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Special Report: Crime and security – trends and solutions (ISSN 17414474)
Organised crime remains resilient
Governments place a major emphasis on combating organised crime. This is understandable and justified, given the enormous human and economic costs inflicted on Latin American societies by organised crime groups. Yet it is hard to pin down any single metric that gives a robust measure of how well – or how badly – the battle against organised crime is progressing. As mentioned in the previous section, perhaps the best indicator of progress is the homicide rate, which has been ebbing and flowing in different countries but remains, according to the consensus view, simply too high across Latin America as a whole, relative to other parts of the world. Various other types of data – such as arrests of gang leaders, drug shipments confiscated, reported gun crime and so on, provide at best partial snapshots but not a coherent and inclusive narrative.
- Executive summary
- The homicide rate: fluctuating, but too high
- Organised crime remains resilient
- Crime remains a profitable business
- A heroin epidemic in the United States?
- Colombian cocaine production surges ahead
- Prison reform is urgently needed
- White collar crime: the battle against ‘grand corruption’
- The criminal justice system struggles to cope