In 2024, Peru’s Congress passed reforms that rewrote the legal definition of “organized crime,” removing certain white-collar and corruption-related offenses from its scope and making it significantly more difficult for prosecutors to pursue complex investigations. On paper, it might have looked like a rather routine technical adjustment. In practice, the revision dismantled a core legal framework used to investigate illicit enrichment, money laundering, and collusion between political actors and criminal networks. The change arrived with relatively little international scrutiny. But it wasn’t an isolated event.
Across Latin America, political elites are quietly passing laws that narrow definitions, shield allies, and choke off the legal pathways through which corruption and organized crime are investigated. From Ecuador to El Salvador, Guatemala to Venezuela, the pattern is becoming clear: where prosecutorial independence and international commissions once served as bulwarks against impunity, legislative and judicial systems are now being re-engineered to neutralize them from within.
This trend marks a shift in how democratic erosion unfolds in the region. The threat is no longer just populist strongmen attacking institutions from the outside. Its lawmakers are using institutional tools to legally erase their own vulnerability. This is the new face of impunity—subtle, procedural, and increasingly effective.
The consequences are already visible: criminal investigations stalled, international watchdogs expelled, and civil society groups constrained by restrictive laws that govern NGOs’ activities. While U.S. and international actors continue to invest in security partnerships and anti-corruption programming, the legal terrain underpinning those efforts is being systematically undermined.
It starts with Peru—but the story stretches across a region where democracy is being eroded, not necessarily through coups or direct censorship, but through clauses, statutes, and legislative silence.
A Pattern, Not an Exception
In Peru, the government’s 2024 legislative reform rewrote the country’s organized crime law in ways that significantly narrowed prosecutorial tools. The changes excluded crimes such as extortion, money laundering, and illicit enrichment from being treated under organized crime statutes unless they met a new, more stringent threshold of “systematic” and “organized” conduct. This redefinition stripped prosecutors of access to key investigative powers such as wiretaps, plea agreements, and multi-defendant case structures. As a result, many cases involving political corruption and criminal collusion now fall outside the scope of specialized anti-organized crime units. Legal experts and civil society organizations have warned that the reform provides de facto protection to powerful actors, allowing criminal networks to operate under the radar while prosecutors are left with diminished authority and increased risk.
Peru may be the most recent flashpoint, but it is far from unique. Across Latin America, governments are increasingly using legislative reform, judicial manipulation, and administrative obstruction not to fight corruption—but to shield it. The trend spans political ideologies and national contexts, yet the underlying strategy is the same: weaken institutions from the inside by narrowing their capacity to investigate and prosecute entrenched power.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Ecuador, where the so-called Purga case has exposed deep institutional collusion with organized crime. In early 2024, Ecuador’s attorney general indicted dozens of judges, police officials, and public servants for allegedly operating a criminal protection network that sold judicial impunity to drug traffickers. Among the most striking revelations: defendants were able to predict court rulings and secure favorable verdicts in high-stakes cases through a web of bribery and influence peddling.
Rather than triggering sweeping institutional reform, the case has prompted a political backlash. Legislative allies of those implicated have proposed constraints on prosecutorial discretion and raised procedural barriers for wiretapping and plea agreements—moves that mirror Peru’s rollback. At the same time, Ecuador’s spiraling homicide rate—now one of the highest per capita in the hemisphere—has been met with military deployments, not legal reform. The underlying legal architecture of accountability remains compromised.
El Salvador offers a more overt version of institutional repurposing. In 2021, President Nayib Bukele’s allies in Congress removed five Constitutional Court justices and replaced them with loyalists. Since then, they have passed a series of laws that not only allow indefinite presidential re-election but also drastically restrict the activities of nongovernmental organizations, particularly those that receive foreign funding. The “Foreign Agents Law” imposes steep taxes on international donations and requires intrusive disclosures from civil society groups—many of which focus on corruption and human rights monitoring. While Bukele’s administration presents these measures as national security safeguards, they functionally suppress dissent and protect the political class from external scrutiny.
In Guatemala, the dismantling of anti-corruption institutions has followed a more protracted path. After the expulsion of the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala in 2019, successive administrations have worked to neuter judicial independence. Prosecutors who built landmark corruption cases—often involving high-level politicians—have fled the country under threat of arrest. Legislative allies of the ruling party have introduced laws limiting the autonomy of the Public Ministry and criminalizing certain forms of investigative journalism. In 2025, new efforts to centralize judicial appointments are underway, sparking concerns of further court-packing and selective prosecutions.
