Why Latin America’s prisons create some of the world’s deadliest gangs

By Alessandra Freitas, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration is escalating efforts to crack down on gangs that move illicit drugs into the United States, with deadly military strikes at sea and measures to toughen up borders taking center stage.

But as the US doubles down on overt interventions, experts warn policymakers may be overlooking a key battlefield: prisons across the region.

Several of Latin America’s most powerful criminal organizations were not forged in borderlands, the streets, or jungle hideouts but inside the region’s prisons. Overcrowded, under-resourced, and often effectively self-governed, these facilities have long served as incubators where armed groups recruit, reorganize, and expand their influence. Across the region, at least ten organizations were either created or strengthened behind bars.

From Tocorón to Sao Paulo

That is the case for Tren de Aragua, cited by the Trump administration as the target of recent strikes on suspected drug boats that escalated tensions with Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro, although there was no strong evidence of a connection between the boats and the criminal group.

Founded inside Tocorón prison in Aragua state in the early 2010s, the group initially sought to impose internal order to secure better living conditions, according to a report by Transparency Venezuela.

“There was a social frustration behind it — resentment at how the state treated prisoners,” Ronna Rísquez, Venezuelan journalist and author of “El Tren de Aragua,” told CNN. “The inhumane conditions and lack of state support directly contributed to the rise of the pranes.”

The pranes — an acronym for Preso Rematado Asesino Nato (“a hardened inmate, born killer”) — eventually became the de facto rulers of many Venezuelan prisons.

“They had total control. The National Guard and prison directors obeyed their orders,” Rísquez said. They taxed inmates, controlled contraband flows, and even ran external extortion and kidnapping operations. The government raided Tocorón prison in 2023 and claims the criminal group was disbanded, although its leaders, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero,” and Johan Petric, are still at large.

This same dynamic has been seen across the region. In Brazil, organized crime groups such as Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) emerged inside prisons in the late 1970s and 1990s as inmates rebelled against overcrowding, abuse, and the precarious living conditions.

Gregório Fernandes de Andrade, a criminal attorney who spent 16 years in the system for homicide, said cells were so packed that inmates often piled up in improvised hammocks hung in the ceilings for lack of space. “I was often in a 4×4 (meters) cell with 40 inmates,” he said. “We had to take turns sleeping.”

According to federal data, Brazil’s prisons operate at 140% occupancy, with more than 700,000 inmates in facilities built for less than 500,000 – a common reality in Latin American countries.

Demand turned into a business for members of organized groups, who sell inmates anything from hygiene items to food, physical safety, and legal help.

Andrade, who shared cells with Roni Peixoto, one of the leaders of Comando Vermelho, and inmates linked to the PCC, says joining is rarely about coercion. “There isn’t a gun to your head,” he said. “People fight to join out of necessity. These factions welcome you — more than the state ever did.” CNN has reached out to the Brazilian government for comment.

By the mid-2000s, PCC dominated São Paulo’s prisons. “They’re present in about 90% of state units, and homicides are practically zero — the system has been ‘pacified’ by PCC for nearly 20 years,” sociologist and Federal University of ABC professor Camila Caldeira Nunes Dias said.

PCC also runs one of South America’s most powerful cocaine export networks, supplying European markets through Brazil’s ports, while CV dominates trafficking corridors from Peru through the Amazon, according to InSight Crime, a group that studies organized crime in the Americas. Experts say the work done inside prisons was crucial to gangs’ establishment in the outside world.

Gang leaders order drug purchases, territorial expansion, and killings from behind bars. “We call prisons the business back rooms,” International Crisis Group senior analyst Elizabeth Dickinson told CNN. “Many leaders prefer operating from inside because they’re safer there.”

But the disputes over achieving such control of the cells and the inmates inside them can be deadly – especially in facilities where multiple factions coexist.

The dispute for cell keys

Across Latin America, prison massacres over territorial control have become a recurring reality. In Venezuela’s Uribana prison, a dispute between gang bosses in 2013 led to the deaths of at least 61 people. In Brazil, a similar dispute triggered the infamous 1992 Carandiru prison massacre in São Paulo, killing 111 inmates and helping spur the rise of the PCC.

