In Ecuador a rightwinger posing as a leftist, lenin moreno, got into power and started upending social programs and doing austerity shit. Covid 19 hit and made it all worse. Increased violence ensued. Drug dealers from Colombia (a lot from Ex-FARC territory) started moving in and using Ecuador as a major cocaine smuggling hub. Ecuador went from one of the safest countries to one of the most dangerous.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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In south america the Venezuelan mass migration broke people's brain, now anyone with a slight Venezuelan accent is part of the tren de Aragua,and everyone has a story about how Venezuelans killed someone they knew to steal their Nike sneakers, there are so many WhatsApp group that peddle reactionary propaganda
Crime has always been front and center in LatAm. It isn't nearly as violent as global north people like to act like it is, but it is still a place where there is so much poverty and inequality, it makes the perfect environment for crime to happen. You can point to imperialism, neoliberal policies adopted to appease the IMF or simply ideological privatization, economic conditions can't improve too much without sustained, systemic reforms over a long time, if not straight up revolution.
Add to this the venezuelan migrant crisis, where millions of people were trying to escape the worst of the effects of the sanctions and blockade, and you suddenly have LatAm countries dealing with something they had never dealt with before: mass migration and xenophobia. When impoverished migrants are met by an unprepared state apparatus usually leads to ghettoization, where organized crime can thrive, offering migrants what the state cannot. Crime suddenly has a national character, rather than it being about race or class.
On the other hand, many crime rates have been consistently dropping throughout the region. Things are getting better, even if it doesn't seem like it, and here we go to why the far right has successfully capitalized on this perception: fascists never have to deal in truth. It's been shown time and time again that votes for harsher policing and "tough on crime" policy are motivated by people's perception of crime, not the actual amount of crime they experience. This perception is in turn shaped by media, sensationalizing any instance of crime they find, and right wing politicians and influencers hammering the same points about public safety and crime, even if they're nothing but canards. The right wing has managed to succeed in this because they make up people in their head and then promise to get rid of them. Liberals and socdems hedge their statements, talk about long-term interventions, while fascists promise to imprison or kill anyone who violates the law.
On top of what traschcan already said, there's an important resurgence in amerikkkan style right/far-right evangelicalism funded by the CIA to counter leftist catholic liberation theology.
About Brazil specifically: in the past decade or fifteen years, it appears that organized crime has been developing into strong institutions with ties to the police, military, churches, politics and banks.
Their more immediately apparent effect is the recruiting, arming and training of socially vulnerable minors in the outskirts of cities, which then start local "wars" with each other with considerable death tolls. This inflow of guns and training also find their way into the hands of criminals that are more interested in small, quick gains instead of the whole criminal institution development: robbery, kidnappings etc.
If I can invoke BMF…
MFW sociology really is a big game of cops and robbers. It’s just that we’re the cops and the robbers just so happen to own cops the institution.
…and something something PMC suburban hitlerites.
What is BMF? It seems to be a Hexbear inside joke and I don't get it 
https://hexbear.net/u/black_mold_futures was a poster who would post in hard to parse style about various news topics using a lot of silly vocabulary like "DSA PMC karens" and whatnot, but they tended to be pretty funny because of the absurdity. They kept getting banned for sectarianism and went through a few accounts here before finally leaving for good, but they've been immortalized into early site lore.
Material conditions?
the imperial core extracts wealth from latam, whilst internally many of these countries have their own national bourgeoisie to contend with. Violent crime is a lot easier to justify if your material conditions are unstable, and bourgeois government only becomes more likely to respond in kind.
The imperial core has a hand in helping things along, but let's be clear; the CIA could cease to exist tomorrow and the link between violence and poverty would not budge from its current trends. The likes of the imperialist security state is to ensure violence serves the imperial core. It does not construct the social relations to the MoP underpinning this class violence.
CIA