In 1993, Colombian police shot and killed Pablo Escobar on a Medellín rooftop. In 2016, Mexican marines captured Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In 2011, the Colombian military killed FARC leader Alfonso Cano. Each time, officials celebrated a blow against organized crime. Each time, the violence didn’t stop it mutated.
For decades, the so-called kingpin strategy has dominated counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency policy in Latin America. The logic is simple: remove the leader, and the organization collapses. But a growing body of research suggests this approach is fundamentally flawed. Violence in the region is less about who leads a criminal group and more about where the group operates. Geography rugged terrain, remote borders, coca fields, and absent state authority creates conditions that make violence inevitable, regardless of the names on the group’s letterhead.
The Kingpin Strategy: A Brief History
The kingpin approach took shape during the U.S. War on Drugs in the 1970s and 1980s, formalized in the 1989 Andean Initiative and later the 2008 Mérida Initiative for Mexico. It was also applied to guerrilla groups, such as the targeted killing of ELN commanders in Colombia. The strategy borrowed from counterterrorism and organized crime literature, assuming that criminal hierarchies are centralized and that leaders are irreplaceable.
But this assumption conflicts with network theory, which shows that criminal organizations are often resilient and redundant. When a leader falls, a network’s nodes reorganize. The structure persists, even if the faces change.
What the Evidence Says: The Hydra Effect
Empirical studies consistently show that leadership removal leads to fragmentation into smaller, more violent groups. The phenomenon is so common it has a name: the hydra effect. Cut off one head, and two grow back.
Post-Escobar Medellín offers a stark example. Between 1993 and the mid-2000s, the collapse of the Medellín Cartel fueled a wave of smaller gangs, paramilitary groups, and drug trafficking organizations that fought over Escobar’s former territory. Homicide rates in the city spiked, and the violence outlasted anything Escobar himself had orchestrated.
More recently, the capture of El Chapo Guzmán in 2016 triggered a bloody power struggle within the Sinaloa Cartel. His sons squared off against a rival faction led by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, resulting in thousands of deaths across northern Mexico. The cartel didn’t disappear — it fractured, and the infighting proved deadlier than the group’s operations under a single leader.
In Colombia, the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC was supposed to end the conflict. But dissident factions that refused to demobilize quickly filled abandoned territories. They are now more numerous and more fragmented than the original FARC, and they continue to control same strategic zones.
The pattern is clear: decapitation doesn’t reduce violence in the medium term. It often increases it.
The Geographic Turn: Why Place Matters More Than the Group
A new wave of research — using satellite imagery, geocoded conflict data, and municipal-level crime statistics — is shifting the focus from organizations to landscapes. Studies published in journals like Journal of Conflict Resolution and Crime Science find that violence correlates more strongly with geographic “opportunity structures” than with cartel presence.
These structures include altitude, forest cover, river access, proximity to international borders, road networks, and the presence of coca cultivation zones. Even if you eliminate a cartel, the geography remains. New groups emerge to exploit the same opportunities.
Consider Colombia’s “coca belt” — regions like Putumayo and Caquetá. These areas have rugged terrain, dense forest, and weak state presence. Poverty is high, and alternative livelihoods are scarce. Violence persists there not because of a particular group’s leadership, but because the environment is structurally conducive to illicit economies. The same holds for Peru’s VRAEM valley and Bolivia’s Chapare region.
Borderlands are another natural hotspot. The Colombia–Venezuela border, the Mexico–Guatemala frontier, and the Paraguay–Brazil tri-border area are “lawless corridors” where rivers, mountains, and forest facilitate smuggling and provide refuge. Targeting a group in one spot often just displaces the violence a few kilometers away.
The Role of State Absence
Geography alone doesn’t cause violence. It interacts with state capacity. In areas where the state is absent or weak, illicit groups flourish. Roads, schools, health clinics, and police presence alter the calculus for criminal actors.
Scholars like Benjamin Lessing and Gustavo Duncan argue that violence is tied to state absence and geographically anchored illicit economies. Coca, opium, gold mining, and timber extraction are rooted in specific territories. These economies are geographically anchored, and they can’t be relocated by killing a leader.
This explains why military operations in remote regions often fail to achieve lasting peace. They may clear a group from an area, but unless the state establishes a permanent presence and offers economic alternatives, the territory remains vulnerable to reoccupation.
Policy Implications: From Manhunts to Territorial Governance
The research suggests a fundamental shift is needed: from “manhunt” strategies to territorial governance. Instead of focusing solely on catching or killing leaders, governments should invest in high-risk geographic zones — improving infrastructure, strengthening state institutions, and providing economic alternatives.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the fight against crime. But it means recognizing that violence is a spatial problem, not just a leadership problem. The U.S. and Latin American governments need to think about borders, terrain, and rural development as counter-narcotics tools.
Critiques and Caveats
Some critics warn against geographic determinism — the idea that geography alone dictates outcomes. They argue that human agency, political decisions, and corruption also matter. Geography is a constraint, not a cause. It shapes the options available to criminals and states, but it doesn’t guarantee violence.
Others note that the kingpin strategy can achieve short-term tactical victories. A capture may disrupt operations temporarily, and it’s politically popular. But these gains are often fleeting, and the costs — increased fragmentation, higher homicide rates, and community distrust — can outweigh the benefits.
What Communities Say
Local communities, often caught between military operations and cartel presence, have their own perspective. They argue that violence persists because of state neglect and lack of economic opportunities, not just because of who is in charge. In many areas, residents would welcome any group — or no group — if it meant they could live without fear and earn a living.
Their voices are often missing from policy debates centered on manhunts and body counts. But they highlight a crucial point: sustainable peace requires addressing the underlying conditions that make violence possible.
The kingpin strategy has failed to deliver lasting peace in Latin America. The evidence points to a different path: focusing on the geographic and structural factors that make violence possible. By investing in state presence, infrastructure, and economic alternatives in high-risk zones, governments can address the root causes of violence — not just its most visible symptoms.
Summary
- Removing cartel and guerrilla leaders often fragments groups, leading to more violence, not less.
- Geographic factors — terrain, borders, coca fields, state absence — are stronger predictors of violence than group leadership.
- The “hydra effect” describes how leadership removal spawns multiple, more violent successor groups.
- Policy should shift from manhunts to territorial governance: improving infrastructure, state presence, and economic alternatives in high-risk zones.
- Geography is a constraint, but it interacts with state capacity and human agency.
FAQ
Q: What is the kingpin strategy?
A: It’s a policy of targeting top leaders of criminal organizations — cartel bosses or guerrilla commanders — with the goal of weakening or dismantling the group.
Q: Why does the kingpin strategy fail?
A: Research shows that removing leaders often causes groups to fragment into smaller, more violent factions that fight for territory, leading to short-term spikes in violence rather than lasting peace.
Q: How does geography influence violence?
A: Geographic features like rugged terrain, dense forest, river access, and proximity to borders create “opportunity structures” that facilitate illicit economies and make certain areas prone to violence, regardless of which group operates there.
Q: What is the alternative to the kingpin strategy?
A: The alternative is territorial governance — investing in state presence, infrastructure, and economic alternatives in high-risk geographic zones to address the root causes of violence.
Q: Does geography determine violence?
A: No. Geography is a constraint that interacts with state capacity and human agency. It shapes opportunities, but it doesn’t guarantee violence.