ECOCIDE

Trump Administration Proposes Offshore Leasing In Almost All Alaska Waters

File photo of a young polar bear climbing atop some ice in the Chukchi Sea.

 (Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher M. Yaw/U.S. Coast Guard)

November 23, 2025 

Alaska Beacon
By Yereth Rosen



(Alaska Beacon) — The Trump administration on Thursday released a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing that would open up almost all Alaska marine waters to development, along with the entire Pacific coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Alaska portion of the plan proposes 21 lease sales through 2031, five of them in Cook Inlet, two in the Beaufort Sea, two in the Chukchi Sea and the others in other marine areas. Those include a lease sale in a newly designated “High Arctic” area that lies beyond the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and where U.S. territorial rights are not yet clear.

The only federal Alaska offshore area without a proposed lease sale is the North Aleutian Basin, where oil leasing is under an indefinite ban to protect salmon-rich Bristol Bay.

The new plan, which also proposes six oil lease sales off the U.S. West Coast and seven in the Gulf of Mexico, is similar to an offshore leasing plan proposed by the Trump administration in 2017.

In a statement, the Department of the Interior called the plan “a major step to boosting United States energy independence.”

“Offshore oil and gas production does not happen overnight. It takes years of planning, investment, and hard work before barrels reach the market,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the statement. “The Biden administration slammed the brakes on offshore oil and gas leasing and crippled the long-term pipeline of America’s offshore production. By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come.”

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a supporter of President Donald Trump, hailed the plan.

“Once again, the Trump Administration is leading the way to American energy dominance by restoring confidence in the federal government’s offshore leasing policies. Alaska has tremendous offshore oil and gas reserves that can power our economy for decades,” Dunleavy said in a post on the social media site X.

Another pro-drilling and pro-Trump Alaska public official, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, had a more muted response.

Sullivan, in a statement, said Burgum on Thursday “committed to me that DOI will continue to carefully listen to Alaskans throughout this process, particularly Alaska Native communities who live near the proposed leasing areas, including our whaling captains who bring generations of experience and deep knowledge of the Arctic Ocean.”

“It’s important for Alaskans to know that this draft proposal is not a final decision or a directive that any particular offshore lease sale will occur. Before any potential proposal is finalized, there will be multiple opportunities for public comment, environmental review, and additional analysis. As my office reviews the proposal, I will work to ensure that we are weighing in and amplifying Alaskan voices and views,” Sullivan continued.

Others expressed anger about the plan.

A map shows the locations of the 21 Alaska federal offshore oil and gas lease sales proposed by the Trump administration. (Map provided by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, was among a group of mostly California Democrats in Congress who blasted it during a news conference Thursday.

“We are here because President Trump just put out what we believe is an asinine pro-polluter plan to open up our coast to offshore drilling,” Huffman said.

It is “not just a little bit of offshore drilling,” he said, but the entire California coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico where residents have long opposed offshore drilling, and “every inch of Alaska.” Huffman is the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

Environmentalists singled out the proposed Arctic lease sales in particular.

“Drilling anywhere in the Arctic Ocean is completely irresponsible. It is remote, ice-filled, stormy, home to irreplaceable wildlife and subsistence traditions. There is no way to clean up oil spills in this environment, and they are inevitable,” Erik Grafe, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said in an emailed statement.

Additionally, Grafe said, leasing in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas is unlawful.

“Those areas have been withdrawn from future leasing by Presidents Obama and Biden, and though President Trump has purported to reverse these withdrawals, he lacks that authority. Only Congress can open them up again,” he said.

That finding was the result of an environmental lawsuit that Grafe represented. In 2019, Alaska-based U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that Trump was barred from undoing Obama administration protections for Arctic and East Coast waters.

A new lawsuit filed in February by many of the same plaintiffs addresses that issue again. The new lawsuit, also with Grafe as one of the plaintiff attorneys, targets Trump’s Inauguration Day executive actions that aimed to open wide swaths of territory to drilling and other development, including the Arctic Ocean.

Another pending legal question concerns whether the federal government has the right to sell leases in the area designated as the High Arctic. That area, part of the North American extended outer continental shelf, lies beyond the 200-nautical-mile U.S. exclusive economic zone. The Biden administration made a territorial claim to the area, which is larger than California. But the claim has yet to be confirmed. The U.S. is not a party to the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that international treaty is used to adjudicate nations’ territorial claims in the outer continental shelf.

