NarcoFiles: The New Criminal Order

Drug trafficking is a globe-spanning business. Cocaine might start life at a plantation in Colombia before being repackaged in Mexico, processed in the Netherlands, and sold on to users as far away as Bulgaria. Markets are booming in Asia, Africa, and Australia, generating billions in illicit revenues that flow back across the world through bank wires, cash transfers, and other transactions.

But the harms are not felt equally. It is developing nations that are most often strangled by the drug trade’s tentacles of violence, corruption, environmental destruction, and economic instability. The borderless nature of these crimes — and the gangs and cartels behind them — requires cross-border cooperation by journalists trying to expose them.

NarcoFiles: The New Criminal Order is an international investigation into modern-day organized crime and those who fight it. A collaboration between more than 40 media outlets, it is the largest investigative project on organized crime to originate in Latin America, a region hit hard by drug trafficking and the violence and corruption that come with it.

The project was sparked by a leak of emails from the Colombian prosecutor’s office, known as Fiscalía General de la Nación. The leak was shared last year with OCCRP and several Latin American outlets, including Cerosetenta / 070, Vorágine, and the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP).

Learn more about the project and read its reports