Structural Consequences of Economic Crisis and US Militarization in the Caribbean: Drug Scarcity, Crime Escalation, and Narco-Entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico
Since 2025, Puerto Rico has become a front line in the US fight against transnational drug trafficking, but the island’s struggle is more than a security issue. Amid an ongoing fiscal crisis, recurring natural disasters, and prolonged political instability, militarized operations and market disruptions have intensified illicit economic pressures, fueling unprecedented violence.
Introduction
During the first year of President Trump’s second term, Puerto Rico became a central stage for a new phase of US security and counter-drug policy in the Caribbean. As part of Operation Southern Spear, a large-scale military campaign aimed at detecting, disrupting, and degrading transnational drug trafficking networks, the United States significantly increased its military presence on the island and in nearby waters. This buildup included extensive amphibious and aviation exercises with the US Marines in southern Puerto Rico, expanded deployment of personnel and naval vessels, and renewed operational activity at the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station—a site of historical military significance. There has also been an increase in military personnel at facilities such as Camp Santiago in Salinas and Fort Buchanan in Guaynabo.[1]
In parallel, Puerto Rico experienced intensified on-the-ground state security operations, including high-profile immigration enforcement actions and coordinated anti-crime initiatives between federal and local agencies. At the same time, the island saw an unprecedented escalation in drug-related violence, with levels of brutality and market instability that many residents and analysts describe as historically unusual. These developments have unfolded amid conditions that shape illicit economic activity. Based on historian George Díaz’s perspective on the illicit market, the article analyzes the correlation between economic precarity arising from the deep fiscal and political crisis and the effects of recent militarized governance, which create environments in which informal and illicit markets do not simply reflect criminal opportunism, but are embedded in broader social survival strategies.[2]
While this background situates Puerto Rico’s current crises, the central argument of this paper is that the island’s economic collapse and the expansion of militarized security interventions interact to produce overlapping and mutually reinforcing forms of structural violence (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. A US Navy warship stationed at the Port of Ponce, December 2025. Source: Photo by Dr. Víctor Vázquez.
Fiscal crisis and institutional weakness erode state capacity and social safety nets, generating conditions in which both licit and illicit markets, including drug trade networks, become mechanisms of social and economic survival. Militarized interdiction and security operations disrupt supply chains, intensifying competition and violence driven by scarcity. In this context, narco-entrepreneurship emerges as a structural response to prolonged economic abandonment and securitized governance, rather than merely a criminal choice. The paper thus links three key variables—economic crisis, militarization, and narco-entrepreneurship—to show how structural vulnerabilities produce new patterns of everyday violence.
This article proceeds in three sections. First, it examines how Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis and weakened institutions shape social and economic survival strategies. Second, it analyzes the effects of military operations and market disruption on patterns of violence. Finally, it conceptualizes narco-entrepreneurship and everyday violence as outcomes of accumulated crisis, demonstrating how economic precarity, militarized policy, and market instability intersect to produce enduring forms of structural vulnerability.
A Weakened State Confronting Overlapping Crises
Puerto Rico entered 2025 burdened by more than a decade of structural instability. A key analytical point is that illicit economies often emerge as survival mechanisms within contexts of prolonged structural weakness. In political science, scholars such as Gerardo L. Munck and Juan Pablo Luna (2022) describe these conditions as characteristic of weak states—contexts in which governments lack the uniform capacity to enforce the law and maintain order across their territories. In such settings, states may formally possess the institutions of modern governance but remain weak in their ability to impose the rule of law and sustain institutional effectiveness.[3]
The 2016 government bankruptcy and the imposition of the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (locally known as la junta) under the PROMESA Law created an austerity regime that substantially reduced budgets for education, housing, security, and public safety, affecting locals’ lives in general. At the same time, the island continues to grapple with the cumulative effects of Hurricane María in 2017, the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale migration, and institutional deterioration highlighted by multiple corruption scandals.[4]
This landscape has severely weakened the state’s capacity to respond to rapid shifts in criminal behavior. The fiscal crisis not only undermined overall living conditions but also generated a severe crisis within local law enforcement. For instance, the Puerto Rico Police Bureau (Policía de Puerto Rico) experienced a significant exodus of officers, resulting in funding cuts, leaving the institution understaffed, demoralized, and structurally fragile. This created a security void in which local criminal organizations, particularly those controlling drug‑distribution networks, expanded their influence. As George Díaz argues in his historical analysis of border contraband, illicit networks thrive in contexts where state presence is limited, law enforcement is inconsistent, and economic necessity drives participation in smuggling and other informal activities. As a result, many streets—especially at night—have effectively become no man’s land, marked by escalating violence and a broad range of criminal activities carried out with relative impunity due to the shortage of officers.