The idea of leasing most of the non-Arctic areas off Alaska’s coastline also got a poor reception on Thursday.

Anticipating the new Trump administration plan, a coalition of Alaska Native tribal governments in June sent a letter to Burgum expressing longstanding opposition to Bering Sea oil leasing.

The letter asked Burgum to drop all plans for selling leasing in areas from the Aleutian Islands to the Bering Strait.

“We, the Central Yup’ik, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, and Inupiaq people, have been here since time immemorial. Because we spend so much time out on the Bering Sea fishing and hunting, the sea is just as important to us as the land. The Tribes that still rely on these waters to hunt and fish remain unified in protecting these waters. Our people have been clear: the planning areas in our region should not be made available for oil and gas leasing,” said the letter, which was from the Association of Village Council Presidents, Nome-based Kawerak, Inc. and the Bering Sea Elders Group.

Kawerak, Inc. referred to that June letter Thursday to express its reaction to the new leasing plan.

The tribal organizations have been the forces behind establishment of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area during the Obama administration. The designation barred oil leasing and bottom trawling, addressed some shipping safety concerns and established a system for more tribal control.

The first Trump administration abolished the designation; President Joe Biden, in an Inauguration Day executive action, revived it. Trump, on the first day of his second term, abolished the protections again.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said Friday that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that manages offshore energy activity, will do further evaluation before settling on a final leasing plan.

“The First Proposal is the first of three required steps before the Secretary can finalize the 11th Program. BOEM is including these areas now to meet legal requirements, conduct further analysis, gather public and industry input, and ensure the Secretary can fully evaluate all options before deciding what areas to include in the final program,” Alyse Sharpe, a senior public affairs specialist, said by email.

Huffman, at the Democrats’ news conference, said the public is likely to mobilize nationally against the plan and that his colleagues will work to prevent it from being implemented.

That includes the proposed Arctic and Bering Sea lease sales, which he called “incredibly reckless.”

“We know what the seafood economy means to the state of Alaska. And we know what happened with the Exxon Valdez,’ he said, referring to the 1989 oil spill disaster in Prince William Sound.

“I’m a Californian, but I will fight to protect Alaska’s coast and Alaska’s fisheries as well,” he added.

Eight years ago, when the first Trump administration released a similar plan for oil leasing in almost all areas of federal waters off Alaska, the idea was widely panned in the state.

While political leaders supported leasing in Cook Inlet and the Beaufort and the Chukchi Seas, they objected to the idea of leasing other areas.

Among the groups objecting was the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages commercial seafood harvests in Alaska’s federal waters. The council, citing “the substantial risk to the sustainable management of Alaska’s fisheries,” asked then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to drop all the Bering Sea, Aleutian and Gulf of Alaska lease sales from the plan.

Then-Gov. Bill Walker and the all-Republican congressional delegation made similar requests to Zinke, asking him to focus the plan on Cook Inlet and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, while retaining longstanding buffers to protect whales and other subsistence resources. The Alaska Legislature passed a resolution with a similar request.

The first Trump administration’s expansive leasing plan never went into effect.

Gleason’s 2019 decision froze action on that leasing plan, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior agency that manages offshore oil and gas leasing, continued to work under the Obama administration’s 2017-2022 five-year plan. In 2023, the Biden administration released a five-year leasing plan for 2024 through 2029 that was limited to three Gulf of Mexico lease sales.

There has never been any oil produced from federal waters off Alaska except for a small portion of the Hilcorp-operated Northstar field in the Beaufort Sea, which lies mostly on state leases close to shore. The last federal offshore lease sale held in Alaska, a Cook Inlet sale held at the end of 2022, drew only one bid.

Alaska Beacon

Alaska Beacon is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government. Alaska, like many states, has seen a decline in the coverage of state news. We aim to reverse that.

The Gospel According to the Military-Industrial Complex

Who Would Jesus Bomb?

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead | Nov 14, 2025 | 4 Comments

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
~ Thomas Jefferson

For a man supposedly intent on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time waging war, threatening to wage war, and fantasizing about waging war.

