When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva carried out a historic – and nonviolent – money-laundering bust last year, his country seemed to shrug.
But not long after, when Brazil’s deadliest known police raid was exacted in a poor Rio de Janeiro neighborhood, many Brazilians spoke out in approval – even though the raid had failed to capture its target.
Across Latin America, concern about violence is growing, even in places where homicide rates have fallen. These worries about safety are leading many in the region to support heavy-handed security policies, such as militarization or mass arrests.
Why We Wrote This
Security and violence are top concerns for Latin Americans, many of whom are voting for new presidents this year. Ostentatious policies like putting the military on the street are popular – but can they create lasting change?
In Rio de Janeiro last fall, this single police operation left more than 120 people dead – many showing evidence of being executed. The United Nations condemned the raid on the Red Command drug-trafficking gang, which holds sway over many of Rio de Janeiro’s low-income neighborhoods, known as favelas, and called for Brazil to reform its security policies.
But according to a poll carried out shortly after the Oct. 28 operation, 55% of Rio de Janeiro residents said they approved of it. That figure rose to 81% among favela residents.
As voters from Peru to Colombia to Brazil go to the polls to select their next presidents this year, security is expected to dominate at the ballot box. Many look to President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and his mano dura – or iron fist – approach, as an aspirational model for getting lawlessness under control. Already, Ecuador and Chile elected tough-on-crime conservatives last year, and Costa Rica did the same this month.
Concern with crime is nothing new in Latin America, where drug trafficking drives the region’s criminal economy. But the situation has taken on a new dimension as crime expands and evolves, and as social media amplifies both fear and calls for Bukele-like crackdowns.
“Mano dura can deliver immediate optics, sometimes short-term drops in visible violence,” says Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank focused on security issues. But, he says, it often fails to tackle the root causes of organized crime.
Just like Canada
After first winning election in 2019, Mr. Bukele implemented a security crackdown with mass incarcerations, symbolized by the 40,000-capacity prison he built, known as the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. El Salvador’s homicide rate dropped from 51 murders per 100,000 people in 2018 to 1.9 per 100,000 in 2024 – the same as Canada’s.
But the human rights cost has been heavy. With arbitrary arrests and a lack of due process, an estimated 2% of El Salvador’s population is behind bars, while Mr. Bukele has tightened his grip. El Salvador has been under a state of emergency since 2022, which suspends judicial guarantees such as the presumption of innocence. The country’s Congress also moved to allow indefinite presidential reelection last August. And, yet, Mr. Bukele has approval ratings consistently above 80% and is widely admired in the rest of Latin America.
“You hear people in a remote area of Ecuador or Colombia saying that maybe a Bukele model will work for them,” says Angélica Durán-Martínez, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies violence and criminal dynamics in Latin America.
Salvador Melendez/AP/File
Right-wing politicians across Latin America speak of repeating Mr. Bukele’s approach at home. Ecuador and Costa Rica are developing new high-security prisons modeled on CECOT. Chile’s far-right president-elect, José Antonio Kast, recently met Mr. Bukele in El Salvador “to learn” about that country’s penal system. And 14 Brazilian politicians have visited CECOT since 2023.
But the Bukele model is hard to replicate. El Salvador is a small country of about 6 million people with no checks on the president’s power, allowing him to ride roughshod over human rights. Its results are also limited.
The cost of crackdowns
In the Penha favela complex in Rio de Janeiro, traffickers went back to business as usual within days of the lethal operation last October. It was Brazil’s deadliest police raid ever, but it failed to capture the targeted gang leader and brought not only Penha but the entire city to a standstill for a day.
Silvia Izquierdo/AP/File
“Nothing improves, things just get worse,” says Elisabete Sulino, a Penha resident, two days after the community project she works for had to cancel its activities as yet another armed police operation – the second in January – kept residents sheltering inside. She later found a stray bullet in her daughter’s bedroom.
“I’m not for or against” police operations, Ms. Sulino says. “But [the police] enter the favela as if there weren’t families here, as if there weren’t children. They come to kill.”
Experts such as Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, believe using reasonable state force is necessary to dismantle gangs’ territorial control – but security policies must also account for the growth and complexity of organized crime.
A relatively new development, he says, is criminal gangs making “much more sophisticated use of business fronts to not only launder money, but also to grow it in the legal economy.”
These gangs have also diversified. “Drugs still matter, but growth is in extortion, migrant smuggling, cyber scams, and environmental crime like illegal mining,” says Dr. Muggah of the Igarapé Institute.
Tackling all this requires governments to follow the money, he says, just as Lula, as Brazil’s president is known, did in August when his government brought down a nearly $10 billion money-laundering scheme. It also means rebuilding rule-of-law capacity to protect citizens and target policing efforts where gangs make their money, such as ports, borders, and prisons.
The problem is that these kinds of long-term policies are too often passed over. Governments use large-scale detentions and ostentatious policing to hold on to power and “show that crime isn’t being tolerated,” says Dr. Durán-Martínez.
Ultimately, she says, most of the consequences of organized crime are local. “They are felt by poor marginalized communities.”
That is evident at the top of Penha, the Rio de Janeiro favela, still reeling from the slaughter of dozens of its young men. After an afternoon distributing food donations while heavily armed traffickers pass by, Ms. Sulino says she would like to see her community afforded alternatives, through better access to education for example.
“We need more things that give low-income Brazilians a way of succeeding,” she says.