Latin America’s Crime Surge, With Will Freeman

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Latin America's crime surge. With me to discuss spiking crime rates across Latin America and their consequences for the region and for the United States Is Will Freeman. Will is a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council. He has written extensively on Latin America with a particular focus on the rule of law, corruption and organized crime, elections and constitutional change. He recently wrote a piece for World Politics Review titled, "A Surge in Crime and Violence Has Ecuador Reeling." Will, thank you for joining me.

 

FREEMAN:
Jim, thanks so much for having me on.

 

LINDSAY:
Will, as I'm reading the news these days, I'm seeing an abundance of stories on how Latin America is wrestling with a wave of crime in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. That news is perhaps unsurprising to many Americans who saw violent crime spike in the United States during the pandemic. Help me understand the nature of the crime wave that Latin America is facing.

 

FREEMAN:
Well, during the COVID-19 pandemic, everything shut down in Latin America except organized crime. Organized crime groups during the pandemic became more entrepreneurial. They diversified into new markets, new types of drug production and drug trafficking. You saw increases in trafficking of natural resources, of human smuggling, and all this really led to an alarming rise in violence. We think of Latin America as a violent region. Of course it is. It accounts for 9 percent of the world's population, but a third of its homicides. So violence is nothing new, but the type of violence we're seeing after the pandemic is changing.

 

Not only are we seeing big spikes in homicide rates in several small countries in the Caribbean, like Jamaica, we're seeing still some of the world's highest homicide rates in countries like Venezuela and Honduras. Mexico and Columbia remain in a very tough spot. And on top of that, we're seeing violence expand to countries which almost never had to deal with it before. Places like Ecuador, Costa Rica, even Chile, which dodged this problem in years past, but now are tackling it, confronting it head on. And really what this all leads to is a grave threat for democracy. More and more citizens in Latin America are questioning whether or not their democratic governments are up to the task of handling this problem. And if we don't see solutions before long, I think we're going to start seeing a wave of authoritarian reversals, if you will, across the region linked to rising crime.

 

LINDSAY:
So Will, let's unpack that. As I understand it, the crime we're seeing in Latin America is, as you point out, linked to organized crime. It is not individual crime for the most part that is really surging. Can you help me understand what is driving that surge in organized crime activity?

 

FREEMAN:
Sure. So first off is an enormous potential for profits. Since the pandemic we've seen surging demand for cocaine in Europe as well as in new markets like Asia, parts of North Africa, Russia that have really upped the profit margins for a number of longstanding criminal groups in the region. So you're seeing more money made than ever, in places like the ports of Ecuador, of Argentina. And that money is basically equipping these organized crime groups to fight back against the state with better weapons, to penetrate further into communities, to have more resources to buy off judges and law enforcement. All that is weakening the state's hand. At the same time, you've seen a real fragmentation of organized crime groups.

 

Now looking back at the history of organized crime in the region. When you have one big cartel that dominates a country, you actually tend to see on average less violence. But what we have today is the opposite situation. In Mexico, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel are locked in a battle for control of the country. They've extended that battle through proxies to Ecuador. In Columbia, a number of armed groups and criminal groups are all fighting over basically vacuums and different illicit markets challenging each other for control. And you're seeing that pattern play out in a bunch of other countries across the region. So it's that combination of high profits, big incentives to get involved, and also this bloody conflict between different groups that's driving the violence today.

 

LINDSAY:
Can I draw you out on the corruption angle of the problem? Because you've written an awful lot about corruption in Latin America. You're writing a book about the rule of law deficit that many Latin American countries face. So help me understand a little bit more about the intersection with corruption, weak rule of law and organized crime.

