Latin America and EU join forces against organized crime finances

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – More than 150 representatives of institutions from Latin America and the Caribbean and the European Union (EU) will meet from Monday to Friday in Panama to “strengthen” the fight against the finances of organized crime, which have worsened as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the framework of the EU program “EL PAcCTO”, the event “The finances of organized crime: how they affect us, how to fight them” will allow the design of “concrete actions to develop (…) operations against organized crime and have greater effective cooperation between Latin America and the EU”, explained to Efe, the director of the project, Juan Gama.

“In the end, what we want with these actions is to stop the bad people, take advantage of the illicit resources they have generated, even provide a social benefit to the institutions themselves, and create a preventive system that avoids more crimes,” Gama said.

During the event, held on the outskirts of Panama City, workshops are being held to learn how to identify the ultimate beneficiary of these illicit finances, streamline international cooperation, seize assets and specialize in the fight against financial crime.

CRIME: SEIZURE OF ASSETS

These organized crime finances “increased” with the covid-19 pandemic, a situation that “caught us off guard”, as the head of Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Partnerships, the Spaniard Jorge de la Caballería, admitted.

“If the enormous money that these groups move has a financial surface as if they were the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country, imagine the capacity to influence. They generate severe problems,” said de la Caballería.

Thus, he pointed out that to “curb” the finances of organized crime, it is necessary to improve “legislation, networks, data sharing, the effectiveness of the police and judges, and penalties”, but he assures that what does the most damage in the end “is to seize the assets that have been achieved through these illicit activities”.

“When the result of the crime is disproportionate, lucrative, and it disappears, they think about it more,” said de la Caballería, who pointed out that initiatives of this type are being developed in many Latin American countries.

“What we want is for it to be done better and for the state to modernize to have weapons and recover those sums of money without control,” he added.

INITIATIVE: “TEAM EUROPE ON GOVERNANCE, JUSTICE, AND SECURITY”.

De la Caballería covered the initiative “Team Europe on Governance, Justice, and Security”, a “way to bring together all the European actors, who want and have added value to make progress on the priorities” of the countries.

“One of the priorities we are dealing with here today is justice and security, which are closely linked to shared values such as democracy, the rule of law,” he said.

This is “the way of working that we have learned in Europe, that has worked for us and that we want to offer to Latin America so that it can adapt it to its reality and develop it,” he explained.

For the other director of the “EL PAcCTO” program, Xavier Cousquer, this initiative guarantees “greater coordination between what the member states do in the framework of their bilateral cooperation with Latin America”.