In How a New Drug Trafficking Panorama Fuels Violence in Latin America, the Worldwide Disaster Group (ICG) maps the provision chains transporting cocaine and fentanyl from Latin America to customers in Europe and North America. The map reveals how a long time of failed prohibitionist insurance policies, shifting demand, and more and more fragmented legal networks have reworked drug trafficking right into a hyper-violent, adaptable trade. An trade which is wreaking havoc on communities all through Latin America.
The ICG’s findings are offered in an interactive Mapbox storymap, permitting readers to hint these medicine’ journeys – from uncooked materials extraction and manufacturing to ultimate avenue distribution. This sprawling system depends on a transnational community of legal teams working throughout continents.
Every drug’s manufacturing and distribution contain quite a few gangs, making a hierarchy the place earnings move upward to cartels, financiers, and worldwide traffickers. In the meantime, violence festers on the grassroots stage as gangs struggle for territorial management, devastating communities throughout Latin America.
Regardless of a long time of militarized crackdowns, legal teams have solely multiplied. U.S. strain for heavy-handed responses has typically backfired – fragmenting cartels into extra violent networks, deepening institutional corruption, and displacing trafficking routes into beforehand unaffected areas like Ecuador and Costa Rica.
