralding the evolution of a new generation of global criminal networks. The Italian, Dutch, and Balkan mafias are the most prolific players and are now operating upstream in Latin America, negotiating cocaine shipments at source and securing a greater share of the profits for themselves. Europe, meanwhile, has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest cocaine market. As the European Union and South America’s Mercosur move forward on a free trade agreement, expect yet more drugs to find their way across the Atlantic.

These networks are not only supplying the European market, they are aggressively developing new destinations in Asia and Oceania. This diversification of markets – coupled with rising purity – has ensured that cocaine prices remain steady despite the record supply. With increasing taxes on alcohol across much of Europe, cocaine has now reached a more mainstream market, widening its availability and appeal. It is no longer the drug of choice for just the wealthy.

SEE ALSO: The Pioneering Albanian Trafficker Who Took Ecuador’s Drug Trade By Storm

Yet cocaine is not the only booming illegal economy in the region. Record gold prices are feeding an illegal mining frenzy in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, stripping waterways that lace the Amazon and leaving behind mercury poisoning and lunar landscapes.

Political upheaval fed by organized crime is prompting mass migration. In addition to some 8 million Venezuelans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Haitians are fleeing violence and extortion at home, most of them northwards to claim some slice of the American dream. Human smugglers and human traffickers are registering record flows and profits.

We have already explored how resistance to organized crime withered in the region during 2024. With record earnings and resources, expect even greater criminal assaults on democracy during 2025, as illegal groups seek to penetrate states further to protect and facilitate their operations. More swathes of the region are likely to fall under criminal governance, where illegal actors take on many of the roles of the state, including the provision of security, justice, establishing social norms, and imposing “taxes.” 

Transnational organized crime can only be reliably confronted with international responses. And so, the need for regional and global cooperation to fight growing global criminal networks will increase in 2025. Law enforcement offensives like Operation Orion, spearheaded by Colombia and involving 62 nations, need to become the norm rather than the exception. Traditionally, Washington has led the fight against transnational organized crime (TOC) in the region, developing a regional strategy and cajoling nations into working together. Yet, the last two US administrations have lost influence in the area, and without the enthusiastic participation of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, a regional strategy is well-nigh impossible.

Which brings us to the second Trump administration. At first glance, there might be good news for Latin America and the Caribbean, with the top two picks at the State Department both Latin America specialists: Marco Rubio, a three-time senator from Florida and son of Cuban immigrants, as Secretary of State, and Christopher Landau, former ambassador to three Latin American nations, as Deputy Secretary.

However, while Latin Americanists look set to dominate the senior echelons of Trump foreign policy, rhetoric coming from the president-elect does not seem designed to improve regional cooperation. Threats of 25% tariffs on Mexico, mass deportations, and the use of the military against cartels, do little to reassure nations in the region that this is an administration looking for greater engagement and cooperation. 

Migration was a significant factor in Donald Trump’s convincing election win, and it will be a priority for the incoming administration and a determining factor in relations between Washington and Latin American nations. A Trump administration may be prepared to overlook human rights considerations and democratic checks and balances, if nations cooperate in containing migration towards the United States. 

Two other issues are likely to dominate US relations in the region and have an impact on criminal dynamics: Venezuela and China.

During the first Trump government there was a hard line taken against Venezuela, the application of sanctions, and “maximum pressure” on the Maduro regime. President Joe Biden’s attempts to engage with Maduro resulted in unprecedented repression of the political opposition and elections that were almost certainly stolen, revealing that Maduro cannot be trusted to fulfill any promises he makes.

It is hard to overstate the growing importance of Venezuela in criminal terms. The Maduro regime, likely looking at another six years in power, is the most sophisticated example of state-embedded organized crime in the region. Allied with criminal groups, Colombian as well as Venezuelan, the state regulates criminal economies, desperate for the hard currency they provide to survive amid increasing international isolation and sanctions.

One of the fastest-expanding and most violent criminal gangs in the region is Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, which has followed millions of Venezuelan migrants as they sought new opportunities, preying on them and others every step of the way. The arrival of Venezuelan organized crime in the United States became an issue during the recent presidential vote, albeit a slightly manufactured one.

SEE ALSO: Tren de Aragua: From Prison Gang to Transnational Criminal Enterprise

Bordering Colombia and cocaine production centers, Venezuela has become one of the principal drug transit nations, sending cocaine into the Caribbean and across to West Africa. Venezuelan gold is a crucial component to the Maduro regime’s economic survival, as well as the use of illegal brokers to sell crude oil in violation of sanctions. Venezuela has become a regional crime hub, a situation that is certain to worsen during 2025, with implications for neighbors, especially Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro’s Total Peace (Paz Total) policy is condemned to failure, in no small part because Venezuela protects Colombian rebel groups.

An economic struggle against China, again centered around tariffs, is likely to be a feature of a second Trump term as well. This could impact Latin America and its criminal dynamics. Marco Rubio has proven himself hawkish on China and Venezuela, as has Trump’s nominated national security advisor, Mike Waltz.

Over the last decade China has increased its engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean, through its Belt and Road initiative and an insatiable appetite for agricultural and mineral commodities. A new billion-dollar deep water port in Chancay, Peru, was inaugurated in November 2024 by President Xi Jinping, the latest addition to some 40 ports that China administers in the region, crucial real estate for TOC.

China’s role in organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean is notable and grossly underreported, with the exception of the fentanyl trade, the precursors for which tend to come from China. However, Chinese fishing fleets are some of the worst culprits of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. China also has an outsized role in other environmental crimes, including shark fins, illegally logged fine wood, as well as claws and teeth from the big cats that roam the Amazon forest. China is one of the principal sources for trade-based money laundering in the region, and Chinese organized crime plays an important role in human smuggling and human trafficking. China does not extradite its citizens, nor does it cooperate in investigations into its citizens’ criminal activities abroad, providing a layer of protection for Chinese organized crime. Any pressure on China to tackle these issues could have profound implications for TOC in the region.

“I don’t think that the Chinese are in any hurry to help the US on criminal issues,” said Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American studies at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and expert on Chinese involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean. But, he said, “There is a huge problem with trade-based money laundering. Chinese organized crime is not only involved in human smuggling and trafficking in the region, but also in underground banking, and helping people get their money out of China. All these new forms of money laundering, along with the Chinese role in illegal mining, will get more attention under a Trump administration.”

It seems likely that the Trump administration will take a tougher line on Venezuela and China, and pressure Latin American nations on the issues of migration and TOC as far as it directly threatens the United States. This is unlikely, however, to translate into an integrated regional strategy to reduce organized crime as one of the main motors for migration and the single greatest threat to democracy and governance in the region.

Illegal economies, and therefore criminal earnings, in Latin America and the Caribbean are going to increase during 2025, led by the cocaine, gold, and human smuggling networks, which overlap and present a global security threat. With “America First,” political instability on the rise, autocracies in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, a failed state in Haiti, and political chaos in Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia, the regional fight against TOC is less of a political priority in the Western Hemisphere. Transnational organized crime likes nothing more than division, political chaos, bumper profits, and plenty of opportunities. The year 2025 offers all of these.

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