Headquarters for Gangs? In Prison.
When officials attempt to curtail the power criminal groups exercise from behind bars, their leaders often deploy members on the outside to fight back.
“The principal center of gravity, the nexus of control of organized crime, lies within the prison compounds,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for Ecuador’s Army.
“That’s where let’s say the management positions are, the command positions,” he added. “It is where they give the orders and dispensations for gangs to terrorize the country.”
Latin America’s prison population has exploded over the last two decades, driven by stricter crime measures like pretrial detentions, but governments across the region have not spent enough to handle the surge and instead have often relinquished control to inmates, experts on penal systems say.
Those sent to prison are often left with one choice: join a gang or face their wrath. As a result, prisons have become crucial recruitment centers for Latin America’s largest and most violent cartels and gangs, strengthening their grip on society instead of weakening it.
Prison officials, who are underfunded, outnumbered, overwhelmed and frequently paid off, have largely given in to gang leaders in many prisons in exchange for a fragile peace.
Criminal groups fully or partly control well over half of Mexico’s 285 prisons, according to experts, while in Brazil the government often divides up penitentiaries based on gang affiliation in a bid to avoid unrest. In Ecuador, experts say most of the country’s 36 prisons are under some degree of gang control.
Latin America’s prison population surged by 76 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, far exceeding the region’s 10 percent population increase during the same period.
Many countries have imposed tougher law and order policies, including longer sentences and more convictions for low-level drug offenses, pushing most of the region’s penitentiaries beyond maximum capacity.
At the same time, governments have prioritized investing in their security forces as a way to clamp down on crime and flex their muscles to the public, rather than spend on prisons, which are less visible.
Brazil and Mexico, Latin America’s largest countries with the region’s biggest inmate populations, invest little on prisons: Brazil’s government spends about $14 per prisoner per day, while Mexico spends about $20. The United States spent about $117 per prisoner per day in 2022. Prison guards in Latin America also earn meager salaries, making them susceptible to bribes from gangs to smuggle in contraband or help high-profile detainees escape.
Officials in Brazil and Ecuador did not respond to requests for comment; officials in Mexico declined to comment.
Underscoring the power of prison gangs, some gang leaders live relatively comfortably behind bars, running supermarkets, cockfighting rings
In Latin America, unchallenged control of inmates.
and nightclubs, and sometimes smuggling their families inside to stay with them.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 to tackle gang violence. About 75,000 people have been jailed, many without due process, according to human rights groups.
Mr. Bukele’s tactics have decimated the Central American country’s street gangs, reversed years of horrific violence and helped propel him to a second term.
But experts say thousands of innocent people have been incarcerated.
“What consequences does this have?” said Carlos Ponce, an expert on El Salvador and an assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. “This will scar them and their families for life.”
The frequent use of pretrial detentions across the region to combat crime has left many people languishing in jail for months and even years waiting to be tried, human rights groups say. The practice has fallen particularly hard on the poorest, who cannot afford lawyers and face a judicial system with cases backed up for years.
In the first seven months of El Salvador’s state of emergency, 84 percent of all those arrested were in pretrial detention and nearly half of Mexico’s prison population is still waiting trial.
Elena Azaola, a scholar in Mexico, said, “Prisons can be defined as exploitation centers for poor people.”