Leonardo Coutinho, director of the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS) and expert on drug trafficking, corruption, and transnational crime, spoke exclusively with Diálogo about the profound transformation of organized crime in Latin America. Coutinho warns that these structures are no longer just illicit businesses, but political actors with global influence.
The most obvious case is Venezuela, where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal have blurred, giving rise to a state operating as a criminal structure with the backing of extra-regional actors such as China, Russia, and Iran. Based on this analysis, Coutinho shows how violence, illicit money, and politics are intertwined, redefining regional security and challenging any traditional view of crime in the region.
Diálogo: You have documented how Latin American criminal organizations have evolved from simple cartels into hybrid networks with political, financial, and military components. How would you describe the new morphology of transnational organized crime in the region, and which criminal structures best embody this model?
Leonardo Coutinho, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society: Organized crime remains a deeply misunderstood enterprise by many governments. There are still views that reduce it to purely domestic dynamics. In Brazil, for example, the First Capital Command (PCC) or the Red Command (CV) are seen as internal phenomena, and the same is true of Mexican cartels, gangs, or Colombian cartels. Even when it is recognized that they traffic drugs abroad, the true transnational dimension and level of sophistication they have achieved are not acknowledged.
Today, these organizations function as highly organized, business-minded, and internationalized criminal joint ventures. They no longer operate through simple trafficking or laundering structures, but rather integrate illicit economies, routes, logistics, and complex financial systems. In addition, they have taken an evolutionary leap and adopted a hybrid structure that transcends conventional criminality.
A crucial example is the cooperation between the PCC and Hezbollah less than two decades ago. Although many are reluctant to accept that a group that emerged in Brazilian prisons could coordinate with a transnational terrorist organization, it happened. The PCC controls the routes from Brazil to Africa, where Hezbollah takes over and moves the drugs to the Middle East. There, Hezbollah provides logistics, distribution, and external money laundering networks, allowing the PCC to internationalize. In turn, the PCC facilitates the movement of money within Brazil to finance Hezbollah’s activities outside Lebanon. The level of sophistication is enormous.
This shows that organizations such as the PCC or Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA), now with a documented presence in 11 countries in the region, are clear examples of groups that have evolved from first-generation structures to become fourth-generation organizations. They no longer just traffic drugs or extort money, but also control territory, exercise capabilities typical of terrorist organizations such as attacks, external money laundering networks, international planning, and operate with increasing political integration.
For its part, the Cartel of the Suns in Venezuela has all the characteristics of a state criminal organization that is a structural part of the state and the regime itself. In this scheme, it converges with the TdA, which operates as its enforcement arm. We are no longer talking about conventional or merely transnational crime; we are talking about “weaponized crime,” where a government exports criminality as a strategy of destabilization, violence, and chaos.
All of this leads us to this new reality of organized crime, which can no longer be combated as if it were a matter of gangs or domestic problems. Many governments still refuse to recognize these organizations as terrorists, and therein lies one of the major problems. The designation enables indispensable tools to combat transnational criminal organizations, such as blocking foreign financing, international cooperation with Europe and the United States, and mechanisms to interrupt illicit money flows.
The key today is to block financing. The volume of resources handled by these structures is enormous and circulates through increasingly sophisticated mechanisms, such as hawala-type systems connected to fully transnational criminal networks, including Chinese mafias.
The restrictions imposed by Xi Jinping on withdrawing funds from China have led many Chinese investors to resort to a Chinese hawala, through which they buy “narco dollars” abroad and make payments within China to drug traffickers. In this way, capital remains in Hong Kong or Macao or is used to pay for exports of goods that allow “legal” stores financed with drug money to be set up. This level of complexity and financial breadth defines the current structure of transnational crime. This is today’s reality.
Diálogo: You have also pointed to the expansion of kleptocratic regimes in Latin America, where the state becomes a machine for institutionalized looting. Which countries illustrate this trend today, and what are the most obvious signs of its consolidation?
Coutinho: The best example is Venezuela. It is the clearest case of a country that has become an institutionalized criminal structure that is part of the state apparatus. There is no longer a boundary between what is legal and what is illegal. The state has disappeared as an entity separate from crime.
I refuse to call Venezuela a “narco-state” [in the conventional sense]. A narco-state is what Pablo Escobar tried to build in Colombia or what the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) tried to do by capturing the state through influence. This is not the case in Venezuela. Venezuela is a drug-trafficking state. In other words, the state itself assumes the functions of a criminal enterprise. Today, the Maduro regime, its ministers, and the entire state structure are criminal actors.
