The Trump administration has stepped up a crackdown on gangs bringing illegal drugs into the United States, with a focus on deadly military strikes at sea and increased border security.
But as the United States ramps up its overt intervention, experts warn that policymakers may be overlooking a key battleground: prisons across the region.
Some of Latin America’s most powerful criminal organizations were formed not in borderlands, streets or jungle hideouts, but inside the region’s prisons. Overcrowded, under-resourced and often effectively autonomous, these facilities have long served as incubators for armed groups to recruit, reorganize and expand their influence. Across the region, at least 10 organizations have been established or strengthened within prisons.
The same goes for the Torren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has cited as a target in recent attacks on a suspected drug ship that heightened tensions with Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, although there was no strong evidence of the vessel’s ties to criminal organizations.
According to a Transparency Venezuela report, the group was founded in the early 2010s inside the Tocolon prison in Aragua state and initially sought to impose internal order to ensure better living conditions.
“There was social dissatisfaction behind it, anger at the state’s treatment of prisoners,” Lona Risquez, a Venezuelan journalist and author of “El Torren de Aragua,” told CNN. “Inhumane conditions and lack of state support directly contributed to the increase in Prahran.”
Praan, an acronym for preso rematado asesino nato (“hardened inmate, born killer”), eventually became the de facto ruler of many Venezuelan prisons.
“They were in complete control. The National Guard and the prison warden followed their orders,” Riskus said. They taxed prisoners, controlled the flow of contraband goods, and even carried out extortion and kidnapping operations from outsiders. Although the government raided Tocoron Prison in 2023 and claims the criminal group has been disbanded, its leaders Hector Rustenford Guerrero Flores (also known as “Niño Guerrero”) and Johan Petryk are still at large.
This same movement was seen across the region. Organized crime groups such as Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) emerged in Brazilian prisons from the late 1970s to the 1990s in response to inmate revolts against overcrowding, abuse, and unstable living conditions.
Gregorio Fernández de Andrade, a criminal lawyer who worked in the system for 16 years on murder charges, said the cells were so crowded that prisoners often piled up in improvised hammocks suspended from the ceiling due to lack of space. “I was often in a 4-by-4 (meter) cell with 40 other inmates,” he said. “We had to take turns sleeping.”
According to federal government data, Brazil’s prisons are operating at 140% occupancy, with more than 700,000 inmates housed in facilities built for fewer than 500,000 people, a common reality in Latin American countries.
Demand turned into business for members of the organized group, which sells everything to inmates from hygiene products to food, personal safety and legal aid.
Andrade, who shared a cell with Roni Peixoto, one of the leaders of Comando Vermelho, and prisoners with ties to the PCC, said participation was rarely forced. “It’s not like there’s a gun to your head,” he said. “People are fighting to join out of necessity. These factions welcome you, more than any nation ever has.” CNN has reached out to the Brazilian government for comment.
By the mid-2000s, the PCC took control of São Paulo’s prisons. “There are criminals in about 90% of the state units, and there are virtually no murders. This system has been ‘pacified’ by the PCC for nearly 20 years,” said Camila Caldeira Nunez Díaz, a sociologist and professor at ABC Federal University.
PCC also runs one of the most powerful cocaine export networks in South America, supplying European markets through Brazilian ports, while CV controls the smuggling route from Peru through the Amazon, according to Insight Crime, a group that studies organized crime in the Americas. Experts say prison operations were crucial to the gang’s establishment in the outside world.
Gang leaders buy drugs, expand territory, and order murders inside prisons. “We call prisons the backroom of business,” Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group, told CNN. “Many leaders prefer to act from within because it’s safer inside.”
But disputes over such control over cells and the inmates within them can be deadly, especially in facilities where multiple factions coexist.
Across Latin America, prison massacres over territorial control are a recurring reality. At least 61 people were killed in a 2013 fight between gang bosses at Venezuela’s Uribana prison. In Brazil, a similar conflict triggered São Paulo’s infamous Carandil prison massacre in 1992, in which 111 prisoners were killed and spurred the rise of the PCC.
