mass violence that escapes transitional justice

From Mexico to Haiti, Ecuador to Nigeria and South Africa, gangs are rampant in a number of countries, where their scale and violence represent the main threat to both the population and the State. In some countries, entire areas are beyond government control, leaving communities destitute and sometimes forced to turn to self-defence groups. In other countries, such as El Salvador and Honduras, governments have been forced to declare war on gangs and introduce a state of emergency in an attempt to curb the violence, with major risks of undermining civil liberties.

In parts of the world, it is not war or dictatorship that are the main source of mass violence, but these criminal groups with no political objective. Extortion, kidnapping, murder, drug and human trafficking, illegal exploitation of natural resources: the modus operandi of violent criminal groups – gangs, mafias, narcos, bandits – covers a wide spectrum. Yet traditional transitional justice organizations and actors are completely absent from this field.

Here, Justice Info draws up a map of the states in the world most affected by these criminal organisations, with a focus on situations where these groups control large swathes of territory, occupy a governance vacuum, have become more powerful than the State, or cause large numbers of deaths.

Then, in an in-depth interview (to read tomorrow in Justice Info), Mark Freeman, Director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), explains why transitional justice has not addressed these situations and why it must take an interest in them, or risk losing its relevance.

Brazil: “a matter of national security”

Criminality score: 22nd out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 18.1 per 100,000 inhabitants (*Note at the bottom of the article)
Number of homicides in 2023: 39,033

Helicopters, drones, armoured vehicles, assault rifles and bullet-proof vests: for years, police raids against criminal gangs have been one after the other in Brazil’s favelas, from the famous City of God in Rio to the slums of Fortaleza and Salvador de Bahia. According to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the homicide rate in Brazil was 18.1 in 2023, with more than 39,000 deaths.

The country is home to three major criminal organisations: Comando Vermelho (CV) which is the oldest, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) which is the largest, and most recently the self-defence militias, formed by retired police officers who, over the years, have become criminal groups in their own right: in addition to the “protection tax” levied on shopkeepers, they practise extortion and force residents to buy their electricity, gas, television or Internet products or services.

According to the National Secretariat for Penal Policies, there were more than 100 criminal gangs in Brazil in 2023, including 72 major groups, also present in prisons.

The main criminal activity is drug trafficking, more specifically the transport and sale of cocaine for domestic consumption – only the PCC exports cocaine – but also extortion and illegal gold mining, particularly in the Amazon.

“Organized criminal groups like the PCC – which has hegemony over the cocaine market in Sao Paulo – do not need to physically display their violent potential and operate more in the shadows,” explains researcher Antonio Sampaio of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), but others are fighting for control of trafficking routes and territories, particularly in the favelas.

Because of the vastness of the country and the federal nature of the government, the response to the gang phenomenon is fragmented, managed by the mayors and governors of the states, which makes it ineffective. In early 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the deployment of 3,700 military personnel to the country’s main ports and airports to deal with the outbreak of violence by organized crime, calling it “a matter of national security”. However, he refused to send the army into the favelas, saying he did not want “pyrotechnics”, an allusion to the heavy-handed raids of previous governments.

Colombia: an offer of negotiation

Criminality score: 2nd out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 25.7 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 13,432

Colombia is the world’s leading cocaine producer, supplying 70% of the global market, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). With coca cultivation and powder production, drug trafficking is a key, traditional component of the country’s criminal activities. But according to Felipe Botero, a researcher at GI-TOC, in recent years Colombian gangs have been fostering a “criminal ecosystem” by diversifying their activities: illegal mining, trafficking in arms, human beings and migrants with Venezuela, extortion, protection rackets, smuggling, and occasionally legal activities.

After half a century of civil war, the Colombian crime model is a hybrid one. On the one hand, there are powerful rebel groups with criminal activities, such as the guerrilla National Liberation Army (ELN), and large criminal drug trafficking groups that operate like cartels, such as the Clan del Golfo, which has some 4,000 members. On the other hand, there are a myriad of local gangs based in a specific town or region of the country, which provide services to the former and also operate autonomously. It is impossible to estimate the number. “The UNODC identifies 400 criminal gangs just in a city like Cali,” says Botero.

These gangs are present in urban areas, in Cali, Medellin and Buenaventura, and in rural areas throughout the country. “You have neighbourhoods in Cali where the police cannot enter, or huge places in Amazon where the natural parks rangers cannot enter,” notes Botero.

