WeeklySA_AdminExplode: Gang violence has exploded in many parts of the world with 150 000 people killed in 2023
By Golnouche K Barzegar and Monk Nkomo
Rampant and dangerous criminal gangs controlled large swathes of territories in various countries throughout the world where they perpetrated large scale criminal acts that included extortion, kidnappings, human trafficking and more than 150 000 murders in eight countries in the past year.
In an in-depth interview, Mark Freeman, Director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions IFIT) revealed that transitional justice had not addressed this scourge of violence where criminal syndicates had become more powerful that their respective governments.
These vicious gangs were involved in a spate of criminal activities that included extortion, kidnapping, murder, drug and human trafficking, illegal exploitation of natural resources. ‘’Yet traditional transitional justice organizations and actors are completely absent from this field’’, according to Freeman.
South Africa,
In South Africa, where 27 419 murders were recorded between April and March 2024, scores of criminal syndicates proliferated in the townships especially in Cape Town where it is estimated that there were 90 to 130 gangs with a total of 100 000 members. They included the Restorama Kids, the Dirty Bastards, the Clever Kids, the Sexy Boys, the Mafias or the Dixie Boys.
These gangsters made their living from a wide range of criminal activities – from drug trafficking (cocaine, heroin, synthetic drugs) to kidnapping, arms and human trafficking.
Extortion has become the country’s burgeoning new business, described by the police as a “national crisis”, while illegal mining has given rise to violent clashes between rival gangs of illegal miners, nicknamed zama zamas.
Understaffed and under-equipped, the South African Police force has had difficulty coping with rapid urbanisation and the rise of street gangs especially in the Eastern Cape and Cape Town. Its ineffectiveness was also due to endemic corruption in its ranks, denounced in 2020 by prosecutor, Andrew Whitfield, who described the SAPS as a police force “rotten to the core”.
In 2019 and 2021, the South African National Defence Force intervened on the orders of President Cyril Ramaphosa after a wave of shootings and murders linked in particular to drug trafficking but to no avail. At the end of August, after yet another shooting in an extortion case, the Head of State promised to tackle crime: “We are now taking the war against those who extort money. We are taking the war against the construction mafia. We are taking the war against the gangs. We are now going to take you on and make sure you are brought to justice,’’ Ramaphosa had said.
The police, in their intensified effort to crack down on extortionists in the country’s hotspots, recently shot and killed several suspected extortionists and arrested others following the tough stance announced by Police Minister, Senzo Mchunu. He said most of these gangs were heavily armed and were not prepared to work. ‘’They choose to parade as armies of murderous parasites that must be fought and rejected by society as a whole.’’
Brazil
In Brazil, police raids against criminal gangs have been one after the other in the country’s favelas, from the famous City of God in Rio to the slums of Fortaleza and Salvador de Bahia. According to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the homicide rate in Brazil in 2023 was more than 39,000 deaths.
The country was home to three major criminal organisations including Comando Vermelho which was the oldest, Primeiro Comando da Capital which was the largest and most recently the self-defence militias, formed by retired police officers who, over the years, had become criminal groups in their own right. In addition to the “protection tax” levied on shopkeepers, they also practised extortion and forced residents to buy their electricity, gas, television or Internet products or services.
Colombia
Colombia was the world’s leading cocaine producer, supplying 70% of the global market, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime . With coca cultivation and powder production, drug trafficking was a key, traditional component of the country’s criminal activities. But according to Felipe Botero, a researcher at GI-TOC, in recent years Colombian gangs had been fostering a “criminal ecosystem” by diversifying their activities: illegal mining, trafficking in arms, human beings and migrants with Venezuela, extortion, protection rackets, smuggling and occasionally legal activities.