 

FREEMAN:
Sure. Let me zoom in on a particular country to unpack that story. And that would be Ecuador. As I mentioned, Ecuador used to be a peaceful country. It added a homicide rate for years that hovered around that of Washington, DC. But just in the past couple of years, it's experienced this surge violence and now has a homicide rate that tops that of Mexico. And corruption's a big part of the story of how Ecuador got there, unfortunately. So from 2007 to '17, you had one president in Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who majorly scaled back investment in state institutions dedicated to fighting organized crime, and it essentially planted a ticking time bomb. When his successors took over, the judiciary always underfunded, always under-resourced in Ecuador, was really susceptible to co-optation by a number of these groups. The police, which had also been weakened over the course of Correa's time in power were more and more they turned up in cases of corruption, co-optation by narco trafficking groups.

 

And what you ended up with essentially in the last couple of years is a state that's systematically unwilling to confront organized crime groups on its territory. When I was recently in Ecuador, the way you see this on the ground is that you meet police who've arrested a gang leader a week ago. That same gang leader will appear before a judge, immediately receive habeas corpus, whether or not that seems legally justified, and we'll be back out on the streets. And that can be really, really dispiriting for anyone trying to take on organized crime in these countries. Ecuador is not the only case where this happens.

 

You also have Mexico where a former defense minister was returned to the country after being arrested in the U.S. on suspicion of cooperating with cartels, and then the attorney general's office of Mexico dropped the case. So we're seeing this all over the region, but really unfortunately, when you have prosecutors, judges, and police who are bought off by cartels and criminal groups or simply feel they don't have the support among their own ranks to confront the problem, it's very hard for any country to move forward.

 

LINDSAY:
So as you describe it, Will, one possible consequence of the surging crime, the development of organized crime and its reaching into government is government capture that organized crime groups can have control over what the state does. But you also mentioned moments ago that one of the consequences to surging crime is that many ordinary people, that is people who aren't part of cartels want security. They want to be protected from violence, and the consequence of that is to favor authoritarian reactions to move away from democracy. Help me understand how that plays out.

 

FREEMAN:
Sure. Well, we should go to the country where this is being expressed in the most significant dramatic way, that's El Salvador. Their president, Nayib Bukele elected in 2019 has taken an absolutely iron-fisted approach to the gangs that controlled the country for decades and led it to have consistently one of the highest homicide rates in the world. And the troubling thing is that Bukele's authoritarian approach on its appearances seems to have worked. As recently as 2016, the United Nations Development Program estimated that extortion and gang related activities consumed 16 percent of El Salvador's GDP. Now by many different estimates, that figure is far down.

 

So how did Bukele do it? This is where the authoritarian part comes in. So shortly after taking office, he did two things. One, and we know this from an unsealed indictment from the Eastern District of New York against Salvador and gang members Bukele cut deals with the leaders of the two biggest gangs in the country. He negotiated economic benefits, the reduction of sentences for them in their inner circle changes even to El Salvador and law and jurisprudence and agreed not to extradite.

 

Now at the same time, he began to crack down against their foot soldiers. So what he did there is starting in March, 2022, he imprisoned... Currently, the number sits at 71,000 people. That's about 7 percent of male Salvadorans aged fourteen to twenty-nine, and he did it in fifteen months, putting them all into mega prisons on pretrial detention. So as you might imagine, this strategy of cracking down the gangs had no respect for civil liberties. We're talking about roundups where having tattoos was enough to get you arrested. So were anonymous tip-offs from neighbors with no follow-up investigation. And as I mentioned, these prisoners are still languishing in jail yet to face trial, although we do know that soon the state will begin trying them in batches of 700. So really no chance to offer any legal defense.

 

Clearly authoritarian, but as I mentioned, this crackdown has been remarkably popular. Not only does Bukele have 87 percent approval at home, even as he's done away with term limits, scrapped a number of other democratic institutions and norms, it's nothing compared to the popularity he enjoys abroad. So from a recent poll from Latinobarómetro earlier this year, according to that poll, Bukele is currently more popular than the Pope in Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And across the region, eight in ten Latin Americans approve of his presidency, his response to crime. According to other poll I saw, if he was allowed to run in Ecuador's upcoming August 20th elections, he would win handily.

 

So that's all to say that you're absolutely right. There are a growing number of Latin Americans who seem to be willing to trade at least some measure of democracy and respect for civil liberties, if it means solving this really pernicious problem. That's plagued the region for years and is only getting worse.

