This week, InSight Crime investigates how Lake Titicaca between Bolivia and Peru, the birthplace of the Inca Empire, has become a smuggler’s paradise. Across its waters move illicit materials like mercury, contraband food and gas, and, as Peruvian coca cultivation booms, coca paste and cocaine.
We also analyze Europol’s takedown of a global “super cartel,” that allegedly controlled one-third of Europe’s cocaine supply. Can this union of international criminals really be considered a monolithic organization?
And we assess Latin America’s mega-prisons, which, in the midst of police crackdowns in Central America and an expected rise in prison populations, remain vital cultivators of gang culture.
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Lake Titicaca: A Smuggler's Paradise in Bolivia and Peru
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Lake Titicaca, nestled high in the Andean mountains between Bolivia and Peru, has been many things to many people. The center of the cosmos, the legendary birthplace of the Inca Empire, and one of the world's largest freshwater lakes.
Today, it serves as a crossroads for varied criminal economies, from cocaine shipments to trafficking the frogs that live along its banks...
Read the analysis >
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The arrest of a top Balkan drug trafficker in Dubai has revealed how some of Europe's leading drug traffickers were able to work...
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A mixture of heavy-handed government policies, a lack of funding, and corruption has led to...
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The Impact of US Marijuana Legalization
Next Wednesday, InSight Crime will publish its latest investigation on how the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of US states is impacting organized crime dynamics in Mexico. Once the bedrock of drug trafficking organizations, these groups have since shifted their focus to powerful synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl. This has upended the relationship they long maintained with small farmers cultivating cannabis, who are now looking to other crops or leaving farming behind altogether and migrating to major urban centers.
Read our investigation on December 7.
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‘Ndrangheta Investigation, Exclusive Interview With Suriname President Make Waves
Two weeks ago, InSight Crime published an investigation into how Italian mafia clan the ‘Ndrangheta built a cocaine trafficking network from South America to ‘Ndrangheta-controlled Italian ports. The investigation generated interest far and wide, and was cited in Venezuela’s La Patilla, CNA and NTV in Albania, and crime-specific news platform Antilavado de Dinero.
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Profiles of some of the notable criminal personalities and groups that have marked this week.
Browse by country > |
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The now-jailed former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” reportedly had many children...
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The Mara Salvatrucha, or MS13, is perhaps the most notorious street gang in the Western Hemisphere. While it has its....
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"According to the InSight Crime think tank, Mara Salvatrucha -- also known as MS13 -- is "perhaps the most notorious street gang in the Western hemisphere."
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