Organized crime and democracy in Latin America: the case of Chile

By: Ricardo Israel - 12/10/2025

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There are times and days when a topic reaches its moment. This has happened in recent months with "Transnational Organized Crime," as what had primarily been a concern of academics and research institutes became a topic of media and political decision-making, starting the day the United States, through President Donald Trump, incorporated it into its decision-making process, primarily in relation to Venezuela, especially in the context of drug trafficking and the Cartel of the Suns ruling that country.

For years, the Interamerican Institute for Democracy (IID) has addressed in numerous papers, studies, forums, and seminars the way organized crime not only financed politics but also seized political power itself through various governments in Latin America. However, the issue gained distinct notoriety when, due to national security considerations, the power identified narcoterrorist criminal groups, whether cartels or criminal gangs, as a danger due to the way they attacked the region's democracies. This led to changes and adjustments in the foreign policy of several countries, in addition to the predictable resistance of the Castro-Chavista dictatorships.

Given its impact, with the initiative and coordination of Carlos Sánchez Berzain, a group of speakers from the United States and Latin America, specialists, former presidents, congressmen, researchers, invited by the IID, Florida International University (FIU), Universidad Austral and Infobae met to discuss the topic in English and Spanish in the new context that is developing, especially in relation to an evaluation of its effects at the national and international levels.

It was originally scheduled to take place at the U.S. Capitol Building, but the country's government shutdown made it difficult, so it was moved to a downtown FIU building in the capital. I was tasked with presenting the case of Chile, a presentation on which this column is based.

Under Trump, the way this scourge is being combated has taken on new characteristics, compounded by the existence since 2000 of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, also known as the Palermo Convention after the place where it was signed. However, this instrument never acquired decisive importance, as it strangely always lacked a clear definition of what exactly was meant by "transnational organized crime." Although it did define what an "organized criminal group" was, providing four characteristics to frame the phenomenon, which allowed jurisprudence to incorporate new forms of crime over the years.

As an instrument, the Convention increasingly lost relevance, so much so that in many places organized crime became a serious problem for democracy. However, it was in Latin America that it acquired a distinctive role, not only participating but also being the government itself, as has happened with Maduro and the Cartel of the Suns in Venezuela.

Regarding Venezuela, the US action has one condition: to avoid, if possible, a prolonged military action, and if it occurs, that it be an in-and-out, similar to the incursion that took place in Iran against its atomic program. According to what was announced, it would seek to leave the legitimate government of Edmundo González and the leadership of Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado in place, and then withdraw.

The implementation of this so-called "Trump Doctrine" of the use of military force followed several steps. The first, in time, was the formal declaration that the Maduro government was illegitimate, no longer a political coalition, but an instrument controlled by transnational organized crime. The second was to define it as a drug cartel, the Cartel of the Suns, whose leader was Maduro, who has an arrest warrant from a New York court, and whose reward for information leading to his capture was doubled to $50 million, a strategy that has yielded results in cases such as that of Saddam Hussein. The third step occurred when it was publicly pointed out that the group in power was also a terrorist group waging a hybrid war against the United States through various means, such as being one of the main drug suppliers, using the Aragua Train as a criminal resource against the superpower, and others.

Personally, I don't like the use of the term "terrorist" as a defining term. Although it has undoubtedly been allied with groups like Hezbollah and countries like Iran, and terrorism has been used against its own people and has attacked other nations in the region, there's no doubt that another term would be better, as it is essentially a different animal.

In any case, given that Venezuela is an extreme situation, there is no doubt that both national and transnational organized crime have been growing in the region in two preferred ways: on the one hand, by taking over the government itself, or secondly, by developing instances of war or hybrid guerrilla warfare, by virtue of which organized crime is used against democracy.

In the case of Chile, it is this second instance that has been operating for years, without any reaction from the country against it, which has taken place consecutively in two very different governments, such as the center-right one of Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022), or the progressive left-wing one of Gabriel Boric, since his swearing in in 2022. The main reason for this situation is that, for too many years, Chile has lacked a vision of its problems and potential in strategic terms, because the long term has practically disappeared, in exchange for the here and now.

