Transnational Organized Crime in the Dominican Republic: A Convergence Center for Illicit Economies

For more than four decades, the Dominican Republic has been a key warehousing center for cocaine heading for the U.S. market, beginning with the rise of the Medellín Cartel in the 1980s, whose leader Pablo Escobar pioneered multi-ton shipments of the drug through the Caribbean for consumption in the United States. As the primary routes shifted to Central America in the late 1990s, the Dominican Republic and its Caribbean neighbors, while remaining critical, were no longer the primary routes.

Now, as Latin American markets face a new “Fourth Wave” of rapidly evolving transnational organized crime structures1, the Dominican Republic is again becoming a central player in the multi-faceted, rapidly shifting global criminal economy. As a result, the multi-billion dollar illicit economies of Latin America, for more than four decades, centered on one primary product – cocaine – with the United States’ primary market diversifying into new commodities, new trafficking routes, and new lucrative markets globally.