Governing Human Trafficking Across Borders: Layered Coordination and Functional but Fragile Regionalism in Central America’s Northern Triangle

Human trafficking is a cross-border governance challenge in which criminal justice, migration management, victim protection, and regional cooperation intersect. This article examines how formal anti-trafficking commitments are translated into operational coordination in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Using a document-led comparative qualitative design, the study analyses 75 coded official and regional records, supplemented by three key-informant interviews and freedom-of-information evidence. The findings identify a layered architecture combining trinational agreements, regional platforms, bilateral channels, and domestic institutions. These arrangements support recurring coordination, shared standards, referral and repatriation routines, capacity building, and information-governance initiatives, but their durability and system-level traceability vary across countries. The article introduces functional but fragile regionalism as a conceptual contribution to explain how institutional density can sustain anti-trafficking cooperation without producing uniform consolidation. The comparison shows that the critical variation lies not in whether formal mechanisms exist, but in how deeply coordination is embedded in national mandates, personnel, resources, administrative routines, and information systems. The findings contribute to debates on human trafficking, transnational organized-crime governance, and cross-border institutional cooperation.