To make matters worse, Puerto Rico’s already strained middle class now faces an additional structural threat. Accelerated gentrification, fueled by the tax incentives established under Act 60, has intensified socio-spatial inequality across the island. Enacted in 2019, Act 60 consolidated several earlier tax incentive programs and granted substantial tax benefits to investors and high-net-worth individuals relocating to Puerto Rico. While the policy was designed to stimulate economic investment, it has simultaneously accelerated housing speculation, increased property values, and made working and middle-class residents more vulnerable to displacement and rising living costs.
Under this framework, Puerto Rico has experienced a new wave of migration, largely from the mainland United States, including remote workers, investors, and high-income professionals seeking favorable tax conditions. This influx has intensified real estate speculation and significantly reshaped local housing markets, accelerating displacement within historically marginalized communities. These dynamics are closely linked to contemporary patterns of urban gentrification, as Vázquez (2024) discusses in Resistiendo la gentrificación en Puerto Rico through a case study of Los Filtros, a low-income community in Guaynabo—one of the most expensive municipalities in the metropolitan area. As property values and rental prices rise, entire neighborhoods undergo demographic transformation and spatial restructuring. At the same time, economically marginalized areas continue to face deteriorating infrastructure, uneven policing, and limited access to stable employment.
Within these structural conditions, the illicit economy does not function solely as a criminal enterprise; rather, it frequently emerges as an adaptive survival strategy among populations excluded from formal economic opportunities. Historically, in Puerto Rico, marginalized communities, including many public housing projects, have been particularly vulnerable to the territorial control of local drug trafficking networks and the consolidation of illicit markets. Areas characterized by concentrated poverty and long histories of marginalization—such as La Perla in San Juan, Los Filtros in Guaynabo, and Barrio Obrero in Santurce, among many others—have long endured structural poverty and, more recently, mounting pressures from urban redevelopment and gentrification. Within these contexts of economic precarity and spatial displacement, marginalized urban communities—including slums, barriadas, and other underserved neighborhoods—have often functioned as localized enclaves for the distribution of illicit drugs, including cocaine, heroin, prescription opioids, adulterated marijuana, and, more recently, fentanyl.[5]
Poverty and Dependency Shape the Social and Environmental Welfare of the Island
For more than fifty years, poverty and welfare dependency in Puerto Rico have been central topics of scholarly debate. Mid-twentieth-century industrialization under Operation Bootstrap transformed the island’s economy from an agrarian to an industrial one, but produced deeply uneven outcomes, leaving Puerto Rico as the poorest US jurisdiction with persistently high levels of poverty and welfare dependency into the twenty-first century (See Figure 2). In this sense, Puerto Rican scholars like Jorge Duany and Linda Colón agree that Operation Bootstrap displaced rural communities and created los arrabales—marginalized urban settlements where many migrants from the countryside settled after leaving agricultural work. The program’s emphasis on industrial labor coincided with the collapse of the agricultural sector, forcing mass migration from rural areas to cities and, later, to the mainland United States, perpetuating cycles of poverty and social marginalization.[6]
Figure 2. Unemployment rate and population receiving public assistance in 2024. Source by NAP/ Ycharts.
