The Politics of Illicit Transit: Governing Fragmented Drug Routes in Honduras and Uruguay

Objective

The global cocaine trade is booming and transforming. Over the past decade, production, seizures, and consumption have risen worldwide, while supply chains have become increasingly fragmented. This fragmentation is especially visible in small Latin American transit countries such as Uruguay and Honduras, which play a crucial yet under-studied role in sustaining flows to Europe, now one of the largest cocaine markets. Whereas large cartels once controlled entire drug routes and operations along them, today criminal networks operate differently. They subcontract tasks to specialised groups that provide services such as transport along drug corridors, but do not necessarily exert control over them. While these dynamics are increasingly acknowledged in academic and policy debates, they remain under-analysed and undertheorised. The Politics of Illicit Transit (POLIT) project addresses this gap by investigating how illicit trade is sustained in the absence of monopolistic control. It explores the strategies and governance arrangements that criminal groups establish along drug routes to enable the trade, and how these vary across contexts. To do so, the project centres on a qualitative comparative case study of two cocaine transit hubs: Honduras – where multiple groups control route segments amid violence and institutional fragility – and Uruguay, where trafficking occurs without route control in a context of relative stability and low crime. Through ethnographic fieldwork and judicial document analysis, POLIT will generate rare, hard-to-collect empirical evidence on the cocaine trade in under-researched transit contexts. It will also contribute to scholarship on illicit markets and extra-legal governance by examining collaborations between rival criminal groups and by theorising how illicit trade is sustained in the absence of monopolistic control. In doing so, POLIT will generate insights to support evidence-based drug prevention policies in Latin America and Europe.