- Joined
- Jan 17, 2010
- Messages
- 4,522
- Reaction score
- 5,485
Governments have learned to manage many threats, but they are failing to curb the growing power of organized crime.
- Blog Post by Will Freeman
- via Los Angeles Times
- January 2, 2024 2:17 pm (EST)
Peru’s last dictator, Alberto Fujimori, has pulled off a jailbreak years in the making—not by tunneling his way out of prison but by the graces of the country’s highest court. His early release in December is part of a broader problem in Latin America, where the line between governments and crime keeps getting blurrier.
The 85-year-old Fujimori was a little more than halfway through a 25-year sentence for greenlighting extrajudicial killings and kidnappings and embezzling $15 million during his decade-long rule, which ended in 2000. But Peru’s Constitutional Court was apparently unbothered by his unpaid debt to society. The court brought about his release by reinstating a years-old presidential pardon.
That blatantly violated international law: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights forbade Peru from shortening Fujimori’s sentence. But as the country’s democracy slid into chaos over the last year, Fujimori’s still powerful family worked to get sympathetic judges on the bench.
The resulting release of Fujimori, who ran Peru as a mafia state, comes as the country’s politicians are chipping away at the capacity to investigate corruption and organized crime. Peru isn’t alone. In several countries across the region, politicians appear determined to weaken the state’s ability to counter criminal groups.
In Guatemala, dozens of lawmakers sanctioned by the United States for corruption have fought to block President-elect Bernardo Arévalo, an anti-corruption crusader, from taking office. In Ecuador, violent gangs are on their way to taking over, having recruited dozens of public officials to do their bidding, according to the country’s top prosecutor. In Mexico and Brazil, drug cartels and paramilitaries loom large over some state and local governments.
Latin America’s democracies and democrats don’t get enough credit for weathering inequality, violence, and economic stagnation. Miraculously, only two of the region’s former democracies, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have collapsed into full-fledged authoritarianism. In no other part of the world have so many democracies held up under such pressures for so long.
They have even pulled off remarkable but often overlooked successes, nearly halving the share of Latin Americans living in poverty since 2000, largely taming hyperinflation, ending a long tradition of military coups and civil wars, and putting leaders such as Fujimori in jail.
But the increasing power of organized crime stands out as a threat they haven’t countered effectively. For the last 40 years—about as long as Latin America’s democracies have been around—the region’s illicit economies have experienced a practically uninterrupted boom. Chief among them, the global cocaine trade spawned some of the world’s most sophisticated transnational criminal organizations. Such groups have inserted themselves into the above-ground economy by laundering their vast wealth and have branched out into other illegal activities: extortion; mining, logging and fishing in protected areas; and, increasingly, human smuggling.
Organized crime can’t grow without state protection, and Latin American mafias have long made it a mission to capture parts of the state. They have had at least as much success amassing political power as any of the region’s political parties. Lawmakers, police forces, courts, mayors, port authorities, air traffic control, and even presidents have been bought off or coerced to ensure that trafficked drugs, resources, and people flow freely to their destinations—often, in the United States.