As part of his “Paz Total” campaign, Colombian President Gustavo Petro is promoting dialogue with all the country’s violent actors, offering political negotiations to rebel groups such as the ELN and a “surrender to justice” deal to cartels and rural or urban gangs that agree to stop their criminal activities and dismantle their organization in exchange for reduced sentences. This policy is deemed ineffective and dangerous by Colombia’s right-wing opposition.

Ecuador: a state of “internal armed conflict”

Criminality score: 11th out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 44.5 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 8,004

Once spared from violence, Ecuador, which borders the world’s two biggest cocaine producers Colombia and Peru, has seen an explosion in drug-related crime that has been rising steadily since the end of Rafael Correa’s presidency in 2017. Today, the country has the highest homicide rate in Central and Latin America (excluding the Caribbean). In 2020, the country’s main criminal organization, Los Choneros, fragmented into a multitude of smaller gangs, which work with the powerful Clan del Golfo in Colombia and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, as well as with Italian and Balkan mafias.

There are around 20 gangs and some 50,000 members, who control various regions and prisons in the country from where they operate with impunity, such as Los Lobos and Los Lagartos. Apart from drug trafficking, their main activities are extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking and illegal mining, particularly in the northern Amazon.

According to the investigative website Insight Crime, the homicide rate has risen from 5.8 per 100,000 in 2017 to 44.5 in 2023. This is a spectacular increase, at an unprecedented rate (+700%), fuelled by power struggles between various gangs. In January 2024, for example, the escape from prison of “Fito”, leader of the Los Choneros gang, set things alight, with bloody riots in prisons, prison guards taken hostage, shootings and even a television station attacked.

Faced with this unprecedented violence, Ecuador chose a drastic response: President Daniel Noboa declared the country to be in a state of “internal armed conflict”, ordering the “neutralization” of criminal groups described as “terrorists” and “belligerents”. The state of emergency, which allows the army to be deployed in public spaces, was declared throughout the country for 90 days in January, then again for 60 days at the end of May, this time in seven of the country’s 24 provinces, where, according to the government decree, there has been “a systematic increase in criminal violence perpetrated by violent organized groups, terrorist organizations and non-state actors”. This policy has been criticised by the NGO Human Rights Watch, which pointed to human rights violations.

El Salvador: repression at all costs

Criminality score: 52nd out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 154

The birth and spread of gangs in El Salvador is an indirect consequence of the civil war (1980-1992). Thousands of Salvadorans, who had emigrated to the United States, settled in the poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, where the two main Central American gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 were born. Expelled by the United States in the early 1990s, they returned to El Salvador and embarked on criminal activities: human trafficking, extortion, racketeering, assault, armed robbery, arms and cocaine trafficking.

In the space of a decade, gangs have become extremely powerful and dangerous. So much so that in 2015, El Salvador became the most dangerous country in the world that is not at war, with a rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The country’s authorities then classified the gangs and their “leaders, members, collaborators, apologists and financiers” as “terrorists” and declared any kind of negotiation with them illegal.

In March 2022, after an unprecedented wave of homicides (87 people killed in two days), the young president Nayib Bukele introduced a “state of exception”, with a massive deployment of military personnel across the country. The initiative bore fruit, with “the capture of more than 81,900 terrorists”, according to the government, i.e. more than 1% of the population, and tens of thousands of convictions in mass trials, with up to 900 people being tried together. According to the investigative website Insight Crime, the homicide rate, which had already fallen from 103 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015 to 36 in 2019 when Bukele came to power, will sink to 2.4 in 2023.

According to Bukele, gangs are responsible for 120,000 homicides since the end of the civil war in 1992, a figure higher than the 75,000 deaths during the twelve years of conflict. “We will not stop until we eradicate what little remains of the gangs,” declared last March Nayib Bukele, who is very popular for his handling of insecurity and was re-elected in February 2024. Under his presidency, El Salvador has become, he says, “the safest country of Latin America”. But at what cost, ask human rights organisations. The country had the highest incarceration rate in the world in 2023: 1,086 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the World Prison Brief. For Amnesty International, the “Bukele model” is being implemented with disregard for the rights and freedoms of citizens.

Haiti: state of emergency

Criminality score: 50th out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 40.9 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 4,789

Since 2023, gang violence has exploded in Haiti, with the homicide rate more than doubling in one year, from 18.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022 to 40.9 in 2023, according to data from the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti. As a result, the country had almost 5,000 homicides in 2023, compared with 2,000 in 2022. The number of people kidnapped has also almost doubled, reaching 2,490 in 2023.

