InSight Crime

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean has adopted new strategies and strengthened control over territories and illicit economies.

Drug traffi…

Two weeks ago, we published what was supposed to be the final episode of The Shadow of El Dorado, our podcast series exploring the story of Segovia, a small mining town in Colombia tainted by blood g…

El descubrimiento de un campo de exterminio y trabajo forzado del Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) ha generado luto nacional en México y evidencia las crueles tácticas del grupo criminal para r…

The Trump administration’s decision to return a high-profile gang boss facing terrorism charges to El Salvador as part of a controversial effort to deport hundreds of Venezuelan citizens could signal…

We head back to Segovia after several years away. Has the town been able to escape the blood gold cycle? 

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This is the final episode of the series. If you’d like to explore past episodes, dive deep…

Tensions between informal miners and the Canadian multinational that is the legal owner of the town’s gold have been building ever since we first arrived in Segovia. And now that conflict is reaching…

Segovia goes into lockdown when a new gold war begins as Colombia’s broader conflict enters a new chapter. But is this an existential battle between legal and illegal, or is that just wartime propaga…

Global capitalism marches into town, pledging to save Segovia from itself. But what – or who – lies behind the promises of a new era of stability and prosperity for all? 

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This series is the product…

The Frontino story leads us right back to them – the paramilitary groups that have lurked in the shadows of Segovia for generations – and our definition of blood gold begins to expand as the line bet…

Our blood gold investigation takes an unexpected turn as we dive into the story of Frontino Gold Mines, a decades-old mystery that could hold the key to understanding how Segovia became the mafia tow…

Our search for Colombia’s blood gold takes us to Segovia and the illegal mines at the very beginning of the global supply chain. But what we find there is a strange mirror world, where conventional n…

In this episode, we dive into the 2025 presidential elections in Ecuador, a country that was once the envy of Latin America for its stability and safety. On February 9, voters went to the polls, and …

La relación del gobierno venezolano con el Tren de Aragua ha sido objeto de escrutinio tras las acusaciones de que el ministro del Interior pudo estar detrás de un complot para contratar a la banda p…

Apenas dos semanas después de tomar posesión, el presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, dio un ultimátum a los gobiernos de Canadá, China y México.

Si no intensificaban sus esfuerzos para interru…

Just two weeks after taking office, US President Donald Trump gave the governments of Canada, China, and Mexico an ultimatum.

If they did not step up efforts to disrupt the flow of synthetic drugs and…

InSight Crime set out to the town of Segovia in search of Colombia’s blood gold – gold that makes us, the global consumers, complicit in conflict, crime, and corruption. But what we found was a trail…

Los golpes en la puerta retumbaron en toda la casa.

Era una mañana de un domingo de enero de 2021, en Tibú, un municipio del departamento colombiano de Norte de Santander, cerca de la frontera con Ven…

A banging on the door echoed throughout the house.

It was a Sunday morning in January 2021, in Tibú, a municipality in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander, near the Venezuelan border.

“We …

Tras cinco años de auge del tráfico de fentanilo desde el estado noroccidental de Sinaloa, “los señores”, como él se refiere a la facción de los Chapitos del Cartel de Sinaloa, habían dado una orden …

After five years of booming fentanyl trafficking in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, “the bosses,” as he called the Sinaloa Cartel faction of the Chapitos, issued a blunt directive: stop all produc…