“It's So Seamlessly Blended into the Regular Economy That It's Hard to Pull Out”: Environmental Organized Crime, in Venezuela and Throughout the Americas
Release Date: 03/05/2026
Oil and the Rule of Law in Venezuela
Latin America Today
This episode assesses the “transition”—if that is the correct word—in Venezuela nine weeks after the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted Nicolás Maduro. This conversation with , director of WOLA’s Venezuela program, and , director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, focus particularly on the role of oil, the country’s largest source of foreign exchange by far. Dr. Monaldi acknowledges that oil revenues have increased significantly. However, these revenues now flow into a U.S.-controlled account. The lack of...
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“It's So Seamlessly Blended into the Regular Economy That It's Hard to Pull Out”: Environmental Organized Crime, in Venezuela and Throughout the Americas
Latin America Today
This episode features , a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. Ungar has written extensively on the rule of law, policing, and human rights in Latin America, and more recently has focused his research on environmental organized crime across the Amazon basin. Ungar notes that environmental organized crime—illegal gold mining, logging, cattle ranching, and land grabbing—has become the third largest criminal enterprise globally and is now deeply intertwined with narcotrafficking operations. Rather than existing as...
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Don’t Let Boat Strikes Fade Into the Background
Latin America Today
This episode is a conversation with , WOLA's director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the ongoing U.S. military attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans. When Walsh and host recorded this episode, on February 13, 2026, 35 attacks had killed at least 131 people since September 2, 2025—an average of four killings every five days—and another attack later that day killed 3 more people. Walsh and Isacson just published a WOLA commentary, "," warning against the dangerous normalization of extrajudicial executions carried out directly by the U.S. military. Five months...
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U.S. Military Attacks Inside Colombia and Mexico: a Conversation We're Actually Having
Latin America Today
Following the Trump administration's January 3, 2026 in Venezuela and its on boats suspected of carrying drugs, its threats of unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexico and Colombia have taken on new urgency. WOLA's and join to examine what such actions would mean for two of Washington's most important partners in the hemisphere. The conversation opens with a sobering parallel: days before recording, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in what appears to be another grossly unjustified use of lethal force. Both guests draw on their countries' painful...
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A Year Into the Trump Administration, "We Are in Untested Waters"
Latin America Today
January 20, 2026 is the first anniversary of Donald Trump's second inauguration. As we pass this milestone, WOLA President Carolina Jiménez Sandoval and Vice President for Programs Maureen Meyer join Adam Isacson to take stock of a year that has fundamentally transformed U.S. policy toward Latin America—and not for the better. This episode is a companion of a that Meyer published on January 15, 2026, tracking how the past year saw U.S. policy undermining democracy and human rights promotion, interfering in elections, hitting immigrants from the region quite hard, and taking the “war on...
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A Shocking U.S. Attack and "a Transition Without a Transition" in Venezuela
Latin America Today
After midnight on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration bombed Venezuelan military sites and extracted the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump declared that the United States is now “running” Venezuela and emphasized access to its oil reserves. The rest of Maduro’s government—the key political figures, the generals, the intelligence chiefs, the colectivos—remains in place. In this episode recorded January 6, as shockwaves from this historic intervention spread across the hemisphere, host Adam Isacson speaks with WOLA President Carolina Jiménez...
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Announcing Democracy&: A New Podcast From The Washington Office on Latin America
Latin America Today
In this series from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), prominent decision-makers from across the Americas—those who have been at the heart of democratic governance—share personal reflections and insights on the meaning, challenges, and future of democracy in the region. In each episode, members of the WOLA team sit down with a current or former political figure from the Americas to explore democracy through different lenses: what it means to them, the challenges it faces, and why it remains essential today. Each conversation pairs democracy with a new dimension—transition,...
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Piercing the Propaganda Bubble in El Salvador
Latin America Today
WOLA presents a new episode about El Salvador, coinciding with our awarding of our 2025 Human Rights Award to MOVIR, El Salvador’s Movement of Victims of the Regime, which supports victims and families of arbitrary detentions carried out by President Nayib Bukele’s government. In this conversation, , assistant professor of public relations in the Department of Communications at California State University, Fullerton, explains why the current popularity of El Salvador’s authoritarian president rests on a surprisingly fragile foundation. Dr. Valencia, a former journalist in El...
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The Grim Side of El Salvador’s “Security Model”
Latin America Today
A special episode as part of WOLA’s 2025 Human Rights Awards Month President Nayib Bukele’s government has jailed nearly 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population—the highest incarceration rate in the world. Still, because violence has dropped sharply, political figures across Latin America speak about emulating Bukele’s “security model.” But behind the videos of mega-prisons and tweets about plunging homicide rates lies a darker, less sustainable reality. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with Beatriz Magaloni ( / ), a political scientist at Stanford...
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U.S. drug policy takes a “radical” and “chilling” turn. Is Venezuela in the crosshairs?
Latin America Today
Since late August, the Trump administration has sent a flotilla of U.S. warships to the southern Caribbean, in the largest naval display in the region in decades. On September 2, a U.S. drone strike sank a small boat near the Venezuelan coast, killing as many as eleven civilians. Administration officials allege the vessel carried cocaine, but have presented no evidence. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with , Director for Venezuela, and , Director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the shockwaves from this escalation, both region-wide and especially in Venezuela. An Extreme...
info_outlineThis episode features Mark Ungar, a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. Ungar has written extensively on the rule of law, policing, and human rights in Latin America, and more recently has focused his research on environmental organized crime across the Amazon basin.
Ungar notes that environmental organized crime—illegal gold mining, logging, cattle ranching, and land grabbing—has become the third largest criminal enterprise globally and is now deeply intertwined with narcotrafficking operations. Rather than existing as separate phenomena, these activities share infrastructure, routes, and personnel.
Criminal networks carrying out environmental organized crime are deeply intertwined with state actors and the legal economy. The nexus involves governors, military officials, environmental ministry personnel, and municipal authorities at multiple levels. Even when good laws exist, implementation remains weak because investigations rarely lead to prosecutions of major figures.
The episode turns to Venezuela's Orinoco Mining Arc, a zone covering roughly 12 percent of national territory that then-president Nicolás Maduro established in 2016. Ungar describes it as a "criminal state project" in which the Maduro government effectively legalized destructive extraction in a geologically unique and biodiverse area that includes nature reserves and indigenous territories. The zone is controlled by a confluence of Venezuelan military officials, Colombian armed groups including the ELN and FARC dissidents, Brazilian garimpeiros, and local criminal organizations called sindicatos and pranes. Violence is extreme, and environmental and health consequences are devastating, with ninety percent of pregnant women and schoolchildren showing elevated mercury levels in their blood.
Ungar explains how the gold and minerals extracted from this area enter legitimate international markets. Between 2016 and 2021, the Mining Arc generated approximately $2.2 billion in gold revenue, but an estimated 86 percent was mined illegally, and roughly 70 percent was smuggled through shell companies and opaque supply chains. The zone also contains big deposits of coltan, iron, bauxite, and other sought-after minerals.
Ungar shares concern about the Trump administration's current approach to Venezuela. While the administration has focused on oil access, counternarcotics, migration, and excluding Chinese influence, there appears to be no priority given to addressing environmental organized crime. Ungar suggests that Washington's willingness to work with the current Venezuelan government—the Maduro regime minus Maduro himself—likely means business as usual for state-sponsored extraction intertwined with organized crime. Consumer countries must stop looking the other way about the origins of products that end up in legitimate commerce.