Across Latin America’s largest economies, a new political tide is rising: right-wing populist candidates are quickly gaining voter support, positioning their tough-on-crime, hardline immigration platforms as a direct counter to the left-wing populist wave that swept through the region just a few years ago.
While overall regional homicide rates have fallen broadly over the past decade compared to 10 years prior, sharp upticks in violent crime in key nations and a widespread surge in non-violent criminal activity have created fertile ground for conservative populists. These candidates have echoed the heavy-handed security strategy popularized by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, framing migrants as primary scapegoats for rising insecurity even as disaffected voters continue to embrace the approach, despite widespread warnings that it risks normalizing human rights violations and eroding democratic institutions.
Data from InSight Crime, a leading think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas, paints a nuanced picture of regional crime trends. Between 2024 and 2025, the combined average homicide rate across Latin America and the Caribbean dropped by more than 5%, pushing the median regional rate down to roughly 17.6 homicides per 100,000 residents. But this overall decline masks dangerous spikes in countries at the center of the global cocaine trade. Peru and Colombia, the world’s two top cocaine producers, along with neighboring Ecuador—whose key shipping ports have become critical transit hubs for drug traffickers targeting European markets—have all seen sharp increases in drug-linked killings.
In 2024, official data recorded 2,400 homicides in Peru and 14,780 in Colombia, marking the highest annual death tolls for both nations since at least 2020. In Ecuador, the surge was even more dramatic: homicides rose 31% year-over-year to hit 9,216, cementing public anxiety over growing criminal control.
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, explains that while populist politics from across the ideological spectrum have performed well in recent elections, only right-wing candidates have been able to offer voters immediate, short-term security promises that deliver a perceived sense of safety within months—even when those promises come at the cost of democratic norms and human rights protections. Left-leaning candidates, by contrast, typically prioritize long-term, systemic solutions such as community violence prevention programs, improved police training, and comprehensive judicial and prison reform. These approaches are widely recognized as evidence-based, but they require years to produce tangible results that voters can feel.
“It’s absolutely what you’re supposed to be doing, but people’s patience runs out,” Isacson noted. “So, there come the Bukeles of the world saying, ‘You want to feel better? We got this.’”
The impact of this political shift is already playing out in high-stakes national elections across the region. In Colombia, where large swathes of rural territory have fallen back into armed conflict after a broken 2016 peace deal, pro-Trump businessman Abelardo de la Espriella has surged to the top of pre-election polls ahead of this weekend’s presidential runoff, having centered his entire campaign on a Bukele-inspired hardline security crackdown. In Peru, where extortion rates have jumped fivefold over the past five years, Keiko Fujimori—who has built her political brand on the authoritarian legacy of her disgraced late father, former President Alberto Fujimori—has advanced to the June 7 presidential runoff running on an unapologetic law-and-order platform, where she has vowed to deploy military forces to prisons and national border crossings.