Williams Gilberto Jiménez García

Criminal ecosystems are durable social systems in which differentiated criminal functions become recurrently interdependent across organizations, networks, illicit markets, institutional actors, financial facilitators, territorial brokers, and social environments. The concept applies when coercion, illicit accumulation, political protection, territorial regulation, and other specialized capacities depend on one another over time and become structurally coupled with institutional, sociocultural, spatial, or technological conditions. A criminal ecosystem is therefore not defined by the presence of a particular organization, market, or territory, nor by resilience itself. It is identified by functional differentiation, recurrent interdependence, structural coupling, and temporal reproduction. Complex adaptive systems theory explains how decentralized interactions can generate adaptation, substitution, and emergent order, while autopoietic social systems theory explains how recurring communications stabilize expectations and reproduce boundaries. Digital infrastructure can mediate financial and transnational functions without constituting a separate operational dimension in the present framework. This distinction allows resilience, reconfiguration, displacement, and decline to be examined as empirical outcomes rather than assumed properties of the ecosystem.

Strategic ports embedded in transnational cocaine trafficking networks operate as critical nodes linking South American production zones with North American and European consumer markets. These por...

Between 2023 and 2025, the Petro government improved the state's operational indicators: seizures increased and impacts on security forces fell by 33.7 %. Over the same period, coca cultivation grew by 51.1 %, homicides rose by 6.9 %, and three armed actors expanded their presence into 700 municipalities. Drawing on academic articles and official data sources, the article documents that divergence through two mechanisms: the rise in seizures combines improved international cooperation with the balloon effect of greater supply, and the drop in impacts on security forces coincides with the selective withdrawal of military operations in areas of high criminal presence. The discussion shows that Total Peace lacked the institutional conditionality needed to translate dialogue into disarmament. The article concludes that the limits of progressive drug policy stem from Colombia's position within a transnational value chain whose profitability is decided outside its territory.

Drug markets display varying levels of violence across urban contexts, and understanding the drivers behind these differences is essential for designing effective interventions. (1) Background: This study investigates why some cocaine markets are more violent than others, focusing on four cities: Ciudad Juárez, Pereira, Frankfurt, and Madrid. (2) Methods: Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we examined complex configurations of institutional, social, and market-related factors. Data were collected through 56 semi-structured interviews and secondary sources from 2015 to 2020. (3) Results: The findings reveal that violence arises from specific combinations of factors rather than isolated variables. In Latin American cities, violence is associated with weak institutional control, dense criminal networks, high social vulnerability, and fragmented market structures. In contrast, European cities show lower levels of violence due to stronger institutions, effective law enforcement, and well-regulated markets. (4) Conclusions: Addressing violence in cocaine markets requires context-specific strategies that take into account institutional capacity, market dynamics, and broader social conditions. These findings challenge simplistic views of drug market violence and emphasize the need for tailored interventions to mitigate violence effectively.

This article analyses the spatial relationship between homicides and drug seizures in three Latin American cities: Cali (Colombia), Curitiba (Brazil) and Monterrey (Mexico). Through a comparative approach and the use of spatial econometric models (SLM and SEM), differentiated patterns of concentration and spatial dependence are identified. The results show that seizures, as a proxy for the drug market, are positively associated with homicides, although the type of spatial dependence varies by city. In Curitiba, a territorial spillover effect is observed, while in Cali and Monterrey unobserved structural influences predominate. These findings confirm that homicidal violence is deeply territorialised and linked to local criminal dynamics. As a complementary input, a statistical annex is presented at the end of the article with a national overview of crime in Colombia for the year 2024, based on the records of the National Police, which allows us to contextualise the specificity of the homicide phenomenon in relation to the broader set of crimes recorded in the country.

El concepto de eficacia colectiva vinculado a la investigación de delitos en barrios surgió en Estados Unidos en los años noventa y pronto fue reconocida como una teoría validada. Sin embargo, su aplicación en América Latina ha evidenciado inconsistencias. A partir de datos de Bogotá, Lima y Santiago, este artículo evalúa la estructura factorial del concepto y su aplicabilidad al estudio de delitos violentos en barrios latinoamericanos. Para ello se estimaron modelos factoriales, invarianza y comparación de medias. Los hallazgos revelan que la eficacia colectiva se compone de tres dimensiones (confianza, cohesión y control social informal), y para cada dimensión se observan medias diferenciadas según experiencia de victimización violenta y ciudad. Así, la composición multidimensional de la eficacia colectiva ofrece una perspectiva enriquecedora para profundizar en los desafíos de la prevención del delito en entornos criminológicos complejos del Sur global.

ARTICLE WRITING QUALITY The article's writing is clear and well-structured, allowing readers to quickly grasp the complex relationship between poverty and crime in Pakistan. However, the narrative could benefit from improved cohesion between section...

La violencia permea diversos ámbitos de los mercados de drogas, manifestándose de manera variable. Algunos de estos mercados exhiben niveles de violencia más acentuados, incluso llegando a ser letales. Este estudio se enfoca en abordar una pregunta crucial: ¿Por qué ciertos mercados de cocaína manifiestan mayor violencia que otros? Para abordar esta cuestión, se investigan las raíces de la violencia asociada al uso de este mecanismo en mercados de cocaína, con énfasis en dos escenarios: ciudades latinoamericanas y europeas, cada una con dos mercados caracterizados por su alta incidencia de violencia. Los resultados obtenidos demuestran que la violencia en los mercados de cocaína es un fenómeno sumamente complejo, profundamente influido por la fragmentación inherente a estos mercados, la presencia de organizaciones armadas y la forma de relacionarse de los actores. La carencia de una regulación estatal efectiva, junto con la corrupción imperante, también perpetúa los niveles elevados de violencia.

Resumen: El presente artículo examina el fenómeno del homicidio en Colombia y busca comprender las condiciones de vulnerabilidad que afectan al homicidio en las ciudades colombianas. A través de un enfoque teórico y metodológico basado en la vulnerabilidad se analizó dicha relación entre la violencia homicida con los mercados ilegales, los mercados laborales pauperizados y la repartición de la riqueza. La muestra se compuso de las treinta y dos ciudades capitales departamentales de Colombia. Se usaron herramientas estadísticas multivariadas (PLS-SEM) para analizar la relación entre estos factores y el homicidio. Los hallazgos sugieren que los bajos ingresos, la falta de empleo, la desigualdad y la violencia están asociados con un mayor riesgo de homicidio.