Latin America accounts for just 8% of the world’s population, yet it experiences 30% of all murders. In areas where organised crime has infiltrated state institutions, ALAS (América Latina Alternativa Social) brings together over 70 organisations from 13 countries that are committed to rejecting violence as a destiny.
Founded by Libera in 2015, ALAS connects Mexico’s search brigades looking for over 100,000 missing people, Colombia’s movements of victims of state crimes, Argentina’s projects that transform confiscated drug baron properties into community centres, and Brazil’s networks that demand justice for the assassinated councilwoman Marielle Franco.
ALAS operates through thematic pillars that address Latin American realities. The Memory and Truth pillar builds bridges between families of the disappeared, creating collective demands for justice. The Bien Restituido project adapts Italy’s Law 109/96 for social reuse, using the proceeds of crime to rebuild communities affected by crime.
The Human Rights pillar protects threatened activists and indigenous leaders. Thirty organisations provide legal defence and visibility for those facing death threats, such as Quito Inuma in Peru, who was murdered while defending ancestral lands. Gender initiatives combat feminicide and trafficking. Environmental projects expose illegal mining funded by criminal economies.
What distinguishes ALAS? Its organisations operate at a territorial level – in favelas, rural communities and indigenous territories – where the absence of the state creates power vacuums. They document cases that the authorities deny, such as the manipulation of statistics on missing persons, the disguising of extrajudicial killings as operations and the appropriation of land for development.
The PLACE connection is structural: cocaine trafficked by Colombian cartels transits West African ports en route to Europe. When ALAS protects Ecuadorian human rights defenders, they undermine the transnational networks that PLACE confronts in Nigeria. Extraction schemes that devastate the Amazon mirror those in the DRC.
In the world’s most violent region, ALAS demonstrates that a coordinated civil society can challenge entrenched impunity.