Brazil should follow the example of the European and North America countries, where violent crimes are punished with a lot more rigor. The right to life must be more respected in Latin America. The first part of this book is dedicated to an economical analysis of Latin America with lots of infographics. If you want to read the whole book there are versions in Spanish and Portuguese on the World Bank webpage. The Latin Americans shouldn't miss the focus on development, education, peace, justice, democracy and human rights. For almost two decades I've been writing online about the importance of these issues for a better life to everyone here in our continent. This post is a summary of the chapter two of the book with the incomplete title above, published in April of 2025 at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/151ce3ba-0caf-4aae-ae71-d68751b7a80b/content
The development challenges in Latin America are increasingly compounded by the expansion of crime in the region. The regions' news outlets document not only rising homicides rates but killings involving politicians; candidates for office assassinated, altering elections; businesses that must pay extortion fees to operate; and neighborhoods, cities and rural municipalities under criminal control. This chapter argues that crime is one of the region's most pressing problems and must be at the center of any conversation about development. While it is a problem present in many countries, in Latin America, crime tends to be more violent and it also flourishes through coercion and extortion; the capture of state institutions and sometimes with rules that limit individual freedoms, including the right to move, work, and vote freely. The impediments it poses to the region's development are myriad: uncertainty about property rights reduces and distorts investment; extortion and insecurity raise business costs and reduce competitiveness; unproductive public security expenses divert resources that could go into health, education or infrastructure, improving people's lives; victims of violence experience reductions in their capacity to accumulate human capital; communities living under crme rule see their basic freedoms compromised. The channels through which crime contributes to low productivity, low growth and poverty are countless. Crime feeds on an absence of opportunities. In the medium and long term, the best public security policy is building more functional states that can offer better education systems and labor markets that work well and can offer quality jobs. Collecting "taxes" from businesses is a widespread practice of organized crime groups in the territories under their control. Extortion affects smaller businesses more than larger ones. A paradigmatic case is El Salvador, where MS-13 and Barrio 18 were involved in extortion throughout the country for decades. Approximately 79% of businesses, including high-end restaurants and shopping malls, paid extortion fees. The total cost of extortion in El Salvador was estimated at 16% of GDP in 2014. In Ecuador, extortion cases increased by more than 65% from 2022 to 2023. Criminal activity is made possible by the ability of criminal groups to manipulate state actors at the national and subnational levels through a perverse combination of coercion and bribes, and some cases control over electoral processes through campaign financing or elimination of candidates by murder or pressure to drop out. Organized crime has become a parallel power at the local level across parts of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador. Latin America has long been hobbled by mediocre annual average economic growth, low productivity and high numbers of people struggling to stay out of poverty. This report argues that the region will remain trapped in this poor equilibrium until it figures out how to contain the worst expressions of organized crime, including the violence it brings along. There are several channels through which organized crime trumps development: 1) Reducing and distorting private investment. 2) Diverting public resources towards unproductive uses. 3) Destroying human, physical and natural capital. 4) Weakening institutions and the quality of government. 5) Deepening inequalities. All these channels add up to significant costs, many of which are hard to quantify. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates direct human capital losses and public and private security expenses in Latin America in 2022 at 3.4% of GDP. Homicides are not the only manifestation of violence. However, the homicide rate is the most reliable comparable statistic of violence. By this measure, violence in Latin America is incomparable high. While accounting for approximately 9% of the global population, Latin America records one-third of all homicides. Moreover, the gap between the homicide rate in Latin America and the rest of the world has widened over the last 20 years. In the second decade of this century, the average homicide rate in Latin America was 8 times higher than the world's average. (23.9 versus 3.0). The Latin America average hides substantial variation across countries. The 2018-2022 average homicide rate vary from 49 homicides per 1,000 people in Jamaica and 38 in Honduras (at the top) to 5 in Argentina and 4 in Bolivia (at the bottom). Most non-LatinAmerica countries ranking among the top 50 by their criminality score have homicides rates under 10 per 100,000 people. The exceptions are Nigeria, South Africa, and South Sudan. In contrast, all Latin America countries in the same group, except Paraguay and Peru, have homicide rate exceeding 10 per 100,000 and seven have homicide rates exceeding 20 per 100,000 people. These figures suggest that organized crime is more lethal in Latin America than in most other places, prompting the question of what else in Latin America different. Latin America, by far, has the highest average levels of excess lethal violence, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa. Within Latin America countries, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Guatemala are the countries with more lethal violence. In contrast, countries like Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina report lower homicide rates relative to their general levels of crime. The available indicators of the effectiveness of criminal investigation and adjudication, from the World Justice Project, suggest that except for Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, Latin American countries rank the lowest relative to countries in other world regions. The first indicator assesses the quality of criminal justice based on the perception and experience of whether perpetrators of crime are effectively apprehended and correctly charged. The second indicator measures whether perperators of crime are effectively prosecuted and punished and whether criminal judges and other judicial officers are competent and produce speedy decisions. It provides a closer assessment of impunity, confirming that this is a significant problem in the region. High levels of impunity for serious crimes are confirmed by most measures of criminal justice performance in those Latin America countries experiencing more violence. Indeed, the availability of appropriate criminal justice performance indicators can improve accountability and public trust while providing the correct incentives for strategic effectiveness. To improve criminal justice capacity, specifically in fighting organizing crime, authorities must turn to prioritization, which entails focusing resources on investigating and eliminating those crimes that are more harmful to society, such as homicidal violence, child abuse and extortion. The lack of reliable information about organized crime and the challenges of measuring it are immense. Indeed, part of the institutional weaknesses discussed in the previous section results from the lack of data. Thus, part of the problem is the absence of systematic official survey. This is despite security being identified as one of the top concerns of public opinion in poll studies.
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