 

LINDSAY:
Is it your sense, Will, that bouquet has actually solved the problem? Or is this an approach that is producing short-term benefits, but perhaps setting the stage for longer term costs or for a resurgence of violence?

 

FREEMAN:
There are absolutely the risks that this will lead to a new explosion of violence and that it's not sustainable in the long run. First, an Achilles heel of the whole strategy is that El Salvador's foreign debts currently sit at 76 percent of GDP. There are major questions about how the state can continue to finance this incredibly expensive strategy of building mega prisons, of having police and soldiers on the street 24/7. For a country that's small that doesn't have a particularly robust economy, these are real questions looming on the horizon. On top of that, there's a question of what happens with these gang members or suspected gang members when they're eventually released.

 

Now, Bukele has recently raised the maximum sentence that people can receive for belonging to gangs to forty-five years. So we are talking about a date far in the future if he proves as authoritarian with these sentences as he has with the strategy overall. That said, you can only imagine that this is creating extreme bitterness, not only among innocence who've been round up in this campaign, but also their family, several civil society groups who have banded together to protest the jailing of family members who they claim are innocent. So it very well could be that this strategy only works for five or ten years, but I'll just say that for Salvadorans who were so desperate for a solution because they'd been living under the tyranny of these gangs for decades, they might still view that as a relative improvement on the status quo before.

 

LINDSAY:
Understood. Let's switch countries and let's talk about a country many Americans have heard a lot about when it comes to organized crime and drug trafficking, and that's Columbia. Now my understanding is the Colombian government has taken a very different approach to dealing with organized crime and drug trafficking. Tell me what that is.

 

FREEMAN:
That's right. Particularly since President Gustavo Petro was elected in 2022. Now, Petro unlike Bukele is a leftist, he himself was a member of an armed insurgency back in the 1970s. He comes from a completely different political background, and he's always been a proponent of peace negotiations in Columbia. An attempt to bring different armed groups to the table, figure out a way for them to peacefully put down their arms and integrate into politics and civil society.

 

LINDSAY:
And Columbia has a long history of civil conflict. 

 

FREEMAN:
That's right.

 

LINDSAY:
Obviously the contest between the central government in the FARC, which was settled back in 2016, I believe.

 

FREEMAN:
So Petro comes out of that tradition and when he gets into office, he says Columbia needs total peace. It's a new strategy he's sketched out where he hopes to follow up on the 2016 peace accords with the FARC by having a whole new round of negotiations that will bring in a much broader range of actors. Those include FARC fighters who refuse to put down their weapons in 2016, but also fighters with the National Liberation Army and other insurgency and drug traffickers, controversially who don't profess any political ideology. Petro's goal has been to bring all those different actors to the table or under the banner of total peace and get them to agree on a set of terms for ending violence and their participation in illegal economies. Now, if that sounds lofty to you, it certainly does to me. It also does to many Colombians and Petro's already seen his approval rating fall to 33 percent.

 

Part of the problem here is that he and his administration have stumbled with some mixed messages. One, we still don't know exactly what the terms of the negotiation will be, what's on the table and what's off. It's not clear if criminal groups are going to get the same treatment as insurgencies. And most confusingly of all is neither the government nor anyone involved is explained exactly what are the incentives. As I mentioned upfront, criminal groups in Latin America are making record profits off the export of cocaine and other drugs. That includes Columbia's. And it's not clear to me anyway, why these organized crime groups would've any incentive to sacrifice those profits even if it meant no longer being harassed, pursued by the state.

 

So that's all to say that Petro's have taken a different approach than Bukele's. Much more focused on negotiation, but unfortunately we haven't seen it produce major results. And if everyone right now in elected office in Latin America practically would like to Nayib Bukele, I can think of hardly anyone who'd like to be Gustavo Petro.