Ecuador
Once spared from violence, Ecuador, which borders the world’s two biggest cocaine producers Colombia and Peru, had seen an explosion in drug-related crime that had been rising steadily since the end of Rafael Correa’s presidency in 2017. Today, the country had the highest homicide rate in Central and Latin America (excluding the Caribbean). In 2020, the country’s main criminal organization, Los Choneros, fragmented into a multitude of smaller gangs, which worked with the powerful Clan del Golfo in Colombia and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, as well as with Italian and Balkan mafias.
There were around 20 gangs and some 50,000 members, who controlled various regions and prisons in the country from where they operated with impunity, such as Los Lobos and Los Lagartos. Apart from drug trafficking, their main activities are extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking and illegal mining, particularly in the northern Amazon.
El Salvador
The birth and spread of gangs in El Salvador was an indirect consequence of the civil war (1980-1992). Thousands of Salvadorans, who had emigrated to the United States, settled in the poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, where the two main Central American gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 were born. Expelled by the United States in the early 1990s, they returned to El Salvador and embarked on criminal activities including human trafficking, extortion, racketeering, assault, armed robbery, arms and cocaine trafficking.
In the space of a decade, gangs have become extremely powerful and dangerous. So much so that in 2015, El Salvador became the most dangerous country in the world that is not at war, with a rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
Haiti
In Haiti, the murder rate had doubled since 2023 when gang violence exploded, according to data from the United Nations Integrated Office in the area. As a result, the country had almost 5,000 homicides in 2023, compared with 2,000 in 2022. The number of people kidnapped had also almost doubled, reaching 2,490 in 2023.
According to the UN, the total number of gang victims killed, injured or kidnapped was around 8,000. “Gang killings, kidnappings and sexual violence continue with widespread impunity,” said Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary – General, in his 2024 report to the Security Council, referring to “the staggering and worsening level of gang violence”.
Honduras
Honduras held the unenviable title of Central America’s most violent country, with a homicide rate of more than 31 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, according to investigative website Insight Crime, and more than 3,000 deaths in 2023. These figures had been falling steadily for a decade. Crime remained particularly high, however, and was spreading outside the country’s two major cities, traditional gang strongholds.
As a key transit point for transnational drug trafficking, the country has seen the development of drug trafficking groups such as Barrio 18 (M-18) and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), as well as street gangs known as pandillas. According to estimates by the NGO Human Rights Watch, there are hundreds of them in the country, with some 40,000 members.
Mexico
Mexico, a hub for drugs from Latin America to the United States and Europe, was confronted with very high levels of violence, particularly in the north of the country, with one main activity – trafficking in heroin, cocaine and synthetic drugs.
As a result, the country’s homicide rate broke records at 29 per 100,000 inhabitants between 2018 and 2020, before falling to 23.3 in 2023. But the number of violent deaths, estimated at nearly 30,000 a year, remained extremely high, as does the number of disappearances, estimated at over 115,000, most of which had occurred since 2006, when the war against the drug cartels began.
With the exception of the Sinaloa Cartel, which remained the most powerful criminal organization on the continent and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the other organisations (Cartel del Golfo, Cartel de Los Beltrán Leyva, Cartel de Juárez, Cartel de Tijuana, Los Zetas, etc.) are now in decline, their leaders killed or arrested in recent years.
The result is a fragmentation of the cartels and a multitude of criminal gangs such as Los Metros and Los Escorpiones.
Nigeria
In recent years, armed banditry has proliferated in north-west Nigeria, particularly in the States of Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto and Zamfara. This area was largely deserted by the security forces and the authorities had virtually lost control, unable to restore order and the rule of law. According to ACLED, the number of civilians killed by the violence of these armed gangs in the North-West between 2018 and 2023 exceeded the number killed in the North-East region of Nigeria over the same period by Ansaru and Jama’atu Ahlul Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP). ACLED counted more than 13,000 deaths linked to the activities of bandits between 2010 and 2023.
According to GI-TOC researcher, Kingsley Madueke, these armed gangs, known to Nigerians as “bandits”, numbered between 10,000 and 30,000 members, although he stressed that these figures fluctuated. – Justice Info-net
