Crime and immigration concerns are driving a far-right backlash across Latin America even as homicide rates have broadly declined compared with a decade ago. Rising extortion, spikes in violence in some countries, and heavy-handed security strategies popularized by El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, have created room for conservative populists to win votes with hard-line promises that critics warn could encourage human rights abuses or threaten democracy.
At the start of the decade, the region leaned left as progressive politicians won power amid public outrage over inequities worsened by the pandemic. Now, the political tide has shifted. 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, where extortion has increased fivefold in the past five years, 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."
The Reality Behind the Rhetoric
Latin America and the Caribbean last year saw their combined average homicide rate drop by more than 5% compared with 2024, with the median rate reaching about 17.6 per 100,000 people, according to InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas. But there are exceptions. Drug-fueled killings increased in Peru and Colombia, the world's top cocaine producers, as well as in neighboring Ecuador, whose major ports traffickers see as a gateway to European markets. Authorities tallied 2,400 homicides in Peru and 14,780 in Colombia last year, the most in each country since at least 2020. Killings rose 31% in Ecuador year-on-year, to 9,216.
Gangs are blamed for much of the violence that began soaring in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic, as cartels from Mexico, Colombia and the Balkans expanded their operations and hired locals, setting off a deadly fight over drug-trafficking routes. Their territorial disputes include prisons, where hundreds of inmates have been killed since 2021. Ecuadorian 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.
Human Rights at Risk
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." He 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.'"
Chile's Shift to the Right
4 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 4 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.
Governing Proves Harder Than Campaigning
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 3 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. 1 month ago, 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."
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.
Why This Matters:
The far-right surge across Latin America represents a troubling retreat from democratic norms and human rights protections at a moment when the region needs stronger institutions, not weaker ones. While voters' security concerns are real and legitimate, the authoritarian playbook being championed by leaders like Bukele and Kast offers short-term political theater rather than sustainable solutions to complex problems rooted in poverty, inequality, and weak state capacity. The political shift threatens to undermine civil liberties, scapegoat vulnerable migrant populations, and erode the judicial independence and democratic checks that prevent abuses of power. As these newly elected leaders struggle to deliver on campaign promises, the gap between rhetoric and reality exposes the fundamental weakness of their approach—one that prioritizes punishment over prevention and spectacle over the long-term investments in community programs, police reform, and social services that evidence shows actually reduce violence and build safer societies.