 

LINDSAY:
So help me understand the geography of drug trafficking. Obviously, if we were to go back twenty, thirty years, Columbia was the primary producer of cocaine. People know all about the Medellín cartel. Netflix and other streaming services have series devoted to it. How does the current production of cocaine in Columbia compared to where we were thirty years ago? Because, obviously, the United States had planned Columbia, which was this very expensive, very systematic effort to try to eradicate the production of cocaine.

 

FREEMAN:
Well, unfortunately, last year, coca cultivation reached record levels. So we know that massive and massive amounts of cocaine are being produced in Columbia, not only there, also in Bolivia and Peru, the other top two producers in the world. And it continues to be a major source of rents for these criminal groups. What you have seen lately that's interesting, and no one's quite been able to explain it, is that you've seen a collapse in the price that criminal groups are paying coca farmers in Columbia. Now, whether or not that herald's a big change on the horizon, if we're going to see major shifts in the drug trade, it's a little too soon to say. 

 

But going back to your original question about the shifting geography of organized crime and drug traffic, generally. What we've also seen is the expansion of organized crime groups into ports specifically, which did not used to be major hubs for criminal activity. There are several on the coast of Ecuador. Tragically on July 24th, you saw mayor of the Ecuadorian city of Manta, the sixth biggest city in the country, assassinated. Now investigators are just beginning to look into the case, but given the high rates of criminal violence in the area, it's suspected that a local organized crime group probably had something to do with it. And it was really alarming. It was only the most recent of a half dozen political assassinations in Ecuador over the last several months. 

 

You've also seen Brazil's first capital command, the biggest organized crime group in that country, a setup shop in Rosario, Argentina, another important port city. So we're starting to see organized crime groups that are based in Columbia, are based in Brazil, are based in Mexico, these traditional hotspots starting to use the infrastructure of different countries around the region and really making this more of a hemispheric problem than just one of these traditional hotspots we think of like Columbia.

 

LINDSAY:
I want to actually lean into that observation, Will, because my understanding was that when the FARC was an active entity contesting with the central government for power in Columbia, that it in many ways disciplined or organized the drug trafficking trade. And with the disappearance of the FARC, what has happened is that, that de facto monopoly has broken down. You have a lot more smaller groups. I think you made this point when we began our conversation about smaller entities competing for space. Walk me through that part of what's happening in Columbia.

 

FREEMAN:
Absolutely. So as you mentioned in 2016, the government of Juan Manuel Santos brokered a peace deal, was in the work for years with the FARC demobilizing most of the FARC structure. And the FARC really had kept a lid on criminal activity, had kept a firm hold over it in much of the country, even by the way, controlling zones of Panama across the border controlling northern Ecuador. And often what you find with these big criminal organizations, armed groups like the FARC, is they're very interested in using violence to eliminate competitors, but they also realize that unlimited violence comes with a cost to their bottom line. 

 

Now, unfortunately, when the FARC demobilized, you had this influx of smaller groups, of newer groups, like for instance, the Gulf Clan, which is the successor to Columbia's right-wing paramilitaries. And not only were these groups all scrambling for control of drug trafficking routes, also control of the lucrative economy in human smuggling over the Columbia Panama border, but they were also completely disunited. So there was no one actor sitting at the top saying, let's keep down violence because that itself is distracting from our main activity making money. 

 

And when you look at the consequences, of course the peace accord in Columbia was a huge achievement. You compare the country now to the early two thousands, it's doing infinitely better. But there were ripple effects and unintended consequences. Not everyone saw it coming. One of those is the security crisis in Ecuador, which you really couldn't understand without the demobilization of the FARC, which opened up a vacuum there. But also rising violence in Columbia itself in the countryside where we're now seeing massacres in rural areas that outpace and outnumbered the years of the early 2010s. So in parts of the country, we're actually seeing a reversal.

 

LINDSAY:
Let's bring a discussion closer to the United States and talk about America's neighbor to the South, Mexico. You mentioned the case of the Mexican general who was arrested by the United States and the government of President Lopez Obrador demanded his return and eventually he was released. What has Mexico's response to drug trafficking and the resurgence of crime been under in AMLO as he's popularly known?

