Crime Archive

In Honduras, the Central American country with the highest homicide rate in the world, the two largest and most dangerous street gangs declared a truce Tuesday. The agreement between MS-13 and Barrio 18 is modeled after one that took effect last year between the same gangs in El Salvador. “The success of the truce in El Salvador, which has reduced homicide levels from 14 per day to five per day since it was negotiated in March 2012, was certainly an important impetus for Honduras to test a similar path,” Rachel Schwartz, program associate at the Inter-American Dialogue, told Trend Lines […]

Central America has returned as an international battleground, not against communism but against organized crime. With successive crackdowns against drug traffickers in the Caribbean, Colombia and, most recently, in Mexico, the countries of Central America’s northern triangle—Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras—have become a center for illegal narcotics transshipment. Beyond their geographic location and extensive coastlines, the combination of weak institutions, political instability and corrupt police in these countries makes the region an ideal base for traffickers. And with astronomical crime rates—Honduras officially has the world’s highest murder rate, at more than 80 homicides per 100,000 people, with El Salvador close […]

As President Barack Obama learned during his whirlwind trip to Mexico in early May 2013, President Enrique Pena Nieto, like his predecessors, is eager to lessen his nation’s security, economic and trade dependence on the United States. During the visit, the U.S. chief executive discussed economic cooperation, education, border infrastructure, migration and the drug war. “We’ve done a lot of work with the previous Mexican administration on security issues and on economic issues. But sometimes the relationship gets characterized just as being about borders or just about drug cartels,” Obama told the Spanish-language network Telemundo. Proximity, joint assembly ventures, and […]

In late-April, the Obama administration blacklisted two Lebanese money exchanges for allegedly facilitating Hezbollah’s use of narcotics trafficking profits to fund terrorist activities. In an email interview, Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein program on counterterrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of the forthcoming “Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God,” explained the broad range of Hezbollah’s illicit activities and the growing savvy of its criminal network. WPR: What are Hezbollah’s main illicit business activities, and where is it most active? Matthew Levitt: Hezbollah is engaged in an amazingly broad array […]