Notwithstanding his dubious claims about having ended “seven un-endable wars,” Trump has continued to squander the American people’s resources and moral standing by feeding the military-industrial complex’s insatiable appetite for war – preemptively bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, and flexing military muscle at every opportunity.

Even the Trump administration’s version of “peace through strength” is filtered through a prism of violence, intimidation and strongman tactics.

It is the gospel of power, not peace – a perversion of both Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the U.S. Constitution.

Thus we find ourselves at this peculiar crossroads: a president hailed by his followers as an “imperfect vessel” chosen by God to save the church and restore Christianity – while they turn a blind eye to his record of adultery, deceit, greed, cruelty, and an almost religious devotion to vengeance and violence.

If anything captures Trump’s worldview, it is the AI-generated video he shared on social media: a grotesque fantasy of himself wearing a golden crown, flying a military fighter jet, and bombing a crowd of protesters with brown liquid feces.

This is the man who claims to be “saving God”?

Dismissed by his devoted base as harmless humor – a cheeky response to the millions nationwide who took part in the “No Kings” protests on Oct. 18 – Trump’s crude fantasy of assaulting critics with fecal bombs nevertheless begs the question: Who would Jesus bomb?

That question, of course, is meant less literally than morally.

To answer it, we must first understand who Jesus Christ was – the revered preacher, teacher, radical, prophet and son of God – born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of America’s own police state.

When he came of age, Jesus had powerful, profound things to say, about justice, power and how we are to relate to one another. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies.”

A revolutionary in both spirit and action, Jesus not only died challenging the police state of his day – the Roman Empire – but left behind a blueprint for resisting tyranny that has guided countless reformers and freedom fighters ever since.

Far from the sanitized, domesticated figure presented in modern churches, Jesus was a radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn. He spoke truth to power, defied political and religious hierarchies, and exposed the hypocrisy of empire.

Jesus rejected politics as a means to salvation. For Him, faith was not about seizing power but serving others – helping the poor, showing mercy even to enemies, and embodying peace, not war. He did not seek political favor or influence; He actively undermined it.

That is not to say He was passive. Jesus knew righteous anger. He turned over the tables of the money changers in the Temple because they had turned faith into profit and worship into spectacle.

Yet even in anger, He refused to wield violence as a tool of redemption. When His own arrest approached, He rebuked His followers: “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

The Beatitudes summarize His message: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” And when asked to name the greatest commandment, He answered simply: to love God with all one’s being and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

In other words, we love God by loving our fellow human beings.

Jesus – the “Prince of Peace” – came not to destroy life but to restore it.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, the latest political “savior” anointed by Christian nationalists for whom the pursuit of a Christian theocracy now appears to outweigh allegiance to our constitutional democracy.

Seduced by political power to such an extent that the true message of Jesus has been taken hostage by partisan agendas, much of today’s evangelical movement has become indistinguishable from right-wing politics – defined by anti-immigrant and anti-homosexual rhetoric, material excess, sprawling megachurches, and a spirit of judgment rather than mercy.

Meanwhile, the wall of separation – between church and state, between moral authority and political coercion – is being torn down from both sides.

The result is a marriage of convenience that corrupts them both.

This is what happens when you wrap your faith in the national flag.

What is worse – far worse – than the Christian right selling its spiritual birthright for a political seat at Trump’s table is the blasphemy that has followed: the Gospel of Jesus replaced by the Gospel of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Within the White House, faith leaders gather to lay hands on Trump as he sits at the Resolute Desk, praising him for defending “religious freedom” for Christians – seemingly unconcerned that from that same desk he has signed death warrants for nearly every other freedom.

In the Pentagon, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, presides over prayer services where the name of Christ is invoked almost in the same breath as he boasts of preemptive strikes, righteous killings, and “peace through strength.”

Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, prays in front of the cameras all the while boosting spending on military weapons for ICE by 700%, with significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”

This is not Jesus’ Christianity – it is Christian nationalism: Christianity draped in the flag and wielding the weapons of war.

When leaders presume to act in God’s name, every drone strike becomes a crusade, every critic a heretic, every raid a holy war.

This is how war becomes a form of worship in the American empire.

What was once the Gospel of Peace has been replaced by a national creed that equates killing with courage, dominance with divine favor, and obedience with faith.