 

FREEMAN:
AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected in 2018 and it's first important to understand who he is. So he's a nationalist. He takes the view across a range of issues that Mexico needs to go its own way. It shouldn't take direction from the United States. And he's also a populist. And what that's led to is a knee-jerk hesitancy to cooperate with the U.S. on security issues. We've really seen since his election, a deterioration of what was a fairly longstanding security relationship partnership between the two countries. First, Lopez Obrador largely dismantled the Merida Initiative, a cooperation agreement that included some 3 billion in funding and dated back to the early 2000s.

 

LINDSAY:
And this was funding provided by the United States?

 

FREEMAN:
That's right. An agreement broker between the George W. Bush White House and then President Felipe Calderón. AMLO in the meantime is rolled out in alternative, even less defined than Gustavo Petro's Total Peace, which he calls "hugs, not bullets." The idea if you were going to be charitable to it is that Mexico, instead of targeting the kingpins of organized crime groups and taking them out, which had only led to further fragmentation and violence, should instead focus on addressing the root causes of crime, lack of education, lack of economic opportunities, huge territorial and class-based inequalities. But Lopez Obrador meanwhile has run a very tight budget. His government's economic agenda looks closer to austerity than anything else. So it's not clear that he's followed up on that rhetoric with a lot of policies and practice. 

 

And meanwhile, we have this very serious concern despite the rhetoric about continued impunity in Mexico. Not only the case of the general who we've been discussing, who was let off without charges, but also across the country at the local level, a real epidemic of disappearances over 100,000 people disappeared in the last decade and a half where most of those cases go uninvestigated.

 

LINDSAY:
100,000?

 

FREEMAN:
That's correct. 100,000 people simply disappeared. That's on top of the 360,000 who've died from homicides since 2006.

 

LINDSAY:
So how have the Mexican people reacted to the approach that AMLO has taken? My understanding is he remains quite popular.

 

FREEMAN:
He does remain popular. Now, this is a fluke of Mexican politics. It's actually, presidents in Mexico almost always tend to poll well with the exception of the last one, Enrique Peña Nieto. But López Obrador does maintain his popularity. A lot of people chalk it up to the fact that he himself knows how to communicate well with ordinary Mexicans like a lot of populists. He's adapted connecting with ordinary people, portrays himself as really coming from their same set of experiences and backgrounds. And at the same time, his nationalism, I think is also given a number of people in Mexico a renewed sense of pride. It's shocking to me that security is not the main issue on the agenda in Mexico, that Mexicans are not clamoring for Bukele the way that Ecuadorians are or that Guatemalans are, or people across the region, but really dismally. It could be that the country is so accustomed to violence at this point that they view continuity as essentially what they can expect.

 

LINDSAY:
So AMLO term ends next year there'll be a new election in Mexico. Do you anticipate that the leading candidates are going to seize on security as an issue, or are they going to continue this hands-off "hugs, not bullets" approach?

 

FREEMAN:
Well, at this point, the two leading prospective candidates, at least in the polls are Marcelo Ebrard. And then Claudia Sheinbaum, who's been mayor of Mexico City until recently. So they're both López Obrador followers. They have not publicly challenged him on security. Ebrard is thought to have closer working relationship with the Biden administration. He doesn't tend to lean into the nationalistic diatribe quite as much as López Obrador or some other members of the government. Sheinbaum is more of a direct follower. So I think in either case, you're not going to see a huge change. But if an opposition candidate rises to the fore and makes this into a compelling issue, maybe we will see Mexico take a new direction.

 

LINDSAY:
When we talk of this Mexican in general, who had ties to the drug cartels, is he the exception to the rule? Or are we seeing the penetration of the Mexican state by drug cartels?