Within this context, many working-class Puerto Ricans experience persistent hardship and high levels of unemployment, contributing to an increase in the number of welfare recipients. While social assistance programs provide essential economic support, long-term reliance on public aid has become embedded in public discourse and stigmatized through labels such as cuponero or vivir del mantengo (Puerto Rican Spanish slang for welfare recipient), terms that moralize poverty and reinforce class divisions. These dynamics continue to shape contemporary perceptions of poverty, reinforcing stereotypes and myths surrounding welfare dependence.[7]
Despite these structural challenges, Puerto Rico’s economy experienced periods of significant growth. During the mid-to-late twentieth century, urban construction, infrastructure development, and public housing projects transformed the island’s built environment, creating a model of industrial growth relative to other Caribbean nations such as Cuba or the Dominican Republic. A particularly notable factor was Section 936 of the US Internal Revenue Code, which between the 1970s and 1990s provided federal tax exemptions to US corporations operating on the island. This policy attracted significant investment from pharmaceutical and other multinational firms, generating employment opportunities and consolidating the working-class population. However, the phase-out of Section 936 in the 1990s, combined with neoliberal reforms, exploitative Puerto Rican politicians, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, led to factory closures and relocations to Latin America in search of cheaper labor, exacerbating unemployment and economic instability for many Puerto Ricans.
As property values and rental prices rose, entire neighborhoods underwent restructuring and demographic shifts. At the same time, economically marginalized areas continued to experience deteriorating infrastructure, uneven policing, and limited access to stable employment. Under these conditions, illicit economies did not operate solely as criminal enterprises; rather, they often served as adaptive survival strategies for residents, particularly in the island’s most impoverished sectors. Marginalized communities—including public housing projects—were historically appropriated by local drug traffickers, who used these enclaves for the distribution of cocaine, heroin, prescription opioids, adulterated marijuana, and, more recently, fentanyl. In this sense, structural inequalities, labor displacement, and economic precarity have shaped not only patterns of poverty but also the survival strategies of Puerto Rican communities across the island.
Anthropological frameworks—beginning with Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty from the 1960s —had a significant impact, representing one of the first academic attempts to describe how marginalized subcultures and poverty operated in Puerto Rico during Operation Bootstrap. However, Lewis’s framework became highly controversial, as it stigmatized Puerto Rican migrants in New York and overlooked structural factors such as systemic poverty, lack of job opportunities, access to education, and broader economic inequalities. Later, structural critiques in the 1980s and 1990s, notably by Charles Valentine and Philippe Bourgois, sought to address these limitations by situating poverty within larger political and economic systems. These scholars emphasized that what was previously labeled as “culture” often developed as a response to structural inequalities under capitalism, offering a more nuanced understanding of how social and economic forces shape marginalized communities.
Despite decades of theoretical and policy interventions, welfare dependency in Puerto Rico has remained historically widespread, reinforcing structural vulnerability to illicit economies. As economic and social opportunities remain constrained, residents in marginalized sectors are increasingly compelled to participate in alternative economic strategies to sustain their livelihoods. From the 1990s to the present, Puerto Rico has experienced sustained deterioration in economic conditions and living standards—further exacerbated by the fiscal crisis declared in 2016—which has entrenched welfare dependency and reinforced the expansion of the informal economy. As early as 2006, The Economist warned of these dynamics in an article titled “Trouble in the Welfare Island,” highlighting the island’s extensive reliance on government assistance and the heightened vulnerability of low-income sectors to participation in informal and illicit markets.[8]
From the declaration of bankruptcy in 2016 through 2025, nearly half of the island’s population continues living below the poverty line, declining from 48% in 2016 to 43% in 2025, according to 2020 Census data. The total population is estimated at approximately 3.24 million residents in 2025, of whom about 1.27 million rely on public welfare assistance. This indicates that nearly half of the population depends on welfare programs, reflecting a significant contraction of the workforce and the erosion of the working class. This demographic shift also represents a substantial decline from the 3.8 million inhabitants recorded in earlier decades. Puerto Rico continues to maintain a high proportion of welfare recipients and part-time workers—key indicators of structural precarity—consistent with an economy that has entered a prolonged period of stagnation.