Venezuela represents the furthest extreme of this trajectory. The government’s Anti-Solidarity Law gives authorities the power to suspend or dissolve any nonprofit organization that receives foreign assistance and engages in undefined “political activity.” The measure targets transparency watchdogs and humanitarian groups alike, effectively criminalizing civil society oversight. While Venezuela’s legal system has long been subordinated to executive power, this legislation codifies that control in ways that could outlast any individual administration.
These cases differ in style but converge in substance. Whether through constitutional reform, judicial intimidation, or the weaponization of administrative law, governments are hollowing out the institutional infrastructure of accountability. The shift is subtle but profound: crime is no longer being hidden—it’s being redefined.
Rather than dismantling corruption networks, legislatures are redrawing the legal boundaries so that those networks no longer qualify as targets. Investigative tools are revoked not through executive decree but through carefully worded bills and budgetary attrition. Prosecutors are disempowered not necessarily through violence but by reshaping what the law allows them to pursue.
This pattern marks a turning point in the region’s democratic backsliding. What once relied on brute force or overt autocracy now unfolds through procedural suffocation and strategic legalism. But how does this trend work? Not as a series of accidents, but as a deliberate transformation of accountability across the region.
From Accountability to Protection
The defining feature of this regional trend is not the erosion of legality—it’s the repurposing of it. In country after country, legal systems are not being discarded but re-engineered to defend entrenched interests. Lawmakers are not undermining accountability by breaking the rules; they are rewriting the rules so accountability no longer applies.
This transformation plays out across three key dimensions:
-
Redefining Criminal Categories
The most powerful tactic is legislative precision. By rewriting legal definitions—of organized crime, corruption, or unlawful enrichment—governments limit which offenses prosecutors can pursue using specialized investigative tools. Peru’s 2024 reform excluded offenses like extortion and illicit enrichment from organized crime statutes unless they met new, restrictive criteria. Ecuador is considering similar statutory narrowing, particularly regarding plea bargaining and asset forfeiture.
These changes reshape the legal playing field. Prosecutors who once relied on multi-defendant frameworks, digital intercepts, or protected witness testimony are now required to proceed as if they were handling low-level, isolated offenses. In practice, this strips cases of momentum and exposes investigators and informants to retaliation.
-
Blocking Civil Society Oversight
Independent watchdogs have long played a crucial role in exposing high-level corruption and organized criminal activity. But as legal threats shift, so do the tools of suppression. El Salvador’s foreign agents bill, Venezuela’s Anti-Solidarity Law, and Guatemala’s recent efforts to criminalize “politicized” civil society activities all reflect a clear goal: neutralize the external actors capable of documenting and publicizing elite impunity.
These laws often mimic anti-money laundering or national security language—casting civil society as a threat rather than a check. They rarely result in immediate crackdowns; instead, they create a climate of legal uncertainty and risk that deters scrutiny. This “chilling effect” is as effective as formal bans.
-
Undermining Institutional Safeguards
Judiciaries and public ministries are being hollowed out through budget manipulation, personnel reshuffles, and politically motivated disciplinary procedures. In Guatemala, prosecutors and judges linked to major corruption cases have been driven into exile or jailed. In El Salvador, the Constitutional Court was captured through a single legislative vote. Ecuador’s efforts to restrict prosecutorial independence have escalated as cartel-linked violence surged in 2025.
What unites these approaches is not chaos but coordination. These aren’t improvisational responses to crises—they are deliberate, sequenced efforts to transform legal systems into tools of protection for ruling coalitions and their networks.
The result is a version of rule of law in which laws exist, courts operate, and trials take place—but only within a narrow bandwidth that excludes those with real power. Anti-corruption institutions remain, but are emptied of autonomy. Legal codes are updated, but only to remove systemic leverage. Oversight mechanisms are present in form, not in function.
For international actors, this creates a fundamental problem. The infrastructure they helped build—prosecutor-led task forces, regional cooperation on illicit finance, judicial modernization programs—is still in place, but operating under new rules. Those rules increasingly prioritize legal protection for elites over justice for citizens.
But what are these consequences? To better understand that, it becomes crucial to look at the ways in which legal manipulation is redefining democracy itself across the region.
