What happens when a criminal organization stops wanting territory and starts wanting, quite simply, efficiency? That question, more than any map of routes or list of seizures, best sums up what has happened with Albanian networks in Latin America over the past decade. The usual, almost automatic, reflex has been to think of organized crime as a structure that advances through firepower and territorial control. The Balkan trajectory in the region patiently—and with the numbers to back it up—dispels that reflex. There are no armies or flags here. Instead, there is a form of criminal governance built on logistical intermediation, a sophisticated hybridization of legal and illicit economies, and an ability to reengineer operations that allows these networks to embed themselves within existing value chains without having to fight for them at gunpoint.
The thesis of this analysis is ultimately straightforward: Albanian expansion is less a matter of conquest than of systematically exploiting the structural vulnerabilities of the states that receive these networks. And that distinction, however subtle it may seem, completely changes the kind of public policy needed to contain them.
It is worth starting with the origins. According to the documentary Albanian Mafia – Narco Families (D News, 2025), the organization consolidated following the fall of Albania’s communist regime in the 1990s, a historic rupture that pushed its expansion into Western Europe and, later, Latin America. Its structure, organized around family clans, gave it something few criminal organizations manage to sustain over time: internal cohesion without the need for a public display of power. A quiet form of reengineering whose sole objective is to make the business work.
A transnational company disguised as a mafia
Calling it a “mafia” may already be an understatement. Arturo Torres’s report in Diálogo Político (2026) documents how these networks operate as coalitions of disparate, independent groups that prioritize alliance over confrontation. This fundamentally reshapes the logic of criminal power as we once understood it. The case of Dritan Gjika illustrates this well: his organization combined a dual corporate structure, with one faction responsible for the purchase, transportation, and export of cocaine, and another dedicated to laundering assets through shell companies, including the infiltration of Ecuador’s banana trade. Legal fruit on the outside, drugs on the inside.
Here, the figures cease to be mere statistical decoration and begin to tell a story of their own. Between 2019 and 2025, Ecuador went from seizing 80 to 226 tons of cocaine, accumulating 835 tons over that period, while various analysts estimate that more than 4,000 tons may have left the country for international markets during the same period. How can a flow of that magnitude be sustained without a truly sophisticated logistics network? One figure helps answer the question: nearly 70% of Colombian cocaine is now believed to leave through Ecuadorian ports, confirming their role as a global logistics hub rather than merely a transit corridor.
Behind this scale lies, moreover, a basic economic calculation that helps explain the speed of the expansion. The price per kilogram rises almost vertically along the supply chain: between $500 and $2,500 in producing areas, around $35,000 in Europe, and more than $150,000 in markets such as Australia. With margins like these, it is hardly surprising that networks from Italy, Turkey, and Russia have begun competing for routes that were once almost exclusively controlled by Balkan clans. The shift in global demand is pushing in the same direction: since 2020, Europe has surpassed the United States as the world’s largest cocaine consumer market, and that market is believed to have quadrupled between 2010 and 2025.
This is where a figure emerges who, without being the most visible, is nevertheless crucial: the emissary. In his analysis for InSight Crime, Gavin Voss describes these operators as negotiators who travel directly to Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil, eliminating intermediaries and keeping a larger share of the profits. The case of Dritan Rexhepi, who reportedly continued coordinating shipments from prison until 2021, reveals something uncomfortable: the continuity of these networks does not depend on an individual’s freedom, because they have already consolidated ties capable of surviving the imprisonment of their own leader. Capturing a kingpin, then, is no longer a guarantee.
The financial component completes the picture. The sanctions imposed in 2025 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on a network linked to the Hysa family, which operated alongside the Sinaloa Cartel, confirms that money laundering has ceased to be an appendage of the business and become its natural continuation. Meanwhile, Darío Brooks’s report for BBC Mundo (2022, updated in 2024) adds a nuance that should not be overlooked: Albanian nationals, such as those identified in Peru, are concentrated precisely in financial and logistical tasks rather than in armed territorial control. The seizure of two tons of liquid cocaine hidden inside asparagus, valued at $77 million, is merely one example of the extent of this specialization.
The Balkan presence in the region, in fact, is not new: it dates back to the early 2000s, with subsequent links to the Italian ’Ndrangheta and to ports such as Rotterdam and Antwerp, according to Europol records. Ultimately, everything points to a relationship of cooperation with Latin American actors—including those in Ismael Zambada’s orbit—rather than a struggle for territorial control.
Challenges and proposals for state policy
So, what does a state do when faced with an adversary that does not want to fight in the streets, but rather infiltrate the accounting books? The answer requires moving beyond the military reflex and building a strategy around three pillars.
The first is financial traceability: specialized units with genuine technical capacity to detect shell companies in sensitive export sectors such as bananas and agribusiness.
The second is the reengineering of migration and port systems, closing the windows of opportunity that currently facilitate the silent infiltration of legal economies. The third, perhaps the most urgent, is the creation of shared regional intelligence among Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, capable of anticipating operational patterns rather than once again reacting to the next isolated seizure.
None of these pillars is flashy. None makes for easy headlines. But ultimately, they are what could determine whether a state manages to regain legitimate civilian control over economic spaces that are currently being captured from within.
The expansion of Albanian networks in Latin America confirms a significant mutation in contemporary organized crime: less visible, but remarkably efficient. Containing it requires, above all, a sustained political commitment over time, beyond the cycle of a single administration. Under this premise, any serious roadmap must place at its center the human dignity of the communities that today coexist, often unknowingly, with these structures; the strengthening of the region’s institutions; and transparency in the management of the economies that, unwittingly, end up sustaining them.
Because, ultimately, the question today is not how to pursue a mafia, but how to stop offering it the conditions in which it can thrive.
Autor
PhD in Public Policy from IEXE University (Mexico). Master's degree in Public Security. Academic researcher. Organizational advisor to Mexican police forces and consultant in public and private security.
