LatAm in Focus: What's on the Table for Brazil's Security Issues ahead of 2026 Elections?

Organized crime continues to drive murder rates in Latin America and the Caribbean to levels well above global averages.  A region that’s home to 8 percent of the world’s population accounts for almost a third of homicides, per 2022 figures. Now, in a context in which the United States has shown itself willing to flex its military muscle in its fight against narcoterrorism, Latin American governments are stepping up hard-line approaches to crime.

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Robert Muggah

“What we might see are governments around the region mimicking the framing of the United States, like using terror labels and exceptional measures to signal their alliance or alignment,” says Robert Muggah, co-founder of both the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based security and development think-tank and SecDev, a geopolitical risk consultancy headquartered in Canada. From Brazil, he spoke with AS/COA Online’s Luisa Leme about the knock-on effects of U.S. security policy in Latin America as governments deal with increasingly sophisticated criminal actors who are spreading their reach into previous safe havens, such as Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay. 

In the case of Brazil, Muggah draws on the example of two recent landmark police operations that have propelled security to the top of the electorate’s worries ahead of the 2026 general elections. In October, a police raid in Rio de Janeiro claimed over 120 lives in what was the deadliest law enforcement operation in the country’s history. Police said they were targeting one of the country’s largest gangs, Comando Vermelho, or the Red Command.   

Two months prior, in August, an investigation labeled “Hidden Carbon” targeted an alleged multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme headed by the First Capital Command, known as the PCC, a transnational criminal organization birthed in Brazil. “[The investigation] revealed that the PCC had. in a sense, infiltrated the entire hydrocarbon fuel supply chain, and that it was operating, in São Paulo state alone, more than 1,000 petrol stations,” Muggah explains. This time, the operation shook Faria Lima, Brazil’s central financial district, where hundreds of police officers searched the headquarters of major fuel and fintech companies allegedly implicated in the scheme. “What we’ve seen [the Red Command and the PCC] doing over the two decades is shifting from a strategy focused on controlling drug trafficking and prisons to operating vast criminal enterprises,” he said.    

Muggah explained how governments in Brazil and beyond can refine the legislative, law enforcement, and policy tools needed to combat evolving threats to public security, even as these groups diversify their portfolio of illicit activities. “I think the question for a lot of us who are watching the elections and thinking about public security is: How do we raise the cost of irresponsible proposals while increasing the payoff of those that perhaps are more evidence-based and offer more effective solutions?”