Why It Matters
The redefinition of crime is not a legal abstraction. It is a quiet but profound reshaping of democracy itself. When legislatures narrow the law to protect themselves, they do more than obstruct justice—they rewrite the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Across Latin America, corruption and organized crime no longer operate outside the law. They increasingly operate through it. Politicians implicated in illicit enrichment or ties to criminal networks are not fleeing accountability—they are voting to abolish it. This is not the collapse of law and order, but its strategic inversion.
The consequences are material and immediate. In Peru, extortion has become a daily threat to workers in construction, transport, and small business. Gangs collect “protection” fees via WhatsApp; those who refuse are beaten or killed. In Ecuador, spiraling homicides have forced the government to declare internal armed conflict. El Salvador’s mass incarceration campaign has swept up tens of thousands of citizens, but offers little insight into the legal forces enabling elite impunity. In Guatemala and Venezuela, those investigating high-level officials have been jailed or driven into exile. Across these cases, violence continues—but prosecutions stall.
For democratic systems, this erosion is doubly dangerous. First, it dismantles the internal checks that hold public power accountable. Second, it erodes public trust—creating the perception that justice is only for the weak. As formal institutions grow less credible, alternative systems of order—patronage, coercion, and informal criminal control—begin to fill the vacuum. What follows is not statelessness, but captured governance: rule not by law, but by those who control it.
Internationally, this poses serious challenges for anti-corruption programming and democratic assistance. For more than two decades, donors and multilateral institutions have invested in judicial reform, civil society support, and regional enforcement cooperation. Yet few of those efforts anticipated the current shift: that political actors would not dismantle institutions but recode them. They didn’t shut down prosecutors’ offices; they rewrote the rules those prosecutors must follow. They didn’t defund civil society; they regulated it out of relevance.
In the absence of credible legal frameworks, these efforts lose traction. U.S. and European development agencies cannot partner effectively with legal institutions designed to fail. Multilateral frameworks—like the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption or FATF-based financial monitoring regimes—depend on functional domestic enforcement. When the law becomes a shield for criminality, these regimes collapse from within.
The issue is not just impunity. It’s the normalization of impunity through law.
What Can Be Done
The legislative manipulation of criminal law is one of the most underrecognized threats to democratic governance in Latin America. But it is not irreversible. While the region faces a legal environment increasingly hostile to oversight, key levers still exist—both within national systems and across the international architecture built to support them.
- International Assistance Must Prioritize Legal Integrity: Anti-corruption aid often focuses on capacity building—training prosecutors, modernizing courts, digitizing case management. But capacity is irrelevant if the law itself blocks action. Donors must begin to treat legal definitions, statutory frameworks, and institutional mandates as frontline anti-impunity terrain. Where parliaments rewrite laws to obstruct prosecution or limit civil society, those changes should trigger consequences: funding pauses, diplomatic pushback, or heightened conditionality. The focus should shift from whether countries have institutions, to what those institutions are legally allowed to do.
- Civil Society Requires Protection and Infrastructure: Organizations tracking corruption and organized crime increasingly face legal, financial, and physical threats. International actors should invest not only in their capacity but in their legal insulation: pro bono legal defense, emergency response funding, and safe-haven support for those targeted by weaponized legislation. In countries like Peru and El Salvador, these groups have become the final line of resistance to elite impunity. They cannot operate if they are taxed into silence or criminalized for transparency.
- Regional Legal Monitoring Needs Strengthening: Too often, legal erosion flies under the radar because it is highly technical and nationally framed. Regional bodies—including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Organization of American States, and civil society coalitions like the Due Process of Law Foundation—must expand their work on legislative capture. That means real-time tracking of legal reforms, comparative alerts, and structured databases that document how laws are being used to restrict—not expand—accountability.
- Redefine Success in Democratic Assistance: For decades, success in democracy promotion has been measured by elections, budget increases for the judiciary, or the creation of anti-corruption agencies. But none of those metrics reflect how law is being used. The new baseline must include whether the legal system allows for the investigation and prosecution of entrenched political and criminal actors. If not, no technical assistance program can function, no regional framework can hold, and no election will yield meaningful change.
The most dangerous new threats to democracy are no longer loud. They do not announce themselves with coups or sweeping decrees. They arrive in amendments, subparagraphs, and procedural reforms—recasting what justice can see and what prosecutors can touch.
Legal impunity is not just about letting corruption flourish. It is about turning the law itself into a mechanism of selective protection. If left unchecked, this quiet reversal will become the dominant governance model in the region—democracies in name, but insulated autocracies in practice.
The fight for accountability in Latin America will not be won in the streets or in the headlines. More and more, it looks like it will be won—or lost—in the fine print.
