Fighting Organized Crime, Illicit Trade, and Corrosive Capital across the Caribbean
Statement by David M. Luna, Executive Director, ICAIE
9 December 2025
Fighting Organized Crime, Illicit Trade, and Corrosive Capital across the Caribbean
It is an honor for ICAIE to join this year’s ACAMS The Assembly Caribbean 2025 and to speak during the Panel on “The Inter-Linked Webs of Organized Crime in the Caribbean”. Increasingly, violent gangs, drug cartels, and criminal organizations in the Caribbean are expanding their illicit empires across the global illegal economy by diversifying into more lucrative illicit markets that range from drugs, guns and counterfeit goods to gold, wildlife, and human trafficking. Our panel discussion earlier explored how these criminal networks overlap and reinforce each other’s illicit enterprises — a growing “crime convergence” that fuels corruption and money laundering, threatens governance, and undermines financial systems and economic development across the region.
In recent months, many of us have seen the headlines on the growing harms posed by the drug cartels and other criminal networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. These range from threats to the United States, Canada, and Mexico on the illegal fentanyl trade front, to South America’s cocaine illicit trafficking routes, to gangs in the Caribbean fomenting violence and chaos, and as news reporting by investigative journalists have illuminated, rising levels of money launderers operating in this hemisphere.
To understand this expanding ecosystem of criminality and illicit shadows, one has to visualize the security landscape of organized crime and illicit trade in the Caribbean as a threat multiplier and through a prism of crime convergence.
The security environment in the Caribbean is worsening, with record levels of criminality and violence, especially as gangs become more fragmented, and as they fight over turf, lucrative illicit markets, power and political influence.
In fact, the Caribbean today is flooded not only with drugs and illicit goods but with too many guns and too much dirty money, with too many innocent bystanders caught in the middle of drug trafficking, cross-border illegal trade, and gunslinging criminals.
An archipelago of Free Trade Zones (FTZs) and hubs of illicit trade has further facilitated greater criminality including Panama’s Colón Free Zone (CFZ), Aruba Free Zone, Corozal Free Zone in Belize, Curaçao Harbor Free Economic Zone, and others in Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago; and even more remote inter-linked ones in China, Cambodia, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The same routes and smuggling logistics used to move drugs are now leveraged by the same criminal networks to traffick people, arms, counterfeits, illicit cigarettes, illegal gold, and other contraband. In fact, the Mexican cartels and other criminal groups are diversifying into these more lucrative illicit commodities where profits are often greater than drug trafficking.
Historically, the growing lucrative illicit trade has accounted for the rise of criminality and drug trafficking of cocaine and the cannabis trade in the Caribbean. Many criminals, including associates within the prison systems connected to Colombia, Peru, Bolivia-based drug traffickers use illicit trade to build their own illicit empires in this subregion.
A “Balloon Effect” exacerbated hemispheric insecurity.
For example, in the 1980’s about 75 percent of all cocaine intercepted by U.S. law enforcement came through Caribbean countries. After interdictions efforts were stepped up the U.S. and other countries subsequently, the cocaine trade was disrupted and traffickers by and large moved drugs through Central America for the next few decades.
In recent years, following U.S. law enforcement crackdowns in Mexico and Central America, and during/after the COVID 19 pandemic, illicit drugs spiked again in the Caribbean (and Canada). Now according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at least 25 percent or more are flowing through the Caribbean Sea through shipping containers, speed boats, and planes.
After a period of such robust law enforcement actions, criminal gangs in Jamaica, for example, have continued to fight one another over power, territory, and drug routes, extortion, money laundering, and have formed alliances with other regional and international cartels and TCOs, resulting in increased levels of organized crime.
Trinidad and Tobago, due to its strategic location in the Caribbean (11km from Venezuela), is exploited as major transit hub for cocaine and contraband, and has experienced one of the highest rates of gang homicides in the region.
In the Dominican Republic, Latin drug cartels have leveraged the country’s infrastructure to coordinate cocaine shipments to Europe and the United States.
Haiti has been captured by criminal gangs and today is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
It is also a reality that the United States remains the richest demand market for illicit drugs in the world and the biggest producer of guns which are smuggled out of the US and trafficked across the hemisphere. 73% of firearms recovered from 25 Caribbean countries and tracked by U.S. law enforcement between 2018 – 2022 could be sourced to the United States, with most sales originating in Florida, Texas, and Georgia.
As a result, numerous states of emergency have been declared in several Caribbean countries related to gang violence, insecurity, and instability.
Public trust continues to decline, undermining governance, prosperity and social cohesion. The private sector continues to be concerned about the high levels of corruption and organized crime that impede quality investments.
The reality is that increased illicit trade and criminality have also helped criminals to launder their filthy profits in financial safe havens within the Caribbean including through trade-based money laundering (TBML), informal value transfer systems (IVTS), and anonymous shell companies, with the complicity of professional enablers and the turning a blind eye by ruling power elites whose illicit wealth has grown exponentially.
Finally, it is also evident that poverty, social inequality, lack of economic opportunities and unemployment have helped to create the underlying root conditions where innocent citizens become easy prey for recruitment and for gangs to thrive in the region.
Caribbean and other Hemispheric leaders need to better address issues of misgovernance, corruption, and criminality because when organized crime captures a state, it threatens the future of citizens, corrodes free markets, and imperils governance institutions.
Enduring public-private partnerships can be force multipliers to counter organized crime and illicit economies across borders, including through information- and intelligence-sharing between sectors and through the development of innovative technologies.
Together, we can confront today’s threats decisively in the Caribbean and Western Hemisphere, and invest our market integrity dividends to benefit us all towards brighter futures and safer communities.
Washington DC
