Audio | InSight Crime

Costa Rican authorities carried out 80 raids this month against a local gang suspected of cargo theft. Reporter Owen Alfonso rode 520km in a semi-truck cab from the Panamanian border to Peñas Blancas, the main crossing between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. He tells InSight Crime’s Managing Editor Deborah Bonello about his reporting trip, how the cargo theft business works, and how Costa Rica’s customs systems tell gangs what each truck is carrying.

Haiti elections are currently non-existent, leaving a power vacuum that empowers criminal groups. We examine the current state of the country's governance crisis.

Steven Dudley sits down with investigator Alex Papadovassilakis to analyze the dire political and security landscape in Port-au-Prince. With the absence of elected leadership, the state has struggled to maintain authority, allowing gang control to expand significantly across the nation. We break down how the erosion of democratic institutions has facilitated this shift and what it means for regional stability.

Our discussion clarifies why the current security situation remains so volatile without a clear path to democratic transition. Understanding the nexus between political failure and organized crime is essential for grasping the current reality on the ground in Haiti.

Subscribe to InSight Crime for weekly analysis of organized crime and security in the region.

What do the latest Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designations of 21 criminal groups in Latin America and the Caribbean actually change for companies? Claire McCleskey, a former head of OFAC's compliance division, spoke to InSight Crime’s managing editor Deborah Bonello about that more in this week's InSight Take.

Two years after Ismael Zambada Garcia, alias "El Mayo," was handed over to US authorities, the war between the Chapitos and the Mayiza factions of the Sinaloa Cartel continues to roil. The Sinaloa Cartel is now being rebuilt around different people. InSight Crime's Victoria Dittmar and co-director Steven Dudley were recently in Culiacán and Sinaloa, where they interviewed drug producers, residents and local sources during a week in which a shootout hit a restaurant near their hotel and a house was attacked in broad daylight meters from one of their interviews. What they found was a city where the war is less visible than it was, but no less present: the lookouts are gone, the narcocorridos have stopped playing openly, and the fighting has moved south.

In this episode of The InSight Take, managing editor Deborah Bonello asks them what that shift actually means for the two factions, for the people living between them, and for who ends up running Sinaloa when the shooting stops.

Venezuela is officially off the US’s blacklist of nations that have failed to adequately tackle drug trafficking. InSight Crime Managing Editor Deborah Bonello and Co-Director Jeremy McDermott look at what Venezuela’s removal means, the US drug certification process, Colombia and Bolivia’s continued presence on the list, and the Cartel of the Suns.
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