The persistence of poverty and welfare dependency, combined with weakened state institutions, helps explain the proliferation of illicit economies. Residents in economically marginalized communities often rely on these adaptive strategies not simply as criminal choices, but as mechanisms of survival in a context where formal employment and state support are insufficient to meet basic needs. In this way, poverty and dependency are structurally linked to broader patterns of illicit economic activity, feeding directly into the paper’s overarching argument about how systemic vulnerabilities foster alternative survival strategies.[9]
Drug Scarcity and Crime Escalation
Since the declaration of bankruptcy in 2016 to the present, Puerto Rico has witnessed an intensification of violence, including murders in broad daylight, massacres, close-range shootings, attacks in public spaces such as restaurants and beaches, carjackings, assaults against elderly individuals, ATM robberies, and rampant domestic violence. The underlying analytical point is that drug scarcity, driven by the US military interventions in the Caribbean Sea, has destabilized local markets and directly contributed to this escalation of violence, demonstrating how structural vulnerabilities and weakened state capacity intersect with informal and illicit economies.
Historically, Puerto Rico has served as a major trafficking route from South America to the mainland United States, functioning as a critical port of entry—particularly to Florida. For decades, this market was dominated primarily by cocaine. However, over the past two years, trafficking patterns have shifted, with increased focus on the smuggling of fentanyl and human trafficking, especially from the Dominican Republic and South America. Following aggressive maritime interventions by the Trump administration—particularly the destruction of several trafficking vessels—the flow of cocaine into Puerto Rico significantly declined. This reduction in supply generated instability within the island’s illicit drug market, forcing local trafficking organizations to adapt by shifting toward alternative substances and developing new smuggling strategies. These interventions also disrupted traditional drug routes, giving rise to new trafficking modalities such as island hopping, a small-scale method relying on private vessels traveling from neighboring islands.[10]
Local news sources remain unclear on which cartels dominate the Puerto Rican drug market. According to press reports, tensions involve international cartels competing for geographic control—such as the Dominican cartel, Los Soles, and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación—as well as local Puerto Rican and Dominican organizations attempting to stabilize their influence on the island.
More recently, Puerto Rico’s Police Superintendent Joseph González and a long-term FBI agent with expertise in drug trafficking on the US border explained that the recent surge in violence is directly linked to US military operations targeting narco-boats in the Caribbean. These operations have significantly restricted Puerto Rico’s role as a primary entry point for illicit drugs, destabilizing the flow of substances, particularly cocaine, fentanyl, and heroin. In response, traffickers have shifted routes: instead of the southern and western coasts, smuggling activity is increasingly concentrated along the northern coast, while overall shipment volumes have declined. González illustrated this shift with recent seizures in Camuy and Loíza, two northern municipalities on the island: “The quantities are much smaller than what we were used to. One shipment was approximately 150 kilos, the other less than 100 kilos, when we were accustomed to seeing much larger shipments of one to two thousand kilos.”[11]
This situation demonstrates how US military operations in the Caribbean, coupled with structural weaknesses, produce both scarcity and market volatility. The illicit economy adapts to these conditions, illustrating a broader pattern in which communities and criminal networks respond dynamically to systemic constraints, reinforcing the paper’s argument that structural vulnerability, weakened state capacity, and external disruptions collectively shape local economies and patterns of violence (See Figure 3).
Figure 3. Homicide rates in 2025. Source by PRIS.
New Narco-Entrepreneurship: Macabre Violence by Drug Cartels
Despite Puerto Rico’s status as a US territory—surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean and monitored by one of the most powerful coast guard and naval surveillance systems in the world—its coastline remains a strategic transit route for international cartels. Local groups often operate as subcontracted distributors for these larger criminal networks (Figure 4). However, as US counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean intensified, the inflow of drugs declined, provoking a rapid escalation of violence as rival factions competed for increasingly scarce shipments and control of the shrinking market.
