Investigations

Mexican authorities have never identified any money laundering cases related to synthetic drugs or precursors in Mexico, according to our public records requests and interviews with officials. Nor were there any cases that had led to asset seizures or forfeitures.  …

On September 21, 2021, Javier Algredo Vázquez was on his way to a US law enforcement office to reclaim chemical substances authorities had seized from him days earlier. In some respects, his trip that day was a remarkable act of …

When Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea contacted her chemical suppliers in China on behalf of a new client, she needed to make a convincing pitch to ensure the deal would go […]

Bukele’s government had once made a pact with the gangs. Now he was making war. In the first two months of the state of emergency, authorities arrested over 33,000 people, nearly doubling the prison population. The gangs had previously managed …

In March 2022, the Bukele administration launched a historic crackdown, implementing a state of emergency that has, for the past 20 months, given his government almost free rein in its war against the gangs. These drastic measures have left the …

The road to El Salvador’s state of emergency has been long and bloody. The small Central American nation spent decades engulfed in some of the most intense spates of violence in the Western Hemisphere, as the country’s three main gangs …

The gangs’ demise has radically altered the country’s criminal landscape, liberating swathes of territory and illegal markets from criminal control. The nation’s homicide rate, which had already sunk to historic lows before the state of emergency began, is now at …

Since the crackdown began, the gangs have shown minimal signs of armed retaliation. In a matter of months, Bukele’s crackdown had swept up tens of thousands of suspected gang members and affiliates, and the gangs’ primary reaction appears to have …

Over 60 indigenous Miskito leaders and representatives are gathered in a Catholic church in the town of Mocorón, a village inhabited by approximately 500 Miskitos, located deep in the Moskitia, the great Honduran jungle in the department of Gracias a …