According to the UN, the total number of gang victims killed, injured or kidnapped is around 8,000. “Gang killings, kidnappings and sexual violence (…) continue with widespread impunity,” said Antonio Guterres in his 2024 report to the Security Council, referring to “the staggering and worsening level of gang violence”.

According to the UNODC, the country is under the control of 150 to 200 gangs, equipped with increasingly sophisticated weapons (Russian AK-47s, American AR-15s, Israeli Galil assault rifles) linked to trafficking. In the capital, Port-au-Prince, there are around 20 gangs, divided into two major coalitions, G-Pèp and G9 Famille et Alliés. Almost the entire capital, major strategic sites and the main roads are in their hands. Terrorised, tens of thousands of inhabitants have fled and are crammed into makeshift camps where insalubrity and famine reign. According to the International Organization for Migration, nearly 600,000 people, half of them children, are internally displaced, i.e. 1 in 20 Haitians.

On July 17, Prime Minister Garry Conille announced a state of emergency in 14 communes where the violence is concentrated, in Port-au-Prince and in the departments of Artibonite and Ouest. On August 19, the state of emergency was extended to other departments and for a further month. These measures, along with the deployment of Kenyan police officers as part of a multinational security support mission, have so far failed to curb the violence. In the absence of results, the population is organizing barricades and self-defence groups.

Honduras: a partial “state of exception”

Criminality score: 13th out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 31.1 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 3,035

Honduras holds the unenviable title of Central America’s most violent country, with a homicide rate of more than 31 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, according to investigative website Insight Crime, and more than 3,000 deaths in 2023. These figures have been falling steadily for a decade: by way of comparison, the homicide rate was 79 per 100,000 in 2013. Crime remains particularly high, however, and is spreading outside the country’s two major cities, traditional gang strongholds.

As a key transit point for transnational drug trafficking, the country has seen the development of drug trafficking groups such as Barrio 18 (M-18) and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), as well as street gangs known as pandillas. According to estimates by the NGO Human Rights Watch, there are hundreds of them in the country, with some 40,000 members. In reality, the number of gang members, large and small, is closer to 15,000, according to Lester Ramirez, a researcher at Gl-TOC. These organizations control entire neighbourhoods and impose their own laws, with a classic modus operandi: drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping.

These gangs also thrive thanks to protection from one of the most corrupt police forces on the continent as well as the country’s economic and political elite, as testified by the traffickers arrested and brought to justice. Some groups have even infiltrated state institutions: cases of collusion between organized crime and high-ranking politicians, particularly from the ruling National Party, are frequent. These include former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was extradited and tried in the United States, where he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.

In December 2022, his successor, President Xiomara Castro, declared a “state of emergency” over more than half the country, including the capital Tegucigalpa and the second largest city, San Pedro Sula. She also called in the army, taking a leaf out of El Salvador’s book on the “Bukele model”. This has been without success for the moment, according to ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), an NGO that collects data on violent conflicts and demonstrations in every country and territory in the world.

In fact, the Head of State is also in turmoil. At the end of August, she cancelled the extradition treaty with the United States that had led to the imprisonment of some 50 drug traffickers. According to the opposition, this decision was motivated by a desire to protect members of her government and her family. According to a video filmed by drug traffickers, her brother-in-law accepted large sums of money in 2013 to help Castro’s election campaign.

Mexico: 30,000 deaths a year

Criminality score: 3rd out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 23.3 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023: 29,675

As a hub for drugs from Latin America to the United States and Europe, Mexico is confronted with very high levels of violence, particularly in the north of the country, with one main activity: trafficking in heroin, cocaine and synthetic drugs.

As a result, the country’s homicide rate broke records at 29 per 100,000 inhabitants between 2018 and 2020, before falling to 23.3 in 2023. But the number of violent deaths, estimated at nearly 30,000 a year, remains extremely high, as does the number of disappearances, estimated at over 115,000, most of which have occurred since 2006, when the war against the drug cartels began.

With the exception of the Sinaloa Cartel, which remains the most powerful criminal organization on the continent, and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the other organisations (Cartel del Golfo, Cartel de Los Beltrán Leyva, Cartel de Juárez, Cartel de Tijuana, Los Zetas, etc.) are now in decline, their leaders killed or arrested in recent years. The result is a fragmentation of the cartels and a multitude of criminal gangs such as Los Metros and Los Escorpiones. According to the investigative website Insight Crime, there are dozens of independent cells spread across the country, fighting each other and carrying out criminal activities such as extortion, trafficking in arms, human beings including migrants, money laundering, smuggling, theft and armed robbery.