The truth is that Chile lacks a state intelligence institution worthy of the name, since what it has is poor and limited to the challenges facing the country, not only today, but throughout the 21st century, because during the seventeen years of General Pinochet's dictatorship, civilian and military intelligence was used to repress dissent, adversaries, both democrats and those who were not, and as a result, the largest nuclei of professional intelligence are within the armed forces, with the limitation that they are legally disqualified from using information for any purpose other than bellicose, that is, war.

What's difficult to understand is why, after so many years, and in circumstances such as the penetration of transnational organized crime, this situation has not changed. The lack of an adequate intelligence service has been detrimental to the country and the state, as both transnational and national organized crime have taken advantage of this shortcoming, with detrimental consequences for the democratic system itself.

First, the country could have lost its democracy when, unexpectedly, in October 2019, acute violence erupted in the streets, resulting in a process that proposed a constitution so radical that it completely altered the country that had evolved over two centuries. Fortunately, Chileans themselves overwhelmingly rejected it in the corresponding plebiscite, but as part of the new political climate, Boric had been elected president. A very prominent role in the violence was played by the so-called "front line," which included young drug-trafficking soldiers.

Second, for nearly three decades, Chile has had a low-intensity guerrilla movement in the south of the country. It has been presented as a vindication of the Mapuche ethnic minority, but in the past it has had links with the Colombian FARC guerrillas, as well as drug trafficking and illegal logging by white gangs. In any case, there are areas in the Araucanía region where the State does not even intervene to conduct censuses.

Third, the country's structural weakness today is such that the Venezuelan dictatorship has taken advantage, using organized crime to kidnap, torture, and murder Lieutenant Ojeda, a military dissident who had received political asylum. The Aragua Train was used and paid for in this crime, and until that moment, many Chileans were completely unaware of the depth of the relationship between foreign intrusion and organized crime. But after his death, the weakness of the system that supposedly protected the country became clearer.

Shortly after, the Public Prosecutor's Office, the independent criminal prosecution system, obtained evidence that the person behind the murder was none other than Diosdado Cabello, the Caracas regime's second-in-command. This information, which the Foreign Minister himself forwarded to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has received no response, as has everything linked to Venezuela there. In any case, the judicial process is so ongoing that in September, three members of the Tren de Aragua gang were extradited from the US to Chile, due to their proven involvement in at least one of the cases.

Today, Chile is suffering from very clear signs of the penetration of transnational organized crime in very diverse areas. A) In everyday life and culture, everyday activities related to transportation and education cannot take place when the streets are taken over by drug funerals, which are also broadcast live on television networks. B) Contract killings are now part of Chile, such that the number of weapons and murders are in the hands of organized crime, the effect of which is amplified when a related crime occurs, since kidnappings for ransom occur frequently. Thus, a crime that was once rare has become the new normal. Finally, as a drug transit country, Chilean ports have established themselves as preferred routes for shipping Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine to Europe, bringing in synthetic drugs for regional distribution in return. At the same time, consumption in Chile is higher than in Colombia.

In Chile, transnational organized crime is a large-scale business, as they have taken control of the country's northern border for the purposes of illegal immigration. There are also massive land seizures, not for political or social purposes, but rather so that drug-linked organizers can sell these illegal plots to poor Chileans and immigrants.

All of the above has already had a political consequence. General elections are coming up next November, and for the presidential election, the sense of insecurity in a country that used to be relatively safe by Latin American standards has become the main factor deciding winners and losers. According to polls, the next president will likely be one of the right-wing candidates, and Boric's continuity will be defeated, given his failure in virtually all areas of his administration.

In any case, another political event had already taken place, because the criminal activity sponsored by Venezuela and the aggressive rhetoric from Caracas produced a political distancing in someone who, like Boric, had supported Chavismo in the past. When his political project failed, he began to blame Maduro for some of his problems, calling what was happening in that country a dictatorship and a dictatorship, although he has never said a word against the mother dictatorship, that of Havana.