In Ecuador, the momentum is even more explosive. Because of its strategic role in global cocaine exports, regions like Guayaquil have allowed foreign forces such as Mexican cartels and Colombian dissidents to integrate into local gangs. Once their leaders were imprisoned, the fight for control moved directly to the prisons.
Daniel Ponton, dean of the School of Security and Defense at the Ecuadorian National Institute (IAEN), says Ecuador’s prisons are often made up of cell blocks controlled by different groups, which can lead to conflict.
“Each bloc had its own economy and leadership, and everything was privatized and controlled by gangs,” he says. “If I get into an argument with a criminal leader, I’ll go after him, kill him, and take over his criminal organization.”
That reality was starkly exposed in 2020 after the assassination of longtime Los Choneros coach Jorge Luis Zambrano, aka “Lasquinha.” His death shattered the balance he had maintained between rival factions. According to Insight Crime, groups such as Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones split and began a struggle for supremacy, leading to massacres that killed more than 400 prisoners in multiple states within three years.
For gang leaders, bloodshed is justified by profit. Ecuador’s prison market is currently worth more than $200 million a year, more than double the federal operating budget of SNAI, the agency that oversees the prison system (approximately $99 million in 2021).
And the prison has become a key node in the global cocaine chain, providing storage, logistics and protection for traffickers moving their shipments through the port of Guayaquil. CNN has reached out to the Ecuadorian government for comment.
Across Latin America, the hard-line mano dura (“strong hand”) movement has become a political focal point, with politicians operating on promises of harsher penalties, mass arrests and an expanded military role.
In 2024, Ecuador’s voters approved military involvement and long sentences for police following a series of assassinations and prison massacres. On November 18, Brazilian lawmakers voted to approve a bill that would classify groups such as the PCC and CV as terrorist organizations, with the aim of significantly increasing prison terms for those convicted under the law.
However, Brazil’s executive branch rejected the idea of classifying the PCC and CV as terrorist groups. At the High-Level Security Dialogue in Washington in March 2024, Brazil’s representative told the US representative that the PCC and CV are profit-driven criminal organizations rather than ideological groups and therefore do not meet Brazil’s legal standards for terrorism.
In that vein, El Salvador’s “Bucre model”, built on mass incarceration and the opening of CECOT, one of the world’s largest prisons with a capacity of 40,000 inmates, has become a political reference point, especially for right-wing leaders in Latin America. Ecuador’s Daniel Novoa, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña and Argentina’s Javier Millay have vowed to replicate the Salvadoran model.
Several countries in the region are investing in a new wave of prison construction as well. In Ecuador, the government began operating El Encuentro. The US$52 million facility in Santa Elena was built to house around 800 high-risk inmates and is equipped with biometric controls, signal jammers and enhanced surveillance systems, but violence remains. In 2024, Honduran President Xiomara Castro announced the construction of a massive 20,000-capacity prison as part of a broader crackdown on gangs, including increasing the number of arrests, designating gang activity as terrorists, and expanding the role of the military and police.
Human rights groups and security analysts have warned that President Nayib Boucle’s approach to mass incarceration in El Salvador will not be an easy transition, especially in a country with fragmented criminal markets and weakened state institutions.
“When prisons are overcrowded, disorganized and under-resourced, it creates an opportunity for criminal groups to take control of them,” Crisis Group’s Mr Dickinson said. “What ends up happening is that many individuals, especially low-level criminals, become victims of this exploitative economy. Many end up allying with factions just to get through this experience.”
Andrade, who was 22 when he was arrested, insists the answer lies in breaking the cycle.
“There were far more opportunities to participate in crime than to live an honest life,” he said. “It’s easier for a child to get a bag of drugs and a gun than it is to get a book and a pen.”
“There are good, smart people out there who can’t even imagine a second chance in society because they weren’t even allowed a first chance,” said Andrade, who eventually earned a master’s degree and became a criminal lawyer. “If you continue to brutalize people indoors, eventually they will become soldiers of crime outdoors.”
