The opening up of the Chinese economy, the increase in domestic corruption, and the global expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative have allowed Chinese organized crime groups to expand internationally, including in Latin America.
For example, in December 2024, Liu Bitong, a fugitive since 2017, was arrested in the Brazilian state of Roraima, on the border with Venezuela. The man, identified as the leader of the Bitong group, believed to be an offshoot of the Chinese triads, the Asian country’s mafia, ran an extorsion scheme in the central region of São Paulo, mainly against Chinese merchants in the vicinity of 25 March Street. The group is suspected of killing three shopkeepers who didn’t meet its demands.
“Chinese organized crime groups are sophisticated and have great business acumen, increasingly focusing on highly profitable lines of business such as human trafficking, online betting, and gambling, and the trafficking of illegal or restricted chemical precursors,” Martin Purbrick, an expert on corruption and organized crime in Asia told Diálogo.
Synthetic drug production
In December 2024, Brazilian police Operation Heisenberg uncovered a criminal network that produced and sold methamphetamine from São Paulo. The group mostly consisted of foreigners, the great majority Chinese citizens, who, police believed, had learned to make the drug from its Mexican members who originated from Jalisco state, where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) operates.
“Drug trafficking has become an important line of business for Chinese organized crime groups, thanks to the large Chinese diaspora around the world, which can be used for the movement of people, products, and funds,” Purbrick says.
According to experts, the official opening in November 2024 of the Port of Chancay in Peru, operated by the Chinese shipping and logistics company COSCO, runs the risk of facilitating and increasing the traffic of chemical precursors for the production of synthetic drugs, as well as finished products, such as methamphetamines and synthetic opiates, from fentanyl to nitazene, an opioid yet more toxic than fentanyl, to the region.
According to a report by the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies (ICAIE), more than 80 percent of the chemical precursors used in the region originate in three provinces of China. “It is highly likely much of those products could enter the region through Chancay under the protection of the Chinese state,” ICAIE indicated.
Marijuana production
Chinese criminal groups in Latin America are expanding into trafficking, but also into the production of marijuana, generally grown in large, enclosed spaces, lit day and night. A series of police operations in Chile discovered that Chinese immigrants brought illegally into the country by Chinese criminal organizations were working in the indoor grow rooms.
“Our investigations showed the cooperation of Chileans […] in cases of migrant trafficking. In terms of drug trafficking, the criminal structure tends to be more closed off and encouraged the participation of its [Chinese] citizens,” Luis Toledo, former head of the National Anti-Drugs Unit of Chile’s General Attorney’s Office, told InSight Crime, an organization that studies organized crime in Latin America.
According to the authorities, families from the Bang clan from the province of Fujian in southern China are at the forefront of marijuana production in the Latin American country. In 2021, Chilean police seized 26 of their production centers and $1 million in cash. According to Chilean daily La Tercera, while the Bang clan sells its marijuana to Chilean traffickers, it buys ketamine and ecstasy from them to sell in its local karaoke bars.
“Not all Chinese criminals belong to triads. Some can be structured in clans, forming a collaborative criminal enterprise with people from the same area and environment. A good example is the province of Fujian, which for hundreds of years has produced tens of thousands of emigrants throughout Asia, and many to the United States, in search of a better life. The term Fujian gang is often used to refer to criminals from the province, but there is no single gang with this name, but rather several criminal organizations from the province that use this appellation,” Purbrick told Diálogo.
Organized crime groups and Chinese triads tend to base their cooperation on common ties of geographical origin, clan links, and language. Many of them only speak the Fujian dialect for fear of eavesdropping, which is more difficult to translate. “When we find interpreters, some leave because they feel threatened or because they fear reprisals from the organization,” Toledo told InSight Crime.
Extortion and gambling
Chinese mafia groups make their presence felt in the region through various illicit activities, including human smuggling and extorsion. In Argentina, in November 2024, three Chinese citizens were arrested for demanding large sums of money from fellow Chinese supermarket owners.
In São Paulo, Brazil, according to data collected by daily Metrópoles, there were at least 15 cases of extorsion from Chinese criminal groups between 2023 and 2024, compared to 21 in the previous nine years. Authorities warn, however, that the number of victims is higher, because many of them do not go to the police for fear of reprisals. Merchants are not only victims of extortion but also used in money laundering schemes. In Brazil, for example, one of the largest criminal groups, the First Capital Command (PCC), not only works with Chinese criminal networks, but also offers them the services of its fintech for drug payments.
“It’s a big hub, a big ecosystem, not necessarily of groups with a hierarchy among themselves, but which benefit from the same structures, both to circulate resources and to have a level of protection so as not to be bothered,” Prosecutor Fábio Bechara, of the Special Force to Combat Organized Crime (Gaeco) of the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office, told Metrópoles.
Illegal gambling, conducted in person and online, is also increasingly used as a form of money laundering. In January 2025, in Chile, a police operation found that a Chinese trafficker who received methamphetamine by mail from Spain owned an illegal casino in his home in Santiago. In 2023, also in Santiago, a Chinese man was murdered in an illegal Chinese casino. In Brazil, Chinese expansion in this sector has become a problem.
“It is estimated that at least 40 percent of online gambling in the country operates illegally. In fact, most of the sites are managed from China. They have found fertile ground here to exploit and they are operating very strongly,” Magnho José, president of the Brazilian Institute of Legal Gambling, told the sector’s specialized website iGaming Futuro.
Although the Brazilian Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) has so far blocked 11,641 illegal sites, those responsible for the legal sector report that just as many are appearing, most of them located in China using virtual private networks (VPNs) to transmit data through public networks anonymously and securely. VPNs allow Chinese criminal groups to exploit encrypted communications and hide the origin of the server, making it even more difficult to block these sites.
“Illegal gambling and sports betting in Asia have been a key activity for Chinese organized crime groups for decades due to the profit margin and relatively low operational risks,” Purbrick says. According to the expert, “the profits from sports betting and illegal online gambling are so high that they have financed and continue to finance the expansion of Chinese organized crime groups into other regions, such as Latin America.”
Chinese criminal groups are undoubtedly a threat to the region that requires an increasingly transnational response.
