A far-right backlash is surging in Latin America as crime fears fuel Bukele-style crackdowns

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — At the start of this decade, Latin America was hurtling to the left. Progressives, seizing on public outrage over entrenched inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, swept to power in many of the region’s biggest economies, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru.

A political backlash is brewing, though. Although homicide rates have broadly declined across Latin America compared to a decade ago, spikes in some countries and a regionwide rise in other crimes, particularly extortion, have created the conditions for conservative populists to score votes by promising strong-arm tactics against crime and immigration.

Stump speeches casting migrants as criminals and pitching heavy-handed security strategies popularized by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, have won conservative candidates U.S. President Donald Trump's backing and fired up their disaffected electorates despite concerns that such tactics could encourage human rights abuses or threaten democracy.

“You have an emergent right wing that is very much in collaboration across the region and with the U.S. through the MAGA movement, which has also used crime as a rallying cry for political mobilization,” said Enrique Roig, vice president of the nonprofit Human Rights First and a former State Department official. “It's easier to sell locking people up than it is to deal with the reasons why mainly young men join gangs in countries like El Salvador.”

Tough-on-crime platforms swing votes

Although populist politics across the political spectrum have done well, only the right has offered short-term security solutions that will make voters “feel safer in six months” even if they have to “sacrifice democracy and human rights,” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America organization.

Proposals offered by the left, such as community violence prevention programs, better police training, and judicial and prison reforms, take more time to bear fruit, he said.

“It’s absolutely what you’re supposed to be doing, but people’s patience runs out,” Isacson said of long-term proposals. “So, there come the Bukeles of the world saying, ‘You want to feel better? We got this.’”

In Colombia, where swaths of the countryside have fallen into renewed conflict, pro-Trump businessman Abelardo de la Espriella has topped polls ahead of Sunday's runoff election as he takes his cues from Bukele.

In Peru, where extortion has increased fivefold in the past five years, Keiko Fujimori rocketed to a June 7 presidential runoff on a law-and-order platform, vowing to deploy the military in prisons and along borders as she leans on the authoritarian legacy of her disgraced late father, former President Alberto Fujimori.

Costa Ricans, rattled by record levels of drug-related killings, elected conservative populist Laura Fernández in February for her tough-on-crime platform. Honduran businessman Nasry Asfura swept December's election after Trump endorsed him as a partner in the fight against “narco-communists.”

Organized crime expands, fueling more violence

Latin America and the Caribbean last year saw their combined average homicide rate drop by more than 5% compared to 2024, with the median rate reaching about 17.6 per 100,000 people, according to InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas.

But there are a few key exceptions. Drug-fueled killings have increased in Peru and Colombia, the world's top cocaine producers, as well as in neighboring Ecuador, whose major ports traffickers see as a gateway to European markets.

Last year, authorities tallied 2,400 homicides in Peru and 14,780 in Colombia, which were the most in each country since at least 2020. Killings rose a remarkable 31% in Ecuador year-on-year, to 9,216.

Gangs are blamed for much of the violence that began soaring in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic, as cartels from Mexico, Colombia and the Balkans expanded their operations and hired locals, who set off a deadly fight over drug-trafficking routes. Their territorial disputes include prisons, where hundreds of inmates have been killed since 2021.

Ecuadorian authorities also recorded more than 16,100 cases of extortion last year, which was down from 23,000 in 2024, though experts say it's an underreported crime.

Populists seize an opportunity

Four years ago, Chilean voters rejected ultra-conservative lawmaker José Antonio Kast in favor of ex-President Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed former student protest leader seeking to address Chile’s endemic social inequities. Last year, though, fears over rising crime — and its frequent association in media with the country's growing population of Venezuelan immigrants — played into Kast’s hands, returning him to power.

As Venezuelan crime syndicates like the Tren de Aragua gang seized on their country’s mass migration wave to infiltrate human trafficking networks following the pandemic, Chile, long one of Latin America's safest countries, witnessed an unprecedented explosion of carjackings, kidnappings and shoot-outs.

Chile’s homicide rate rose by 30%, to a peak of 6.7 per 100,000 people from 2021 to 2022, according to the Interior Ministry. It has since dropped but has stayed above pre-2021 levels. Other types of violent crime are still rising, including kidnappings, which have increased by nearly 180% over the past four years.

Drawing inspiration from Bukele, whose mega-prisons in El Salvador he toured while campaigning, Kast handily beat his Communist opponent in December with pledges to build a massive border wall, toughen prison conditions for gang members and deport hundreds of thousands of migrants without legal status. For his promises of safety, voters shrugged off Kast's opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage rights and his defense of Augusto Pinochet's bloody dictatorship.

In Peru, despite the contentious legacy of the convicted Alberto Fujimori, his daughter's candidacy has taken advantage of a surge in violent crime four years after she lost the election to schoolteacher Pedro Castillo.

Campaigning under the slogan “Peru with Order,” Keiko Fujimori won the largest vote share in April's first round of voting. Results of the June 7 runoff still show her in a technical tie with the political heir of the imprisoned Castillo, nationalist Roberto Sánchez.

Experts say the public's appetite for tough tactics — historically associated with the region's right-wing 20th-century dictatorships — has grown alongside its shrinking confidence in state institutions and its deepening ambivalence about democracy.

“The thinking is often, ‘democracy hasn’t been able to keep me and my family safe, so maybe democracy is part of the problem,’” said Eduardo Moncada, director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.

That poses a major challenge to the Latin American left, which in many countries has presided over sluggish economies, grappled with corruption scandals and failed to fulfill promises of social reform in recent years.

Even progressives such as Jeannette Jara in Chile and Sánchez in Peru have shifted with the political tide. Uruguay's president, Yamandú Orsi, called Bukele's model an example worthy of further study. The center-left Guatemalan government declared a state of emergency to crack down on gang violence this year and welcomed the Trump administration's help targeting drug traffickers.

Campaign promises meet reality

Recently elected politicians' hard-line ambitions, though, have collided with the practicalities of governing complex and cash-strapped democracies like Ecuador and Chile. They are nothing like tiny El Salvador, where Bukele’s party holds a legislative supermajority.

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa's promises in his 2023 campaign included locking up gang leaders on barges and building mega-prisons. He abandoned the floating prisons proposal after taking office, and it took his government until November to open the first mega-prison.

“Building mega-prisons hasn’t been that easy or that straightforward because the country is in a very bad state financially and because President Daniel Noboa still sees himself as a democrat,” said Beatriz García Nice, policy analyst for the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank.

Nearly three months into Kast's tenure, pollsters say a skeptical public can't tell the difference between his security crackdown and that of his left-wing predecessor. His government has organized only two deportation flights after promising to immediately round up and expel Chile’s more than 300,000 immigrants without legal status. A different, more sheepish tone has crept into his speeches. Last month, he came under fire for calling the mass deportation promise “a metaphor.”

Even as he pitched new security measures in a June 1 address, including banning those convicted of attacking police from receiving social benefits, he tried to whittle down his supporters' outsize expectations.

“Governing, as many of you know, means taking responsibility for reality, especially when it’s difficult,” he said. “I’m proceeding step by step because this isn’t something that happens overnight.”

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DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.