Corruption, gender, and the invisible infrastructures of illicit economies: What we must confront together

12 August 2025 – Guest blog by Ana Linda Solano López

At the 13th Gender, Inclusion & Corruption Working Group, I presented insights from Latin America on a critically overlooked nexus: corruption, gender, and illicit economies. This is not simply a governance failure; it is a structural system that exploits power asymmetries and gender roles.

Beyond isolated cases, facilitation of corruption can become systemic, embedding itself in entire institutions and value chains. When corruption is not just a sporadic bribe but an ongoing mechanism that connects local criminal actors, cross-border networks, and legitimate markets, it sustains more complex forms of organized crime.

This systemic facilitation means that illicit economies thrive not only because of gaps in oversight, but because corrupt relationships provide protection, resources, and impunity. Drug trafficking, human trafficking, and money laundering often overlap within these same networks, which adapt and diversify their operations using corrupt infrastructures as a shield.

Corrupt infrastructures also act as the backbone of many illicit economies. In contexts like human trafficking, corrupt actors are not just passive enablers — in some cases, evidence shows they are direct beneficiaries or even owners of the criminal activities they protect1. Recognizing this helps to expose systemic forms of complicity.

In many cases, women’s bodies are instrumentalized to secure loyalty and maintain networks of silence and impunity. This goes beyond individual abuse: it is about how gendered power dynamics sustain corruption. It does not reduce women to passive objects; instead, it shows how power is reproduced through their constrained agency.

Sextortion remains an extreme, under-recognized form of sexualized corruption. Countries like Peru, Chile, and Brazil have taken initial steps to acknowledge or legislate on sextortion, but enforcement is fragmented and definitions remain limited. Legal frameworks must evolve to recognize the role of coercion, power, and consent in these abuses2.

From a gender perspective, Women’s positions within these systems are also complex and often contradictory. Many navigate what can be called “conditioned autonomy” — spaces where choices exist, but within severe constraints of poverty, coercion, or the threat of violence. Some women are victims of trafficking or sextortion, others engage with illicit networks under coercion or survival logic, and some may temporarily benefit while still being exposed to heightened risks3.

Gender-disaggregated information is scarce, and when women’s roles do not fit the victim/offender binary, they become invisible in policy responses causing major data gaps. As sociologist Jennifer Fleetwood reminds us: “Those invisible in data are invisible in policy.”

Dimensions of the problem

To address these dynamics, we must understand their multiple dimensions:

  • Institutional:
    Corruption within public institutions — through omission, complicity, or active participation — enables trafficking, sexual extortion, and criminal protection.
  • Legal:
    Frameworks often fail to define or prosecute sexualized corruption like sextortion and rarely recognize conditioned autonomy.
  • Socioeconomic:
    Women’s roles are shaped by poverty, exclusion, and migration, limiting real freedom of choice.
  • Cultural:
    Patriarchal norms normalize the instrumentalization of women’s bodies as currency within networks of corruption.
  • Criminal:
    Corrupt networks often act not only as facilitators but as direct operators or owners of illicit markets. In more complex structures, systemic corruption connects different layers of crime — trafficking routes, drug supply chains, financial laundering — creating a resilient ecosystem that is difficult to dismantle.
  • Narrative and data:
    The lack of nuanced, disaggregated data makes these dimensions invisible in policy design.

What comes next

Looking forward, real progress demands coordinated anti-corruption and anti-trafficking responses grounded in gender analysis. This means improving articulation between specialized units (anti-corruption, anti-trafficking, gender-based violence, financial crime) to address how these networks overlap.

Regarding sextortion: 

  • Legal reforms should recognize sexualized corruption as both a form of corruption and sexual violence, addressing its doctrinal challenges. They should build more precise typologies and prosecution strategies.
  • Developing a regional model law, possibly under the Organization of American States or Latin American and Caribbean Parliament, to guide national processes across Latin America.

About corruption: 

  • Classifying forms of corruption more accurately, recognizing as grand corruption those practices that directly undermine fundamental rights, including sexual violence.
  • Investing in gender-disaggregated data and survivor-led research to expose under-recognized dynamics.
  • Expanding our understanding of social currencies used in corruption exchanges, including sexualized forms where women may be both subjects and objects in these corrupt relationships.
  • Deepening the analysis of corruption as a facilitator of more complex criminality, such as human trafficking, and its role within broader criminal governance contexts.

Fighting corruption without a gender lens sets it up for failure. Fighting human trafficking or organized crime without dismantling the corruption that sustains them is an illusion. Recognizing these intersections is not enough — it demands action grounded in evidence, survivor voices, and cross-border solidarity. For Latin America, the challenge is not only to prosecute isolated cases but to dismantle the systemic infrastructures that reproduce exploitation, silence victims, and reward impunity.

Exposing what has long remained hidden is only the first step. The next is building institutions, laws, and alliances capable of protecting those who navigate these realities with constrained autonomy, and of holding to account those who benefit from it. Making the invisible visible must lead us to transform power itself so that corruption can no longer thrive at the expense of women’s dignity, rights, and lives.

  1. For more information on practical cases and regional approaches, see: UNODC. (2025). Turquesa: Compendio de casos [PDF]. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 
    https://www.unodc.org/ropan/uploads/documents/2025/TURQUESA_CompendioCasos.pdf
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  2. Solano López, A. L. (2019). Mujer y corrupción: Estrategias para abordar los impactos diferenciados de la corrupción en América Latina (OK-5). Programa EUROsociAL+. 
    https://eurosocial.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/OK-5-Mujer-y-corrupcion-EUROSOCIAL.pdf
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  3. Díaz Rivillas, B., & Solano López, A. L. (2024, November 22). Atrapadas entre el tráfico de drogas y la trata de personas: La urgente necesidad de una justicia penal con perspectiva de género. COPOLAD III Blog. https://copolad.eu/es/atrapadas-entre-el-trafico-de-drogas-y-la-trata-de-personas-la-urgente-necesidad-de-una-justicia-penal-con-perspectiva-de-genero/
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