Is Colombia’s terrorist label for all criminal groups a new tactic?
Why have the US missile strikes against drug boats restarted after a 2-month hiatus?
What does one of Haiti’s largest mass kidnappings reveal?
This week’s top organized crime stories in On the Radar.
1. Colombia to Treat All Crime Groups as ‘Terrorists’
President Abelardo de la Espriella ordered Colombia’s security forces to treat criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, and smuggling under a single label: “terrorists” The directive aims to strengthen judicial and financial prosecution and requires the army, police, navy, and air force to operate as “a single body,” according to the recently installed president’s office.
But the use of the “terrorism” term in Colombia is nothing new, and dates back five decades to its conflict with guerrillas like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) and the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN). What implications the term will have for the legal and judicial processes around tackling Colombia’s complex criminal landscape remain to be seen.
The move comes after the Trump administration designated 20 Latin American criminal groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala designated regional groups as “terrorists.”
2. US Military Strike Breaks Two-Month Pause
After a two-month hiatus, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) carried out two lethal strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean this week, the first reported strikes since June 21.
Since the bombing campaign began in September 2025, the US has carried out 68 strikes, killing at least 227 people. But as US officials themselves have acknowledged, the strikes have done little to curb drug trafficking, mostly just pushing traffickers to shift routes. See InSight Crime’s tracker of the strikes for the full picture.
3. Gang Massacre in Haiti Fuels One of the Country’s Largest Mass Kidnappings
A Viv Ansanm-linked gang attacked the town of Kenscoff, outside Port-au-Prince, over the weekend, killing at least 47 people and kidnapping more than 50 others, the UN said. It’s believed to be one of the largest mass kidnappings in Haiti in the last few years.
The attack is the latest escalation in the town outside the capital: a wave of Viv Ansanm violence there in early 2025 killed roughly 260 people over two months. Haiti hasn’t held elections since 2016—five years before President Jovenel Moïse’s July 2021 assassination, which created a power vacuum that gangs have since filled, but a first round is now scheduled for December 13.
See InSight Crime’s Haiti coverage for more on the rise of gangs in Haiti.
Facts Only
* President Abelardo de la Espriella ordered Colombian security forces to label criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, and smuggling as “terrorists.”
* The directive requires the army, police, navy, and air force to operate as a single body.
* The use of the term “terrorism” in Colombia dates back five decades concerning conflicts with FARC and ELN.
* The Trump administration designated 20 Latin American criminal groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala designated regional groups as “terrorists.”
* US Southern Command carried out two lethal strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean this week.
* Since September 2025, the US has carried out 68 strikes, resulting in at least 227 deaths.
* A Viv Ansanm-linked gang attacked Kenscoff outside Port-au-Prince over the weekend.
* The attack resulted in at least 47 deaths and the kidnapping of more than 50 people.
* Haiti has not held elections since 2016.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The simultaneous presentation of these three events suggests a thematic convergence around the redefinition and deployment of security categorization to address transnational criminal realities. The Colombian move to classify all organized crime as terrorism signals an attempt to utilize a maximalist legal framework—borrowing from international counter-terrorism discourse—to mobilize a comprehensive state response against diffuse illicit economies, even though the term has historical roots in internal conflict rather than contemporary trafficking structures. This pattern suggests that labeling is less about semantic precision and more about establishing unified operational authority and leveraging external legitimacy for enhanced enforcement capabilities.
The US strikes reveal a persistent, high-intensity kinetic response to drug trafficking, yet the acknowledgement by officials that these actions primarily shift routes rather than eradicate the flow points to a structural limitation: physical force alone cannot dismantle complex transnational economic systems. This creates a tension between punitive state action and systemic reality.
The Haitian situation illustrates the consequences of governance failure—a security vacuum allowing non-state actors to fill voids, leading directly to mass violence and kidnapping. The comparison implies that where state infrastructure collapses, criminal dynamics become immediately lethal. The underlying pattern is the functional relationship between legal categorization (Colombia), external military intervention (US strikes), and internal state fragility (Haiti). The implications for agency are whether this framework enhances accountability or simply substitutes one form of imposed control for another.
Bridge Questions: How does the invocation of "terrorism" risk obscuring localized grievances against state presence, and what conditions must be met for unified security categorization to translate into tangible reductions in violence across these disparate geographies? If kinetic action fails to change trafficking routes, what institutional shift is required to transition from reactive strikes and ad-hoc labeling to proactive systemic dismantling of criminal financial networks? What are the long-term consequences for legal systems when historical conflict terminology is retroactively applied to modern illicit economies?
Sentinel — Human
The text reads like an aggregated news bulletin that connects three separate, complex global events using external data references, exhibiting typical journalistic structuring rather than purely synthetic generation.