It is a blasphemous marriage of church and state – one that desecrates both Christ’s command to love one’s enemies and the Constitution’s mandate to keep religion free from the corruption of power.

Under Trump’s rule, this weaponized faith has found expression not only in rhetoric but in action.

It is there in the bombing of Venezuelan fishing boats – no declaration of war, no congressional authorization, no due process – men in small vessels labeled “enemy combatants” by fiat. It is there in the militarized ICE raids that tear families apart under cover of darkness. It is there in the persecution of journalists and dissidents accused of being anti-American. It is there in every detail of how, as one state senator warned, “the President is building an army to attack his own country.”

Each act is justified as righteous violence, sanctioned by a president who sees himself as both protector of the faithful and punisher of the wicked.

Yet beneath the veneer of divine mission lies the same old tyranny the Framers warned against: a ruler who mistakes executive power for divine right and turns the machinery of government into an instrument of holy war.

Both Jesus and the framers of the Constitution understood the same truth: faith and freedom cannot be imposed by force.

That is why the First Amendment forbids the government from establishing religion. The moment religion aligns itself with political power, it ceases to be faith and becomes ideology. The moment a president claims divine sanction for war, the republic ceases to be a democracy and becomes a theocracy of fear.

Driven by those concerns, the framers built a system designed to restrain ambition, limit vengeance, and guard against tyranny.

That constitutional system is being bulldozed before our eyes – just as surely as Trump is bulldozing his way through the White House, leaving wreckage in his wake.

And so we return to the question that started it all: Who would Jesus bomb?

The answer, of course, is no one.

Jesus would not rain destruction from the skies or bless the machinery of death. He would not mistake vengeance for virtue or domination for deliverance.

Jesus would heal the sick, welcome the stranger, and lift up the poor. He would drive the money changers from the temple, not sanctify the merchants of war.

Yet here we are.

Under Trump’s broadened definitions of “rebellion” and “domestic terrorism,” Jesus would be labeled a subversive, his name placed on a watchlist, his followers rounded up for “reeducation.” He preached compassion for enemies, defied authority, and stirred the crowds without a permit.

Were Jesus –  – a Palestinian refugee, a radical, and a revolutionary – to show his face in Trump’s American police state, he would fare no better than any of the undocumented immigrants being snatched up in the dead of night, stripped of any real due process, made to disappear into inhumane detention centers, and left to be tortured or die.

This is what happens when nations lose their moral compass: due process becomes a slogan, justice a privilege, and compassion a crime.

When even mercy is outlawed and truth branded subversion, the darkness is no longer metaphorical – it is moral.

It is midnight in America, a phrase evocative of Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning of a “midnight in the moral order.”

This is the time, King cautioned, when absolute standards pass away, replaced by a “dangerous ethical relativism.” Morality becomes a mere “Gallup poll of the majority opinion.” Right and wrong are reduced to the philosophy of “getting by,” and the highest law becomes the “eleventh commandment: thou shall not get caught.”

In this deep darkness, King said, there is a “knock of the world on the door of the church.”

That knock is a reminder, he warned, that the church “is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

That knock still sounds today – steady, insistent, and largely unanswered.

It reverberates through religious institutions that mistake nationalism for faith and pulpits that confuse politics with piety. It calls us to rediscover the moral courage that resists tyranny rather than blesses it – to be, once more, the conscience of the state before the darkness becomes complete.

Whether we heed that call will determine what kind of nation we remain.

The time for silence has passed; the hour demands conscience.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” must step up, speak up and speak out.

The tragedy of our age is not merely that presidents claim godlike power or that the citizenry themselves go along with it – it is that people of faith who should know better consent to it.

When Christians cheer the strongman who wraps himself in Scripture while shredding the Constitution – when they bow to the idol of safety, mistaking fear for faith – and when religious institutions fail to speak truth to power – we lose more than our freedoms.

We lose our moral and spiritual birthright.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of the Rutherford Institute. His new book, The Freedom Wars, (TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about the Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Exploring The High Rates Of Social Violence In America – Analysis

 October 1, 2025  

By John P. Ruehl

For decades, the Americas have been the most violent part of the world outside active war zones. Many factors contribute to this, but long-term solutions remain difficult to achieve.