To combat the cartels, Mexico tried the “war on drugs”, launched by President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012). Then his successor Enrique Peña Nieto (2013-2018) promised a preventive approach against the gangs, without any concrete results. The Abrazos, No Balazos (hugs, not shootings) campaign of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has not had much effect either: endemic corruption and the failings of the state are preventing any concrete results, especially as the new gangs are younger, more violent and lack a strategic vision.

Nigeria: the North-West under the terror of “bandits”

Criminality score: 6th out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 21.7 per 100,000 population (2019)
Number of homicides in 2023: 44,200

In recent years, armed banditry has proliferated in north-west Nigeria, particularly in the states of Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto and Zamfara. This area is largely deserted by the security forces and the authorities have virtually lost control, unable to restore order and the rule of law. According to ACLED, the number of civilians killed by the violence of these armed gangs in the North-West between 2018 and 2023 exceeds the number killed in the North-East region of Nigeria over the same period by Ansaru and Jama’atu Ahlul Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP). ACLED counted more than 13,000 deaths linked to the activities of bandits between 2010 and 2023.

According to GI-TOC researcher Kingsley Madueke, these armed gangs, known to Nigerians as “bandits”, number between 10,000 and 30,000 members, although he stresses that these figures fluctuate. “There is no fixed membership: you can join in one operation and walk out, or just be an informer in a township,” he says. This is confirmed by ACLED’s research, which refers to “a hierarchical structure (that) does not preclude flexibility of membership, movement and action”. 

These bandits operate “mostly in rural areas and forest areas where you have limited state presence,” adds Madueke. “But they have spread their activities from their original operation base in the north-west to north central, from where they launch attacks on Abuja (the country’s administrative capital).” 

Looting, cattle rustling, kidnapping of locals and foreign workers, attacks on vehicles and villages, gold panning, extortion and tax collection are among their preferred modus operandi. “They have been very mobile, moving from one area to the other, and launch attacks from rural and forest areas into cities and villages, and then retreat back to their bases,” says Madueke. 

These gangs, whose leaders gradually become warlords, work together and sometimes also cooperate with jihadist groups such as JAS. In November 2021, the government labelled these bandits “terrorists” and launched military operations to combat them, including air strikes on their supposed bases. To no avail. Banditry continues unabated.

South Africa: a “national crisis”

Criminality score: 7th out of 193 countries
Homicide rate: 45.1 per 100,000 inhabitants
Number of homicides in 2023-2024: 27,419

The Restorama Kids, the Dirty Bastards, the Clever Kids, the Sexy Boys, the Mafias or the Dixie Boys: hundreds of gangs proliferate in the townships of South Africa’s major cities. In Cape Town alone, the South African police estimate that there are 90 to 130 gangs, with a total of 100,000 members. These gangsters, known as Totsis, make their living from a wide range of criminal activities, from drug trafficking (cocaine, heroin, synthetic drugs) to kidnapping, arms and human trafficking.

Extortion has become the country’s burgeoning new business, described by the police as a “national crisis”, while illegal mining has given rise to violent clashes between rival gangs of illegal miners, nicknamed zama zamas.

According to the latest data from the South African Police Service (SAPS), between April 2023 and March 2024, the country recorded more than 27,000 homicides. The homicide rate is 45.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to SAPS, not counting armed robberies, carjackings, kidnappings and rapes (with a very high rate of 70 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Understaffed and under-equipped, the South African police force has had difficulty coping with rapid urbanisation and the rise of street gangs. Its ineffectiveness is also due to endemic corruption in its ranks, denounced in 2020 by prosecutor Andrew Whitfield, who described the SAPS as a police force “rotten to the core”. In recent years, the army has therefore been increasingly called upon and deployed in certain townships, particularly in Cape Town, to support the police, tasks for which it is ill-equipped.

In 2019 and 2021, the army intervened on the orders of President Cyril Ramaphosa after a wave of shootings and murders linked in particular to drug trafficking. To no avail. At the end of August, after yet another shooting in an extortion case, the Head of State promised to tackle crime: “We are now taking the war against those who extort money. We are taking the war against the construction mafia. We are taking the war against the gangsters. We are now going to take you on and make sure you’re brought to justice,” he said.

* By way of comparison, the homicide rate is 0.5 per 100,000 in Switzerland, 1.4 in France, 1.5 in Vietnam and 6.8 in the United States. The average rate in Europe is 3, in Africa 12.5 and in South America 23.

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