Crime and immigration fears are handing conservative populists a fresh opening across Latin America, even as the region’s combined average homicide rate dropped by more than 5% last year compared with 2024, according to InSight Crime. The numbers don’t stop the political machinery. They just get repackaged into stump speeches, border panic and promises to lock people up faster than the problems can be named.
Who Pays for the Crackdown
In Peru, authorities tallied 2,400 homicides last year, and extortion has increased fivefold in the past five years. In Colombia, authorities recorded 14,780 homicides last year, the most in each country since at least 2020. In Ecuador, killings rose 31% year-on-year to 9,216, while authorities also recorded more than 16,100 cases of extortion last year, down from 23,000 in 2024, though experts say it’s an underreported crime. Those are the conditions ordinary people are living under while politicians sell themselves as the only adults in the room.
The political shift has been reinforced by heavy-handed security strategies popularized by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and by speeches casting migrants as criminals. Those messages have won backing from U.S. President Donald Trump and energized disaffected voters, even as critics warn they could encourage human rights abuses or threaten democracy. Enrique Roig, vice president of the nonprofit Human Rights First and a former State Department official, said, "You have an emergent right wing that is very much in collaboration across the region and with the U.S. through the MAGA movement, which has also used crime as a rallying cry for political mobilization," and added, "It’s easier to sell locking people up than it is to deal with the reasons why mainly young men join gangs in countries like El Salvador."
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America organization, said only the right has offered short-term security solutions that make voters "feel safer in six months" even if they have to "sacrifice democracy and human rights." He said left-wing proposals such as community violence prevention programs, better police training and judicial and prison reforms take longer to work. "It’s absolutely what you’re supposed to be doing, but people’s patience runs out," Isacson said. "So, there come the Bukeles of the world saying, ‘You want to feel better? We got this.’"
The Vote for Order
In Colombia, pro-Trump businessman Abelardo de la Espriella has topped polls ahead of Sunday’s runoff election as he takes his cues from Bukele. In Peru, Keiko Fujimori reached a June 7 presidential runoff on a law-and-order platform, vowing to deploy the military in prisons and along borders as she leans on the authoritarian legacy of her disgraced late father, former President Alberto Fujimori. Costa Ricans, rattled by record levels of drug-related killings, elected conservative populist Laura Fernández in February for her tough-on-crime platform. Honduran businessman Nasry Asfura swept December’s election after Trump endorsed him as a partner in the fight against "narco-communists."
Chile shows how quickly fear can be turned into a political weapon. Four years ago, Chilean voters rejected ultra-conservative lawmaker José Antonio Kast in favor of ex-President Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed former student protest leader. Last year, fears over rising crime and its frequent association in media with the country’s growing population of Venezuelan immigrants played into Kast’s hands, returning him to power. As Venezuelan crime syndicates like the Tren de Aragua gang seized on their country’s mass migration wave to infiltrate human trafficking networks after the pandemic, Chile, long one of Latin America’s safest countries, witnessed an unprecedented explosion of carjackings, kidnappings and shoot-outs.
Chile’s homicide rate rose by 30%, to a peak of 6.7 per 100,000 people from 2021 to 2022, according to the Interior Ministry. It has since dropped but has stayed above pre-2021 levels. Other violent crime is still rising, including kidnappings, which have increased by nearly 180% over the past four years. Drawing inspiration from Bukele, whose mega-prisons in El Salvador he toured while campaigning, Kast beat his Communist opponent in December with pledges to build a massive border wall, toughen prison conditions for gang members and deport hundreds of thousands of migrants without legal status. Voters shrugged off Kast’s opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage rights and his defense of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship.
What the Institutions Call Safety
Experts say the public’s appetite for tough tactics, historically associated with the region’s right-wing 20th-century dictatorships, has grown alongside shrinking confidence in state institutions and deepening ambivalence about democracy. Eduardo Moncada, director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, said, "The thinking is often, ‘democracy hasn’t been able to keep me and my family safe, so maybe democracy is part of the problem.’" The left faces a major challenge in many countries after presiding over sluggish economies, corruption scandals and failed promises of social reform.
Even progressives such as Jeannette Jara in Chile and Sánchez in Peru have shifted with the political tide. Uruguay’s president, Yamandú Orsi, called Bukele’s model an example worthy of further study. The center-left Guatemalan government declared a state of emergency to crack down on gang violence this year and welcomed the Trump administration’s help targeting drug traffickers.
Recently elected politicians’ hard-line ambitions have collided with the practicalities of governing complex and cash-strapped democracies like Ecuador and Chile, which are nothing like tiny El Salvador, where Bukele’s party holds a legislative supermajority. Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa had campaigned in 2023 on locking up gang leaders on barges and building mega-prisons. He abandoned the floating prisons proposal after taking office, and it took his government until November to open the first mega-prison.
Beatriz García Nice, policy analyst for the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank, said, "Building mega-prisons hasn’t been that easy or that straightforward because the country is in a very bad state financially and because President Daniel Noboa still sees himself as a democrat." Nearly three months into Kast’s tenure, pollsters said a skeptical public couldn’t tell the difference between his security crackdown and that of his left-wing predecessor. His government had organized only two deportation flights after promising to immediately round up and expel Chile’s more than 300,000 immigrants without legal status. Last month, he came under fire for calling the mass deportation promise "a metaphor." In a June 1 address, Kast proposed new security measures, including banning those convicted of attacking police from receiving social benefits, and said, "Governing, as many of you know, means taking responsibility for reality, especially when it’s difficult," adding, "I’m proceeding step by step because this isn’t something that happens overnight."
The pattern is plain enough. Leaders campaign on fear, promise order, then run into the limits of cash-strapped states and their own contradictions. Meanwhile, the people living with violence, extortion, deportation threats and prison expansion keep paying the bill.