On March 2021, CIPÓ took part in a workshop for South American experts held by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GIATOC). The goal was to review and comment on the profiles of South American countries as part of the new edition of the Global Organized Crime Index. The objective of the Index is to call attention to the growing threats posed by organized crime, to help guide policymakers legislators, and to support regional organizations in their approaches to these challenges.
CIPÓ drew on its expertise on environmental crimes such as illegal land invasions, forest fires caused by human action, illegal wood extraction and illegal mining to offer inputs on how to assess those activities in the region.
The Index assesses the pervasiveness of criminal markets, the dynamics of criminal actors, as well as individual countries’ effectiveness in establishing the mechanisms and responses needed to ensure robust resilience to organised crime, including environmental crimes. The Organised Crime Index, as an analytical tool, rests on three core parts: the scope, scale and impact of specific criminal markets; the structure and influence of criminal actors; and the extent and capacity of countries’ resilience measures against organised crime. These three measures are used to assign each country a criminality score as well as a resilience score.
The second edition of the Index, which will be published in September 2021, has built on the first edition of the tool and will provide an overview of the state of organized crime in 2020 in 194 countries around the world.