In October 2025, authorities discovered the tortured and stripped bodies of five men displayed in public places—three in Carolina, near a church, and two in Santurce. Local police Superintendent Joseph González told El Nuevo Día that while “es probablemente relacionado al narcotráfico” (it’s probably related to drug trafficking), no other avenues are being explored. This horrific spectacle is emblematic of what I term the macabre turn in Puerto Rico’s drug violence—a shift where bodies become public messages, terror staged in visible urban contexts.[12]
Growing inequality in Puerto Rico coincides with notable shifts in narco trafficking practices. Murders involving the public display of bodies—as reported in Santurce and Carolina—reflect the emergence of a macabre aesthetic employed as a communicative tool: to intimidate rivals, assert territorial control, or signal defiance toward both the state and competing organizations. Traffickers increasingly use social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to circulate images of these acts, amplifying their reach and reinforcing their intended messages. These performative forms of violence mirror patterns documented in México, Colombia, and Central America, indicating heightened interactions between local networks and transnational groups, including cells affiliated with international cartels.
These practices do not emerge in a vacuum. They respond to fluctuations in illicit markets, scarcity of drugs, and pressures created by federal enforcement. When traditional trafficking routes are interrupted and drug availability declines, competition intensifies. Organizations resort to aggressive tactics to maintain territory, punish defectors, or demonstrate resilience. Combined with the island’s socioeconomic precarity, these pressures generate a highly volatile criminal ecosystem—or, as we argue, a new culture of narco-entrepreneurship.
Figure 4. The iconic La Perla in Old San Juan, a community that has experienced increased insecurity and police raids related to drug trafficking, including the murder of a US tourist in the summer of 2025.Source: Photo by Dr. Víctor Vázquez.
As a result, drug scarcity, fiscal crisis, territorial disputes, and spectacles of terror have intensified, embedding fear into the fabric of everyday life. Puerto Rican sociologists like Linda Colón (2024) and Luis Javier Cintrón Gutiérrez (2024) in agreement with anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (1998, 2024)—whose long-term ethnographic work examines Puerto Rican drug economies in New York and Philadelphia—demonstrate that the island’s expanding illicit economy is a direct response to the long-term deterioration and precarity of Puerto Rico’s formal economic structures. This precarity has deepened with the fiscal crisis and prolonged political instability, generating an unprecedented economic gap in which only a small elite has meaningful access to opportunities.[13]
Within this context, the new culture of narco-entrepreneurship has emerged: an underground economy shaped by a corporate logic with no ethical standards, in which traffickers adopt increasingly sophisticated strategies and draconian techniques of violence to project power, intimidate rivals, and discipline local communities. This organizational shift has normalized extreme brutality, reconfigured as a perverse currency of respect and a method of social control deployed by local cartels that gained prominence in recent years.
For example, before the decapitation murders that shook the island in 2025, Puerto Rican authorities had already dismantled a notorious local drug gang known as FARC (Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Cantera) during 2023–24. Cantera—a marginalized neighborhood in San Juan—became widely known because the group allegedly disposed of kidnapped rivals by feeding their bodies to caimans kept in makeshift warehouses. Although the gang was ultimately dismantled and its leaders arrested, a new and more violent criminal organization soon emerged, signaling a shifting narco-landscape with no clear end in sight.[14]
Structural Effects in Puerto Rico of US Militarization in the Caribbean
Amid the ongoing social and economic crisis in Puerto Rico—deepened by years of fiscal instability and austerity policies—another structural force has increasingly shaped the island’s landscape: the expansion of US militarization and homeland security operations. It is therefore crucial to examine the impact that US military activity and immigration enforcement practices have had on Puerto Rican communities (Figure 5).
Figure 5. US Border Patrol Headquarters in Aguadilla. Source: Photo by Dr. Víctor Vázquez.
Since the summer of 2025, the US military has intensified its training exercises in Puerto Rico, drawing growing attention from local residents, community organizations, and government officials. These exercises—spanning air, land, and maritime operations—are officially framed as efforts to strengthen military readiness and interagency coordination across the Caribbean region. However, the scale and visibility of these activities have significantly increased, particularly in the southern region of the island, Salinas, Arroyo, and Ponce, and the east in Ceiba, where previously closed US Army and Navy facilities have been reopened for operational use.