By mid-2025, U.S. homicide rates were lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. It is a welcome sign, though the decline has been uneven across the country, and wider trends in violent crime remain mixed throughout the Americas.

Since the latter half of the 20th century, outside of war zones, few regions have experienced comparable levels of lethal violence to the Americas. Even Canada, generally low in crime and consistently ranked high on global peace indexes, recorded a higher homicide rate than any other G7 country in 2023 apart from the United States.

Accurate global comparisons remain difficult. Think tanks such as the Igarapé Institute compile extensive data, but differences in recordkeeping, definitions of violence, and underreporting complicate the process and fail to capture an accurate picture. Even so, underreporting is global and cannot obscure the violence experienced in the Americas.

Home to just 13 percent of the world’s population, the region’s 154,000 killings accounted for roughly one-third of global homicides in 2021, according to UN data, which stated, “The Americas have the highest regional homicide rate in the world, and high rates of homicidal violence related to organized crime.” The regional homicide rate, around 15 homicide victims per 100,000 people, was nearly triple the global average of 5.8. In fact, 43 of the 50 most violent cities in the world were located in the Americas in 2023.

Young men are disproportionately the victims, largely through inter-gang violence, though many other citizens are caught in the crossfire. While much of the violence is related to criminal activities, it is sustained by a wider set of factors. Addressing the problem will require coordinated, continent-wide efforts, which have so far proven elusive or been shaped by policies from Washington.

Sources of Violence

Inequality and poverty are major drivers of violence in the Americas. High inequality often fuels crime by breeding resentment, eroding social cohesion, and limiting legitimate work opportunities. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, consistently places countries in the Americas among the worst worldwide. South Africa, which has Africa’s highest homicide rateand is the only country outside the Americas with multiple cities on the world’s most violent cities list, has a relatively high GDP per capita among African countries, but suffers extreme inequality

Yet inequality alone does not explain the picture. Saudi Arabia also ranks poorly on inequality based on 2019 data, but maintains a very low homicide rate. Additionally, although Pakistan’s GDP per capita is lower than that of most countries in the Americas, its homicide rate is lower compared to theirs, showing that poverty alone is not the only cause for violent crime. Corruption is also widespread in the Americas, but by Transparency International’s measures, it is no worse than in many African or Asian countries.

The region’s experience with urbanization, particularly in Latin America, has been an important contributing factor to the rising crime rates. Latin America’s rapid urbanization during the latter half of the 20th century took place before large-scale industrialization, the reverse of what happened in Europe and much of Asia. The region now has some of the highest urbanization rates in the world, with the rush creating sprawling informal settlements outside state control and social services. Combined with limited employment and education opportunities, these conditions have left large populations vulnerable to exploitation and violence.

The region has also fallen victim to geopolitics. Latin America has long been considered Washington’s backyard, and since the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has worked to keep out European and later Soviet influence, often backing pliable governments at the cost of strong institutions. This left many states weak, prone to instability, and unable to impose a monopoly on violence or law and order. According to “The Global Safety Report” 2024 by Gallup, the Americas scored lower than most regions outside Africa.

The U.S.-led war on drugs, beginning in the early 1970s, further exacerbated the problem. Washington simultaneously targeted and, at times, cooperated with cartels for geopolitical ends, enriching criminal groups and fueling decades of violence across Latin America and also in U.S. cities, impacted by these actions. These policies continue to be adopted under the Trump administration, leading to “regional tensions.”

Drug trafficking supercharged criminal economies, and homicide rates soared. While some of the worst-hit countries, like Colombia, have seen improvements in the crime rate since 2005, and U.S. violent crime is down from its late-20th-century peaks, the drug wars have left a lasting impact on the Americas.

Firearms have been another accelerant. Roughly 73 percent of murders in Latin America were gun-related, similar to the 80 percent in the U.S. in 2024, compared with a global average of about 40 percent. The flow of weapons stems from legal imports, corruption, local production, and constant smuggling, much of which is tied to the United States. Alongside private purchases, scandals like the “Fast and Furious” and “Wide Receiver” operations revealed the U.S. government’s involvement in helping spread guns to illicit actors in the Americas.

But even when firearms are excluded, violence in the Americas stands out. In the U.S., the country recorded about 0.5 stabbing deaths per 100,000 people in 2021—triple the rate in France and six times higher than the UK.