Added to this is Nicaragua, which has become a recipient of drugs from Colombia and Venezuela, fueling instability in Central America. And then there is Cuba, which many forget, but which was the first country to institutionalize drug trafficking in the 1980s with Fidel Castro selling services to Pablo Escobar. In my research, I have spoken with exiled Chavistas who claim that it was Fidel who taught Chávez to use drugs as a weapon. And that’s how it is, which is why the Cartel of the Suns has only one father, Chávez, and one godfather, Fidel Castro.
Diálogo: In the case of Venezuela, what concrete evidence supports the transformation of the Venezuelan regime from conventional authoritarianism to functioning as a criminal structure, and how does this metamorphosis of the state into a “mafia state” materialize in the dynamics of power?
Coutinho: It all begins in a democratic context. Chávez was elected, possibly in the only truly free election in Venezuela’s modern history. He starts with a normal government, with popular measures, and then with increasingly unpopular decisions. The 2002 coup attempt is a turning point. That is when Chávez understands that he must accelerate the Bolivarian revolution and, above all, control or destroy the military culture.
Chávez began to grant military equipment, privileges, and benefits —Venezuela now has more generals than any other country in Latin America, and even more than the United States — and, at the same time, he modified military doctrine. New generations of officers had to adopt Bolivarian education and study asymmetric warfare inspired by Islamic models.
Between 2002 and 2006, a little-documented process took place: the criminal infiltration of military sectors. Following Fidel Castro’s advice, Chávez allegedly allowed the military to use official trucks to support the FARC, which led to their involvement in the cocaine trade. Once a military structure is corrupted by drugs, it can finance any type of operation, including asymmetric warfare. This is how what would later be known as the Cartel of the Suns, made up of high-ranking officers who ended up joining a criminal structure that destroyed Venezuelan military culture, came into being.
At the same time, Chávez dismantled the private sector through expropriations and persecuted opponents, eroding democracy and institutions. It was not an instantaneous process, but it was accelerated. When Nicolás Maduro came to power, Venezuela was already deeply affected by criminal dynamics, but Maduro amplified them. Unlike Maduro, Chávez was more discreet, but Maduro is not. That is when Venezuela ceased to be a narco-state and became a drug-trafficking state. Today, Maduro is nothing more than a figurehead; he is not a real actor, but a symbol, sustained mainly by criminal networks and extra-regional support, such as China and Russia.
To talk about Maduro today is to talk only about the façade. The real power lies in a network where organized crime now occupies a space and wields influence in the United Nations.
Diálogo: The Tren de Aragua, now considered a terrorist organization by several governments, has expanded throughout the continent. What factors explain its rapid internationalization? Is there evidence of complicity, protection, or permissiveness on the part of the Venezuelan regime in this process?
Coutinho: The Tren de Aragua was born in Venezuela’s prisons at the time when Nicolás Maduro created a prison ministry, a state organization to oversee the administration of prisons. The head of that ministry, an official from the state of Aragua, allowed one of the prisons under his jurisdiction to become a laboratory for control and recruitment of groups initially intended for internal repression. TdA was therefore born inside prisons, but with no intention of expanding outside the country.
That course changed with the mass migration from Venezuela. Starting in 2014, Maduro ordered the release of prisoners and took advantage of the exodus to quietly expel them, using them as a kind of Trojan horse. The humanitarian drama, with millions of people fleeing, completely overshadowed what was happening in parallel. The eyes of the continent were focused on the tragedy, not on who was involved in it. And, in that context, the strategy worked. The released criminals dispersed to different countries and, little by little, established the first cells of the TdA outside Venezuela. It was not a massive “invasion” of criminals, but rather a gradual infiltration, disguised in the flow of migrants.
Over time, recruitment became even easier. Many Venezuelan migrants involved in minor crimes in their destination countries did not belong to the TdA, but the group attracted them by offering protection. This is how increasingly robust cells were consolidated. And here lies a crucial difference with other criminal organizations. While organizations such as the Brazilian PCC, for example, have grown without state support and without operating through cells, TdA does have these two characteristics. That is why the argument that Venezuela does not operate as a simple narco-state, but as a criminal state, and the prison origin administered by the state, the release of prisoners, and their cell expansion are nothing more than evidence of this transformation.