Residents in nearby communities have reported a notable rise in military presence, including the movement of personnel, equipment convoys, aircraft, naval vessels, and other military assets. For many, these developments evoke historical memories of US military occupation and raise renewed concerns about sovereignty, environmental impact, and the broader structural implications of militarization in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean (See Figure 6).
Figure 6. A protest sign displayed at a house in Barrio Obrero, Santurce, reads “Ningún ser humano es ilegal” (“No human being is illegal”). Barrio Obrero, the largest Dominican community in San Juan. Source: Photo by Dr. Víctor Vázquez.
While federal authorities emphasize preparedness and regional security, some local officials and community activists have raised concerns regarding noise pollution, environmental degradation, lack of governmental transparency, and the potential long-term consequences for surrounding communities. Initially, Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González (R) stated that she had not been formally informed about the use of Puerto Rican territory for these military exercises, nor about the island’s inclusion in Operation Southern Spear. However, media reports later indicated that in September 2025, the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, conducted two official visits in the region—first to Puerto Rico, where he met with Governor González to observe the exercises, and subsequently to the Dominican Republic, where he held meetings with President Luis Abinader. These diplomatic and military engagements highlight the broader regional scope of the operation and the strategic importance of the Caribbean within contemporary US security policy.[15]
At the same time, the intensification of immigration enforcement has introduced another layer of vulnerability and structural violence into everyday life in Puerto Rico. Since early 2025, the migrant population residing on the island—linked to long-standing maritime arrivals along its coasts, particularly from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other Caribbean nations—has increased significantly, placing additional strain on already fragile humanitarian and social support systems, as discussed by Frank Granziano’s ethnographic study on illegal rafters.[16]
Since January 2025, multiple enforcement operations have been conducted in Barrio Obrero, a historically Dominican immigrant neighborhood in San Juan. These raids—carried out by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in coordination with the US Department of Homeland Security—have primarily targeted undocumented Dominicans and other Caribbean migrants, sending shockwaves throughout immigrant communities across the island.
These operations, often characterized by home raids, arbitrary detention, and forms of public humiliation, extend beyond routine immigration enforcement and instead function as mechanisms of social control. The resulting violence is both physical and psychological. Fear reshapes everyday life: residents limit their mobility, children miss school, and communal routines deteriorate under the constant threat of detention. Within this framework, immigration enforcement practices illustrate how state power can blur into forms of structural violence, transforming the law into an instrument of intimidation rather than protection.
At the same time, the dynamics unfolding in Barrio Obrero reveal additional layers of social complexity. The neighborhood has historically faced structural vulnerabilities associated with illicit economies, including drug trafficking, human smuggling, irregular migration networks, and sexual exploitation. Heightened enforcement and recurring raids have forced many migrants into deeper states of invisibility and fear, pushing them to avoid public spaces and hide from authorities. This climate of surveillance and insecurity destabilizes neighborhood life, weakens community networks, and disrupts local economic activity (See Figure 7). In turn, such conditions may inadvertently create environments in which illicit actors and criminal organizations can further expand their influence, exacerbating the vulnerability of already marginalized communities.[17]
Figure 7. by Dr. Víctor Vázquez, US Border Patrol boat surveillance on the Rincón Coast. Source: Photo by Dr. Víctor Vázquez.
Conclusion: A System of Accumulated Violence
The convergence of US federal policies implemented during the administration of Donald Trump and Puerto Rico’s prolonged economic crisis has deepened the island’s structural vulnerability, reshaping everyday life in profoundly violent ways. Immigration and security directives expanded the reach of federal enforcement agencies into urban spaces, transforming poor and migrant neighborhoods into zones of surveillance, fear, and social control. When combined with the austerity regime imposed after 2016, these policies have contributed to what may be described as an economy of survival, increasingly sustained through illicit markets, drug distribution networks, and underground exchanges operating beyond the legal boundaries of the state.