People are also more likely to commit violence when they believe they can act with impunity, which remains high in the Americas due to overwhelmed or reluctant police and fear of retaliation. “Police forces, judicial systems, and other key institutions struggle with inefficiency and lack of resources. Moreover, the politicization of these institutions further erodes their credibility and effectiveness. … High impunity rates across the region [Latin America]—where only a fraction of homicide cases result in convictions—highlight systemic failures in the justice system. This ineffectiveness not only emboldens criminal organizations but also perpetuates a cycle of violence and lawlessness,” according to an article in Americas Quarterly. In Latin America, only about eight in every 100 homicides lead to a conviction, while in the U.S., nearly half of murders now go unsolved.

Together, these factors create a volatile situation, and violence can quickly take hold. In 2006, Mexico recorded a homicide rate of about five per 100,000 people. After the launch of the government’s war on drug trafficking that year, the reliance on military force against the cartels fractured existing groups, fueling violent competition, and killings soared to roughly 27 per 100,000 people by 2020. Ecuador, once relatively calm, saw homicides more than double from eight per 100,000 in 2020 to 46 per 100,000 in 2023. Even Costa Rica, one of the region’s safest countries, saw its murder rate almost double from 9 to 17 murders per 100,000 people from 2014 to 2023.

Addressing the Issue

Many regions have endured ongoing periods of violence, with Europe suffering from high homicide rates for centuries before they declined in the 20th century. Today, governments from local to national levels across the Americas are testing different approaches to curb violence.

In the U.S. city of Baltimore, long one of the country’s most dangerous cities, its homicide rate has dropped sharply since 2022 under Mayor Brandon Scott, who has pushed a mix of violence intervention programs, more aggressive prosecution, and coordinated community partnerships. San Pedro Sula in Honduras, once the world’s murder capital with 142 killings per 100,000 people in 2014, dropped to 26 per 100,000 by 2023 (alongside declines in other Honduran cities) after police reforms supported by the Honduran government, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Still, concerns remain over corruption and the prolonged state of emergency in place since 2022.

Other leaders have opted for harsher measures. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, suspended civil rights and jailed thousands of suspected gang members, curbing homicide rates from 53 per 100,000 people in 2018 to 2.4 in 2023. The crackdown remains widely popular, showing how dire the situation was, though its long-term consequences are still uncertain.

Ecuador has followed a similar path. After violence rose rapidly in 2020, Daniel Noboa won the presidency in 2023 on a tough-on-crime platform and backed a 2024 constitutional referendum tightening security laws. Following his 2025 reelection, the electoral council approved his request for another referendum on further constitutional changes, with violence remaining high.

Other countries have pursued reconciliation with criminal groups. Venezuela, for instance, had 11 cities among the world’s 50 most violent in 2021, but by 2023, only Caracas remained on the list. This decline is often attributed to government-brokered understandings with gangs, as President Nicolás Maduro consolidated greater control over the country, in a common but controversial tactic.

Multilateral institutions like Interpol exist to combat crime, but coordination among American countries is limited, and the scale of violence is enormous. U.S.-backed security partnerships, such as those with Colombia, meanwhile, depend heavily on political alignment with Washington, alienating some governments, and tensions between the U.S. and Colombia now threaten the continuity of such partnerships.

The region’s crime crisis has also led to a boom in private security beyond traditional war zones. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, has been exploring security ventures in Haiti, Ecuador, and El Salvador as of 2025. Private city initiatives, like Honduras’ Próspera, are experimenting with their own security models. Yet private forces have proven to be frequently infiltrated by organized crime and rarely address the root causes of violence.

Countries in the Americas continue to rely on fragmented national strategies tailored to their circumstances to address the crisis, with little effective coordination in the region. The underlying conditions that fueled the turmoil, including rapid urbanization before industrialization, inequality, firearms prevalence, and weak states, are also present in parts of Africa. Countries like South Africa and Nigeria have experienced rapid rises in their homicide rates over the last few years, and Africa had the “highest absolute number of homicides” compared to other regions in 2021, with data suggesting no decrease in the homicide rate, according to the UN. Without preventative measures, African nations risk seeing their violent crime rates continue to rise, making the Americas an important reference for cautionary lessons and potential responses.

• Author Bio: John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

• Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.