TdA is now a transnational criminal organization whose cells carry out conventional crimes such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, and extortion in their daily activities, but remain available for specific operations of the regime. The case of Ronald Ojeda [the dissident Venezuelan military officer who was kidnapped and murdered in Chile in 2024, in a crime that Chilean authorities allege was politically motivated, ordered by Diosdado Cabello, and carried out by TdA members] appears to be an example of this instrumentalization. Furthermore, the timeline of the group’s expansion coincides with episodes of extremely violent protests in countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Chile. In the case of Colombia, there are records of individuals linked to Venezuelan crime participating in protests at the beginning of the pandemic. It is not that they act as an ideological insurgency, but rather as criminals activated by a criminal state to carry out selective killings or magnify chaos when the regime needs it.
Thus, TdA is no longer just a gang born in a prison, but a functional piece within a much larger machine. They are a criminal organization at the service of a criminal state, which uses them when necessary.
Diálogo: You mentioned that the expansion of TdA has coincided with spikes in violence in countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Chile. Ecuador has also experienced a rapid deterioration in security. How has Ecuador been transformed as a result of the expansion of transnational organized crime, particularly with TdA’s presence?
Coutinho: Ecuador is one of the most interesting examples of how organized crime has mutated in the region. The deterioration of its security began after the peace process in Colombia, when the demobilization of the FARC left a surplus of “criminal manpower” that began to move and directly affect the country. This criminal force quickly integrated into new illicit structures, opening the door to European mafias — especially Lebanese ones — and Chinese criminal networks. With the emergence of the TdA, the scenario was consolidated and Ecuador became an expanding criminal hub, virtually impossible to contain.
The central problem is that many governments continue to deny this phenomenon. They even resist recognizing organizations such as TdA as transnational criminal structures. This denial has allowed them to consolidate in at least 11 countries, including Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and the Dominican Republic. They have even managed to expand into territories that, on the surface, maintained a certain stability. And in places like Haiti, where the state is practically non-existent, the organization has spread its tentacles without any resistance.
The crisis in Haiti is a clear example of this pattern. It all stems from the absence of the state, a vacuum that empowers criminal networks. This criminality is fueled by cocaine from Colombia, but mobilized by Venezuela, which drives waves of violence throughout the region. Drug trafficking has become an instrument of destabilization, and TdA is an integral part of that machinery. All this is happening because states continue to act as if they were dealing with “conventional” crime, when in reality they are dealing with transnational and hybrid criminal structures.
Diálogo: The Orinoco Mining Arc was presented by the Nicolás Maduro regime as a sustainable development project, but various investigations describe it as an enclave controlled by military structures and criminal networks. What role does gold play in the political and economic sustainability of the regime, and how is this resource linked to the participation of national and international criminal actors?
Coutinho: We are talking about an extensive gold-bearing region in Venezuela that covers a considerable part of the national territory. In a democratic state, this mineral would be legally exploited through concessions, generating tax revenues and contributing to the country’s prosperity. That would be the ideal scenario. But in today’s Venezuela, all that is just rhetoric.
Most of the extraction is illegal and controlled by networks in which military officials provide logistics and protection. In this scheme, the line between legal and illegal has virtually disappeared. And it is not just a few corrupt military personnel: It’s the entire structure of the Venezuelan state that operates under a logic of systemic corruption, deeply intertwined with illicit economies.
That gold has three main destinations. The first is China, which does not need to “legalize” it, as it incorporates it directly into its Central Bank reserves; part of that gold serves as debt payment or as a mechanism of corruption to prop up the regime. The second destination is Turkey, which does require legalization and receives large volumes of Venezuelan gold and re-exports it as formal gold. And the third is Nicaragua. Flights from Venezuela arrive loaded with gold, and one need only look at Nicaragua’s export figures, which are implausible for a country that does not produce gold on that scale.
This whole network shows how illegal Venezuelan gold finances corruption and enriches the regime to the extent necessary to keep it operational.
Part II
In the second part of this interview, Coutinho reveals the most alarming aspect of the hemispheric criminal map: the internationalization of the Venezuelan mafia state and its operational connection with Iran, Russia, China, and Hezbollah. This chapter completely dismantles the idea that crime in the region is an isolated or domestic phenomenon and demonstrates how extra-regional powers are using Venezuela as a platform to wage a silent hybrid war that already extends beyond its borders and places all of Latin America at real, immediate, and accelerating risk to hemispheric security.
