️👮 Prisons everywhere ... and Boric's dilemma in Chile

Hello!

It would seem that “prisons” is the word of the week in Latin America. At least that is the case in Honduras, Ecuador and Argentina, where governments have launched or announced plans to build new maximum security prisons which, they said, are a fundamental pillar of their strategies to combat organised crime, a threat that continues to expand. 

Xiomara Castro, Daniel Noboa and Javier Milei are fascinated by Nayib Bukele's anti-gang strategy, which, although it has proven successful in reducing the homicide rate, it has been very controversial for doing away with the most basic human rights. 

But those who are not rushing to follow in Bukele's steps are the authorities in Chile, where organised crime is also expanding, as we detailed in our explainer. In fact, in January, Interior Minister Carolina Rohá said that "the reality of Chile is not the reality of Ecuador. We are confronting organised crime and drug trafficking with exceptional legislation, institutions and funds."

While it is still too early to say whether their strategy is working, what is clear is that the rise in crime presents a huge dilemma for President Gabriel Boric's administration. Read our analysis here.

That's not all. Here’re the other five main news on organised crime in Latin America, summarised and analysed for you.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Josefina Salomón

Editorial Director

1. Mega Prison. In a national broadcast on Saturday night, Honduran President Xiomara Castro announced the building of a mega-prison with capacity for 20,000 people as part of a national strategy to fight gangs and improve the country's long-struggling prison system. The security plan also includes measures to strengthen the military's role in fighting organised crime and to prosecute drug traffickers as terrorists. The government is also asking Congress to change the Penal Code to allow people suspected of gang membership to be detained without charge and mass trials held. Violence remains at very high levels in the Central American country. The increase in arrests has pushed the prison population to 19,500 in a system that is designed for 13,000, according to official figures. Castro also announced plans to build a prison with capacity for 2,000 people on the Islas del Cisne, located 250 kilometres off the coast of the country. This will be the only prison on an island in the Western Hemisphere. Sounds familiar? That's because it is. Castro is copying the "Bukele model" from his Salvadoran neighbour, and not only in terms of prisons. She has also imposed a state of emergency in several parts of the country and, like her colleague, received a barrage of criticism from human rights organisations that accuse her of abusing basic rights while questioning the long-term effectiveness of these policies. 

2. And another. Castro is not alone in believing that prisons are the answer to the expansion of organised crime. On Friday, Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa kicked off the construction of a new maximum security prison in Santa Elena, a coastal town 130 kilometres from Guayaquil. The new prison, which will have six watchtowers, real-time monitoring, biometric access systems and mobile phone signal blockers, will have capacity for 880 people and cost about US$52 million. Since the beginning of the year, when Noboa declared that Ecuador was in a state of internal armed conflict, the country's prisons, which criminal organisations used as centres of operation and recruitment, came under the control of the military. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch have denounced abuses in the prisons, including lack of food deliveries. While Noboa says his security strategy is working, and has reported a reduction in the high homicide rate, high numbers of violent deaths continue to be recorded in several areas of the country. The collapse of Ecuador's main morgue is an illustration of the state of affairs in Ecuador, as Leila Sofía Medina reports in this feature for BBC News Mundo. 

3. One more. It seems that Argentina's government does not want to be left behind in the new trend of building more prisons. On Sunday, Argentina's Security Minister Patricia Bullrich travelled to El Salvador to meet with her counterparts and visit the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), the largest maximum security prison in Latin America. Bullrich wants to replicate Bukele's strategy in Argentina, despite the widely different contexts. The last time Argentina tried to replicate Bukele's style of prison policy in the city of Rosario, at the epicentre of the country’s criminal map, it generated a wave of violence.

4. 580,000. That is the number of people who had to flee their homes to escape gang violence in Haiti in the last three months, according to a United Nations report released on Tuesday. The situation in the country remains catastrophic with gangs controlling 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and a humanitarian emergency affecting most of the population. Part of the problem is a lack of trained police, something the government of the newly appointed Garry Conille is trying to reverse. On Tuesday, 400 new police officers graduated as they prepare to welcome an international mission that will arrive in the coming weeks to support them. 

5. TikTok. Dissident groups from Colombia's former main guerrilla group are recruiting young people through videos they post on the popular platform, according to a new BBC investigation. According to official data accessed by the British outlet, at least 184 young people were recruited by various dissident guerrilla groups in 2023 and, as of June this year, 159 people under 18 years of age had enlisted. The vast majority (124) were from the department of Cauca, where one of the main dissident factions, Estado Mayor Central (EMC), is active with more than 3,000 members. 

ALSO

Here’re some of the week's other best reads to understand the impact of organised crime in Latin America.

Bukele's pact with gang leaders he let escape and who the US is recapturing (Hector Silva, InfoBae) 

"You spend so much time in isolation that you want to die": Wave of suicides in a women's prison in Mexico (Valentina Oropeza, BBC Mundo)

One hundred years of bananas (Jordana Timerman, Cenital)

Migrating from trauma to an unknown country (Laura Panqueva Otalora, Gatopardo)