In Chile, it was drug trafficking that changed the nature of both crime and criminal activity. It began to gain territorial control and became more heavily armed than the police, while simultaneously corrupting the government, seizing power in some municipalities and local governments due to ties between politicians and organized crime. In other words, as in the rest of the region, the political class has been unable to develop successful public policies or the will to defeat organized crime. In fact, the current government's failure was evident in the fact that, in its latest security budget, the National Plan against Organized Crime was cut by 31.7% for 2026.

In Latin America, in the relationship between democracy and organized crime, the takeover or seizure of states from within has been compounded by new dangers on top of old ones, such as attempts to break up the national state through the emergence of sub-states, for example, with control of guerrillas or drug trafficking, and also, more recently, the use of the concept of plurinationality to divide the nation-state into ethnic autonomies, as featured in the constitutional proposal rejected in the Chilean plebiscite and as part of Evo Morales' attempts to build an Aymara ethnic state in contiguous parts of Peru and Bolivia.

The issue is even older in the Argentine provinces, where family clans dominate political power, increasingly in close ties with transnational organized crime interests through drug trafficking and consumption. The issue has also been present in the regions occupied by FARC dissidents after the failed Santos peace agreement, which ultimately only benefited drug trafficking, primarily on both sides of the border between Venezuela (Cartel de los Soles) and Colombia, as those who protected drug trafficking decided to control the business themselves, usually in alliance with cartels from around the world.

In other words, it is this presence of drug trafficking that gives Latin America a special characteristic, along with another element, since the control that the Assads had in Syria or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the "warlords" in Afghanistan (with the tolerance of the US), never intended in the past to be some kind of "superior" form of doing politics or of overcoming democracy, a "post-democracy", whose narrative has also been attractive to voters in many elections in the region, perhaps too many, as also occurred in the way that the Correa decade opened the doors of Ecuador to the Cartels that today challenge the State itself.

That is the role played by drug trafficking, since what once began in the region as simple political financing has evolved into control from within the governments themselves. In Chile, it was drug trafficking that enabled the penetration of transnational organized crime, which forces us to rethink this marriage of political power and organized crime, of which Mexico is a prime example. So much so that it is necessary to begin using the concept of criminal legality to account for how difficult it is today to differentiate between what is legitimate and what is illegitimate or what is illegal, both in public and private actors. And where once again it is false that there is a supposed Chilean “exceptionality,” a concept that has done great harm to the country, a nation that lied to itself in this regard, refusing to accept this reality for many years, so much so that organized crime does not in itself have a penalty at the level of the threat, rather it is used, even in courts, as a generic term for a group of people who, according to the UN Convention, “are engaged in organized crime.”

However, the scourge is growing and strengthening, in the development of the hybrid war that uses crimes against democracy, which permanently moves in a kind of gray area, which in turn is a form of defiance of the Geneva Conventions, the specific legislation that regulates war worldwide, and which allows states that promote the subversion of democratic institutions to be denied participation, as Havana has done with notorious impunity for decades.

A special kind of victim is that democracy that does not defend itself or does so full of complexes, since we are not only talking about the weakening of the State's sanctioning capacity, but also about something that also affects the very foundations of democratic society in various ways, sometimes without distinguishing between underdeveloped and developed countries, as is the case in the country that is one of those doing the worst in relation to drugs, that is, the United States, which has accumulated many defeats in the past.

And if we're talking about the US, with Trump they're proposing the most profound transformation of international relations since the fall of the USSR, and for some purposes, like the economic ones, even more striking, since it could bring about the end of the architecture created by Washington itself after the Second World War, although it's not at all clear, not even for Trump, what comes next, except for the fight between China and the US for global dominance.

In Latin America, it has become clear that the future is defined in Venezuela. I believe that greater regional solidarity among democracies is necessary so that democracy does not continue to lose battles. To achieve this, it is also necessary to understand the depth of the changes (and alliances) taking place in the world, starting with the Middle East, and to begin to see the United States as an ally rather than an adversary, so as to avoid continuing to be the region that never misses an opportunity.

@israelzipper

Master's and PhD in Political Science (University of Essex), Bachelor of Laws (University of Barcelona), Lawyer (University of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

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