 

FREEMAN:
Well, I think in such a big country, one with so much geographic diversity, it's hard to generalize. But I don't think that that he's an isolated case by any means. Now, back a few years ago, you saw a very disturbing case in Mexico where forty-three students were murdered in a case clearly involving organized crime. But ultimately, according to the investigations that followed up, what looked to be the participation of at least some members of the security forces locally. And that case has been investigated for years. When López Obrador was running, he actually promised to finally clarify what had happened in that very disturbing case, the investigation actually just concluded. Several of the investigators on the case essentially walked away saying that that they'd been stymied. They hadn't been allowed to get to the bottom of things. So that alone to me suggests that, that you're seeing something broader. This isn't just the case of one general or one institution even.

 

LINDSAY:
And I should note that when we talk about Mexico, we have the central government, but Mexico also has states, state government. The level of violence in penetration by cartels, I think varies across the country. Take it that was your point about it being hard to generalize in terms of a country like Mexico that is so large, but obviously there must be a concern that in some states the authorities may be working for the wrong people.

 

FREEMAN:
You often hear about Sinaloa, the home of the Sinaloa Cartel, for instance, as a state in which the regional and local government is deeply penetrated. You also hear about Michoacán and several others.

 

LINDSAY:
So what does all this mean for American foreign policy? What is it that the United States has been doing under the Biden administration and is it working?

 

FREEMAN:
Well, what it means for U.S. foreign policy, first off, criminal violence, the surge we've seen in Latin America is, at least if you ask me no doubt, one of the biggest national security concerns we should be thinking about. Last year, 110,000 Americans died from fentanyl, as you discussed a couple of weeks ago on this show. That's the worst year we've seen ever in terms of drug overdose deaths. So clearly the ripple effects are reaching not only the U.S. Mexico border, but beyond. 

 

So what's the administration been doing? Well, first it's been continuing and deepening some of the security assistance programs we've seen in place for years. Overall, the Biden administration's requested 2.4 billion in funding for the State Department and USAID devoted to Latin America and the Caribbean for fiscal year 2023. That's more funding than it's been allocated to the region in any single year in more than a decade. And funding for International Narcotics Control and the Law Enforcement Bureau of the State Department has also been trending upwards. On top of that, the administration's been continuing to invest in programs like the Caribbean Base and Security Initiative and working on as it can and occasionally with bipartisan support on cutting down on the flow of U.S. firearms into Latin America where the majority of firearms originate from this country, not from the region itself.

 

But in terms of diplomacy, I will say that the Biden administration has been hitting a rough patch. One is that it doesn't have an abundance of partners on this issue who want to cooperate with the U.S. We talked a little bit about Mexico in that case. López Obrador has not proven interested in working together. In the case of El Salvador, it's been a really hard line for the administration to walk. On the one hand, they've been publicly critical of Bukele's, erosion of democracies, concentration of powers, and the anti-gang crackdowns total disregard for civil liberties. But at the same time, I think the administration's beginning to realize that it can't necessarily challenge head on such a popular leader in the region. You've seen that a new ambassador to El Salvador, William Duncan, sworn in January, has taken a much less critical approach. It seems that we're maybe seeing the administration step back a little bit from its criticism of some of these new approaches being tried in the region. 

 

I will say though, that besides what we're seeing from the Biden administration, you're seeing even more focus on this issue of crime in Latin America from GOP primary candidates. So essentially all the top contenders on that side of the aisle in the race for the primary have endorsed some form of a counter-terrorism operation in Mexico that would aim at taking out or curtailing the power of cartels that are currently trafficking fentanyl.

 

LINDSAY:
Let me slow you down right there, Will.

 

FREEMAN:
Sure.

 

LINDSAY:
Explain what that means in practice, what it is that is being at least floated as a policy for the United States. What do you mean when you say a counter-terrorism policy?

 

FREEMAN:
Well, you've seen both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump promised to deploy the military, including on Mexican soil to fight cartels. Governor Ron DeSantis discussed shoot-to-kill orders in terms of migrants crossing the border, allegedly carrying drugs. So we're seeing some very extreme proposals. I think what GOP candidates are trying to get across here is that in an next administration, if it is a Republican administration, there needs to be much more focus and a much more aggressive approach towards organized crime in Latin America. They're raising the salience of the issue, given that it has not always topped the agenda in the Biden administration.