This economy of survival has deep historical roots across the Hispanic Caribbean, particularly in contexts where weak or constrained states have struggled to provide stable economic opportunities. In places such as Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, the illicit economy has long functioned as an alternative mechanism of subsistence amid economic scarcity, unemployment, and political instability. Anthropological research has documented how smuggling networks, contraband trade, and survival-based sexual economies often emerge in response to structural inequality and limited access to formal labor markets. Ethnographic work by Kaifa Roland (2010), for instance, demonstrates how these practices operate within complex moral and social frameworks across Caribbean societies like Cuba.[18]
In the case of Puerto Rico, the illicit economy, particularly those connected to drug trafficking, has become increasingly attractive to individuals excluded from the formal labor market. This dynamic is especially visible among younger generations affected by the island’s prolonged fiscal crisis, the deterioration of public institutions, and the weakening of the public education system. For many marginalized youth, participation in drug distribution networks represents one of the few accessible pathways to income, social status, and economic mobility. The expansion of this illicit economy is therefore not solely a consequence of economic collapse but has also been intensified by broader US security strategies and the growing militarization of the Caribbean.
Within this shadow economy, the boundaries between survival, necessity, and criminality become increasingly blurred, generating conditions in which violence functions both as a means of subsistence and as a manifestation of systemic abandonment. In recent years, intensified federal anti-drug operations and disruptions in regional trafficking routes have contributed to periodic shortages within local drug markets. These disruptions often provoke heightened competition among local gangs and trafficking networks attempting to secure access to limited supplies. As a result, acts of violence have become increasingly macabre and symbolic, including public executions, mutilations, and other forms of brutality intended to send clear messages to rivals and reinforce territorial control. Such displays of extreme violence serve not only as instruments of intimidation but also as mechanisms for maintaining authority within increasingly unstable illicit markets.
Meanwhile, weakened state infrastructure has turned the island into a strategic corridor for transnational criminal organizations, including the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Cartel de los Soles, and Dominican trafficking networks. These organizations have further entrenched patterns of systemic violence across the Caribbean region. Local gangs, operating within a growing culture of narco-entrepreneurship, increasingly deploy extreme and symbolic forms of violence to maintain territorial control, intimidate rivals, and signal resilience in the face of federal interventions. Ironically, US military and federal anti-drug operations—while intended to suppress trafficking—have often intensified competition and instability within these illicit economies, demonstrating the complex interconnection between state enforcement strategies and criminal violence.
The erosion of public institutions resulting from prolonged bankruptcy, austerity policies, and the absence of sustainable economic alternatives has left Puerto Rico increasingly vulnerable, functioning as a weak and constrained polity. In this context, violence is no longer episodic but systemic: it circulates through everyday interactions, territorial disputes, and public demonstrations of power. A new configuration of control emerges in which colonial dependency, neoliberal austerity, and hemispheric drug enforcement policies converge to produce a landscape of precarious survival and persistent insecurity. Puerto Rico’s current condition, therefore, reflects a broader regional crisis in which the absence of viable structural solutions to economic collapse perpetuates cycles of violence, social fragmentation, and institutional fragility.
Puerto Rico urgently requires a comprehensive and coordinated social policy framework capable of addressing the structural conditions that sustain these illicit economies and the violence associated with them. Without meaningful economic opportunities, effective governance, and stronger institutional capacity, transnational criminal networks will continue to exploit the island’s vulnerabilities. The growing militarization of the Caribbean, combined with enforcement-driven federal policies and limited local autonomy, has further intensified instability across vulnerable communities. Taken together, these dynamics reveal that Puerto Rico’s crisis is not merely a matter of crime or public security but a manifestation of deeper structural forces—colonial governance, economic austerity, and transnational criminal economies—that demand urgent and transformative responses.
Endnotes
[1] Israel Meléndez Ayala, “Puerto Rico’s Old Military Wounds Are Being Reopened.” Time. 10 November 2025, https://time.com/7332725/puerto-ricos-military-roosevelt-roads/.
