Increasingly complex Community Embedded Transnational Armed Groups (CETAGs) criminal organizations are expanding their effective governance and territorial control across large swaths of Latin America, often with more legitimacy in the eyes of the governed than national or local governments. This is creating a mosaic of alternative governance models that exercise strategic control of key supply chain segments and illicit economies, with deep community roots. These non-state governance models present some of the most complex challenges to recuperating functional, legitimate state governance in strategic geographic and economic regions of the hemisphere such as Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador, Colombia and beyond. This is not a small and isolated phenomenon. By some recent estimates some 46 percent of the population of 18 Latin American nations, roughly 79 million people, now live areas of extra-legal governance or contested spaces between the state and CETAGs. This is equal to the populations of Colombia and Peru combined. Because of the varied types and levels of control and combinations with corrupt state actors, we use extra-legal governance rather than dichotomy of state/criminal governance. As the removal of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela demonstrated, regime reorganization can be undertaken at relatively low costs. However, consolidating legitimate state control across myriad non-state governed territories is a far more complex yet vital to successfully executing SOUTHCOM's intended sequence of stabilization, recovery and eventual political transition, as enunciated in regard to Venezuela and applicable across the region. Replacing CETAG governance across multiple regions with legitimate state sovereignty will require deliberate, often non-military approaches including some that may mirror elements of the Maduro extraction–removing the critical leadership while leaving functional parts of the CETAG governance in place temporarily as the state reestablishes legitimacy and territorial control. Crucial to a stabilization and political transition are: community engagement; a disaggregation of complex social structures to differentiate among criminal actors and civilian inhabitants; and effective and robust state engagement to offer a positive presence as CETAGs are displaced. Stabilization, recovery and political transition will not be possible without this.
