Fecha Publicación: 25-04-2025

Bodies hanging from bridges; beheadings and other brutal executions; assassinations, including of police officers and innocent youths; kidnapping and fear-mongering – the violent acts carried out by criminal groups often resemble those of terrorists. Yet they have been treated differently, both in terms of data collection and criminal prosecution. This could change as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order designating organized criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).

Violent activity by criminal groups is not classified as terrorism in the Global Terrorism Index. Yet the massacre of 207 people by criminal gangs in Haiti in December 2024 would rank as the second deadliest terrorist attack in 2024. To put things in perspective, 7 555 people were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2024; in Haiti alone, there were 7 302 homicides last year. The number of homicides in Mexico in 2024 was 25 469, many of them directly attributable to organized crime. In stark terms, organized crime kills far more people than terrorism.

It could be argued that the motivations of criminal and terrorist groups are very different. Although both use violence, organized criminal groups seek to profit, while terrorist groups are usually politically or ideologically motivated. Furthermore, the most efficient criminal networks are those that act discreetly, while terrorists typically seek to attract attention.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of examples of criminal groups using terrorist tactics, such as bombings and assassinations carried out by the Italian mafia and Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel, as well as narco-terrorist cartels in Mexico. As explained by Roberto Dondisch, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, such acts are designed ‘to create terror, to make people afraid of them and to send a signal to the police, politicians or other cartels in order to control markets’.

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