[2] George T. Díaz, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
[3] Gerardo L. Munk and Juan Pablo Luna, Latin American Politics and Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
[4] PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) is a US federal law enacted in 2016 to manage Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis by establishing a Financial Oversight and Management Board with authority over fiscal policy and debt restructuring.
[5] Víctor M. Vázquez Rodríguez, Resistiendo la gentrificación en Puerto Rico: La lucha comunitaria en Los Filtros, Guaynabo. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Publicaciones Gaviota, 2024.
[6] Jorge Duany, A Stateless Nation in Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
[7] Luis Galanes Valdejulli, Tourism and Language in Vieques. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. [8] “Trouble on Welfare Island: Overbearing government and the welfare state are hurting the United States’ poorest citizens,” The Economist, 25 May 2006, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2006/05/25/trouble-on-welfare-island.
[9] Linda Colón Reyes, La herencia de la exclusión: Desigualdad y pobreza. Puerto Rico, siglo XXI. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Publicaciones Gaviota, 2024.
[10] Alex Figueroa Cancel, “Narcos modifican vías de contrabando ante presencia militar: “No podemos decir que ha habido una disminución.” El Nuevo Día. 11 December 2025, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/seguridad/notas/narcos-modifican-vias-de-contrabando-ante-presencia-militar-no-podemos-decir-que-ha-habido-unadisminucion/?templateId=OT3HWJU9FRSI&templateVariantId=OTB2HAZL1TSY&experienceID=EX6EM0NN2JJ3.
[11] Katiria Soto, “Escasez de droga en la calle aumenta los robos y violencia, según superintendente.” Wapa.TV, 5 December 2025, https://wapa.tv/noticias/locales/escasez-de-droga-en-la-calle-aumenta-los-robos-y-violencia-seg-n-superintendente/article_f543bda4-244e-4529-94bd-20ecd48560ab.html.
[12] Alex Figueroa Cancel, “Reflejan que fueron torturados: Policía investiga masacre en Carolina y no descarta ningún móvil.” El Nuevo Dia, 7 October 2025, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/seguridad/notas/reflejan-que-fueron-torturados-policia-investiga-masacre-en-carolina-y-no-descarta-ningun-movil/?templateId=OT3HWJU9FRSI&templateVariantId=OTB2HAZL1TSY&experienceID=EXRSL2YIUINN.
[13] Bourgois, P., Hart, Laurine. Kain., Karandinos, George., & Montero, Fernado. “The violence of the American Dream in the segregated U.S. inner-city narcotics markets of the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora” inShandy Dianna, McCurdy David W, and Spradley James, Eds., Conformity, Conformity and Conflict Sixteenth Edition. Long Grove: Waveland Press, 2024, pp. 107–124.
[14] Luis Javier Cintrón Gutiérrez, “Las FARC, el narcotráfico y la “lógica empresarial”. El Nuevo Día. 22 January 2024, https://www.elnuevodia.com/opinion/punto-de-vista/las-farc-el-narcotrafico-y-la-logica-empresarial/?templateId=OT3HWJU9FRSI&templateVariantId=OTB2HAZL1TSY&experienceID=EX6EM0NN2JJ3.
[15] Dánica Coto, “Hegseth and Caine visit Puerto Rico as US steps up military operations in the Caribbean.” AP News. 8 September 2025, https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-caine-puerto-rico-military-caribbean-marines-88c1ad093ee158606e784e731391249e.
[16] Frank Graziano, Undocumented Dominican Migration, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
[17] Ronald Alexander Ávila-Claudio, “Hay personas pasando hambre porque no se atreven a salir de sus casas”: Barrio Obrero, la comunidad dominicana de Puerto Rico sacudida por las redadas migratorias de EE.UU.” BBC, 6 June 2025,https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c753krxrngwo.
[18] Kaifa Roland, Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meanings (Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology), New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
The post Structural Consequences of Economic Crisis and US Militarization in the Caribbean: Drug Scarcity, Crime Escalation, and Narco-Entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.