Can the United States destroy transnational organized crime in the Western Hemisphere?

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 10/09/2025

In August, the United States declared a sort of war to the death against the criminal organizations that roam freely throughout the Americas. Their advance and control of trade routes and financial channels is undeniable. And their decisive influence is evident in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador; Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela. This is not even counting Haiti, where organized crime rules de facto through Johnny BBQ Cherizier.

This situation contrasts with the predictions made by world leaders in 2000 when the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime was signed in Palermo, Sicily. According to these leaders, the international instrument would allow crime to be subdued and viable societies to be established in territories controlled by this scourge.

Twenty-five years later, the situation is completely different from what was envisioned at the time of the convention's signing. In 2000, there were no more than 50 criminal syndicates, and according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the revenues of transnational organized crime amounted to one hundred billion dollars. Today, according to that source, along with the World Bank, the International Settlement Fund (ISF), and the International Criminal Tribunal for the United Nations (FATF), the revenues of transnational organized crime amount to approximately $24 trillion annually. This does not include cybercrime, which reaches one trillion annually. Combating it costs, meanwhile, stand at $3.6 trillion annually. Meanwhile, the multiplication of criminal entities has exponentially, reaching over 1,000.

These developments serve to remind us of the magnitude of the task facing the United States state apparatus. Because transnational organized crime is not a commercial phenomenon. It is a way of life for a significant proportion of the world's population.

Indeed, if we analyze the factors that explain the limited success in combating transnational organized crime, we realize that they are not temporary in nature but rather structurally permanent. Starting from the economic perspective, as Milton Friedman rightly pointed out, the worst economic perversions originate in monopolies. Monopolies, in his view, only serve to create rent for those who exploit them while penalizing the rest of society. The state has the power to create or dissolve monopolies through regulations. When something is prohibited, a monopoly is created for those unwilling to abide by the prohibition. And these individuals extract monopoly rents, which, in the case of drugs, are elevated by the market value of the merchandise. This creates the conditions for those who exploit the trade in prohibited goods to extract high monopoly rents with which they can subvert any state apparatus.

Second, there is the chronic poverty experienced by drug-producing countries, migrant populations, and those with a wealth of exotic flora and fauna. This tends to perpetuate this and other criminal enterprises. The chronic poverty that affects 44% of the world's population is a product of a lack of freedom; a lack of the rule of law and a lack of quality education and jobs; inadequate healthcare; food and housing insecurity; weak or deficient social safety nets; and the aggravating effects of conflict, climate change, and intergenerational poverty. In Latin America, the shantytowns surrounding large cities are immense incubators for criminal activity. These are residents who have lost hope of advancement, condemned to informal jobs that perpetuate their poverty. And it is from there that the armies that operate transnational organized crime emerge.

And third, and no less important, is the consumption of drugs and other psychotropic substances by the middle classes in the leading countries of the global economy. In these countries, young people have been drug users since the 1960s. Later, in the United States, representatives of an impoverished middle class joined the consumer public thanks to the economic crises of the late 20th and early 20th centuries. The bursting of the internet bubble destroyed between five and nine trillion dollars of wealth in financial instruments. Then, in 2008, the mortgage bubble burst, resulting in the loss of 4.8% of the United States' GDP. These two crises were compounded by the slow but unstoppable change in the employment structure as a result of digitalization, which eliminated jobs in both the manufacturing and service sectors. These processes plunged 12% of the American middle class into poverty and, from there, into drug use. In Europe, the drug-consuming public is a mix of economic elites and young people who cannot find jobs.

An account of the structural factors that fuel the power system represented by transnational organized crime leads us to conclude that the current campaign waged by the United States government to eradicate it will only address the collateral damage. These include a reduction in violence; difficulties in accessing the international financial system; and the abandonment of public positions in states where cartel leaders are heads of government. But to eradicate transnational organized crime, it is necessary to improve access to basic services (education, healthcare, housing) for 44% of the world's population. And that will take a good part of this century.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».