Paying gang extortion and the material support risk
- Operational and cargo security
- Cargo theft, extortion and private security
- Audited
It is a federal legal risk: OSAC states in as many words that paying extortion demands to criminal groups designated as FTOs may constitute "material support" under 18 U.S.C. § 2339A-D, and recommends that compliance departments verify that they are not giving material support, knowingly or otherwise, to FTOs. Since November 2025 it is also, potentially, an offense of terrorist financing under Guatemalan law (Decree 11-2025), whose exact scope remains to be verified in the text. "Pay the rent and keep operating" ceases to be an option for subsidiaries of US companies.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Caveat
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This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.