Far-right backlash surges in Latin America
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 region-wide 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.
Short-term solutions
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.”
Latin America and the Caribbean last year saw their combined average homicide rate drop by more than 5 percent 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.
Remarkable rise
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 percent in Ecuador year-on-year, to 9,216.
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.
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.
Chile’s homicide rate rose by 30 percent, 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 percent over the past four years.
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.