In Ecuador, that dynamic has become even more explosive. Because of its strategic role in global cocaine exports, areas like Guayaquil allowed foreign actors — Mexican cartels, Colombian dissidents — to embed themselves in local gangs. When their leaders were jailed, the fight for control migrated directly into penitentiaries.

Daniel Pontón, dean of the School of Security and Defense at Ecuador’s Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN), says Ecuadorian prisons are often structured in cellblocks controlled by different groups, which incites conflict.

“Each block had its own economy and leadership — everything privatized and controlled by the gang,” he says. “If I have a dispute with a criminal leader, I go after his block, kill him, and take over his criminal structure.”

That reality was harshly exposed after the 2020 assassination of Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña,” longtime leader of Los Choneros. His death shattered the balance he maintained among rival factions. Los Lobos, Los Tiguerones and others splintered and began battling for dominance, triggering massacres that killed more than 400 inmates across multiple provinces in less than three years, according to InSight Crime.

To gang leaders, the bloodshed is justified by profits. Ecuador’s prison markets are now worth over $200 million annually — more than double the federal operating budget for SNAI, the organ overseeing the prison system, which was roughly $99 million in 2021.

And the prisons have become key nodes in the global cocaine chain, offering storage, logistics, and protection for traffickers moving shipments through Guayaquil’s ports. CNN has reached out to Ecuadorian government for comment.

Mano dura

Across Latin America, hardline mano dura (“strong hand”) campaigns have become a political focal point, with politicians running on promises of harsher sentences, mass arrests, and expanded military roles.

In 2024, Ecuadorian voters approved military involvement in policing and longer sentences after a wave of assassinations and prison massacres. On November 18, lawmakers in Brazil voted to approve legislation to label groups such as PCC and CV as terrorist organizations, aiming at significantly extending prison sentences for those convicted under the statute.

Brazil’s executive branch, however, has rejected the idea of classifying PCC and CV as terrorist groups. During a high-level security dialogue in Washington in March 2024, Brazilian representatives told their US counterparts that PCC and CV are profit-driven criminal organizations rather than ideological groups and therefore do not meet Brazil’s legal criteria for terrorism.

In that vein, El Salvador’s “Bukele model” — built on mass detentions and the opening of CECOT, a mega-prison with capacity for 40,000 inmates that puts it among the world’s largest — has become the political reference point, especially for right-wing leaders in Latin America. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa to Paraguay’s Santiago Peña and Argentina’s Javier Milei have vowed to replicate the Salvadoran model.

Several countries in the region are similarly investing in a new wave of prison construction. In Ecuador, the government began operating El Encuentro, a US$52 million maximum-security facility in Santa Elena built to house around 800 high-risk inmates and equipped with biometric controls, signal jammers, and reinforced surveillance systems – but violence remains. In 2024, Honduran President Xiomara Castro announced a mega-prison with a capacity for 20,000 people, as part of a broader gang crackdown – including increased arrests, designation of gang activity as terrorism, and expanded role for military and police forces.

A hidden front line

Human rights groups and security analysts warn that President Nayib Bukele’s mass incarceration approach in El Salvador is not easily transferable, especially in countries with fragmented criminal markets and weaker state institutions.

“When you have an overcrowded prison, and there’s disorder and lack of resources, you create an opportunity for criminal groups to manage that,” said Dickinson of the Crisis Group. “What ends up happening is that many individuals, especially low-level offenders, become victims of this extractive economy. Many end up allying with a faction just to get through the experience.”

Andrade, who was 22 when he was arrested, argues that the answer lies in breaking the cycle.

“I had many more opportunities to join crime than to make an honest living,” he said. “It’s easier for a kid to get a bag of drugs and a gun than a book and a pen.”

“There are good, smart people in there who can’t even fathom a second chance at society because they were never even allowed a first one,” said Andrade, who eventually earned a master’s degree and became a criminal attorney. “If we keep brutalizing people inside, eventually they become the soldiers of crime outside.”

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