 

But what concerns me is that I'm not sure that these approaches we're seeing floated regarding Mexico have any viability in practice. We're talking about the United States largest trading partner. Mexico has claimed that status for the last several months and our most significant international border where we see huge flows of people and goods every single day. Militarizing that border further sending U.S. troops across the border against the wishes of Mexico, could lead to a full blown diplomatic rupture. That's something that the U.S. simply can't really afford. So I'm curious to see if this moves beyond rhetoric. We're still in the early stages, of course, of any candidates defining what exactly they mean by this strategy, but it's clear that it's coming more and more into focus as we approach 2024

 

LINDSAY:
Will, what about proposals for the United States to close down or tighten the border, particularly at legal border crossings? And I say that because there has been a lot of evidence that suggests that most of the fentanyl that comes into the United States from Mexico comes through legal border entries and is often carried by American citizens. And one way you stop that is you have tighter inspections. And I should note that fentanyl is incredibly powerful relative to its side. We recently had a drug inter addiction, I think it was fifty-four pounds of fentanyl in one single car, and that was enough fentanyl doses to kill 12 million people. So fentanyl in many ways is a smuggler's dream because it's relatively small and worth a lot of money. Does it make sense to just tighten down the border?

 

FREEMAN:
Well, not only would that come with huge economic costs, but to me it also seems like somewhat of a fool's errand for the reasons you just mentioned. When such large doses of such a potent drug can be moved across the border hidden in the back of a car. And all it would take is one or two or three cars crossing the border to fuel drug trafficking organizations all over the U.S. I'm not sure that that's a practical solution and the cost would be huge. I think that the Biden administration has been right to focus energy on curbing demand for the drug at home, off investing in alternative forms of treatment, and it really treating it as a public health concern. And I hope that that approach continues going forward.

 

That said, I understand critics who say, "Look, we are still seeing the drug abused at higher and higher rates with more and more people dying from overdoses. So you do need a radical shift." If anything, I think here we're catching up to Latin America, as you saw Bukele and others start to say, "Look, the old approaches on organized crime haven't worked. We need something radically new." Now you're starting to see that in U.S. politics.

 

LINDSAY:
Are there any other strategies that the Biden administration should be pursuing or consider pursuing?

 

FREEMAN:
To me the question's more about what should reformers in Latin America be doing and how can we best support them? So taking that question on for a second, I think the approach that should be taken in Latin America when and where it has the political will, is attempts to reverse the capture of criminal justice systems of police, prosecutors and judges. If you don't start there, there's really little chance of bending the curve on this problem in the long term. And you do have some inspiring examples, including from the recent past of the region in Guatemala, UN sponsored International Commission against Impunity, which partnered with local prosecutors and judges managed to dismantle gangs across the country without the abuses of Bukele, halve the country's murder rate in just a decade and massively reduce extortion. Now, ultimately, that same commission was shut down by a Guatemalan president who came on the scene afterwards. But it gives you an example of the way that really a very focused and narrow attempt to walk back criminal co-optation of judges, prosecutors, police can score major victories. 

 

So I think that the U.S. should be doing whatever we can, whatever this administration can to incentivize that approach to support judges, prosecutors, others who are trying to reform their own institutions from within. What that could look like in practice? It could look like scaling up assistance to the judiciary in Ecuador where they've been demanding, really clamoring for more U.S. attention, but not always getting it. It could look like supporting future initiatives by the United Nations or other bodies to clean up judiciaries. Right now, there's one of those initiatives getting started most likely in Honduras in the next couple of years. We're seeing the negotiations right now to put that in place. So I think those could all be steps forward. But in terms of what the administration can do, unfortunately, it's also dealing with a pretty short time horizon, and this is a problem that's going to be with the region for years to come.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up the President's Inbox for this week. My guess has been Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Will, thank you very much for joining me.

 

FREEMAN:
Thanks so much, Jim. It was a pleasure.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us your review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.