By Ernesto Schargrodsky and Lucía Freira

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between inequality and crime, with a focus on the Latin America and Caribbean region. We find a significant, positive, and robust association between these variables.

The results persist if one instruments for inequality with historical variables in crime regressions, suggesting that a causal interpretation of the estimated effect is reasonable. Moreover, inequality is the only variable showing this robust regularity. Education levels, economic activity, income per capita, and poverty show weaker and unstable relationships with crime. The analysis of the distribution of crime victimization indicates that men and youth suffer more crime than women and the elderly. By socio-economic strata, high-income groups suffer more victimization relative to poorer groups in LAC countries, but the poor suffer more homicides.

UNDP LAC Working Paper 13.

Panama City, Panama: United Nations Development Programme, Latin America and the Caribbean , 2021. 48p.

By Maloney, William, Marcela Melendez, and Raul Morales

The report titled “Organized Crime and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean” underscores how these issues exacerbate the region's already fragile economic landscape. Latin America and the Caribbean are projected to grow by 2.1 percent in 2025 and 2.4 percent in 2026, positioning it as the slowest-growing region globally.

The region grapples with alarmingly high levels of lethal violence linked to organized crime. Victimization rates are three times higher than the global average, with homicide rates standing at eight times the global average.

The report outlines several factors contributing to the rise in organized crime, including escalating global demand for illegal goods, government crackdowns that have reconfigured criminal networks, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed these groups to solidify their power in areas where state presence is weak.

“Organized crime is rapidly proliferating across the region, transcending domestic borders and becoming a pervasive threat. This is no longer an isolated issue; it demands a regional and global dialogue to elevate solutions and mobilize our collective expertise and resources,” said Carlos Felipe Jaramillo, Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.

This proliferation has clear development consequences. The report outlines how it threatens public safety, stifles economic growth and erodes the integrity of public institutions. The uncertainty surrounding property rights, rampant extortion, and pervasive insecurity inflate transaction costs for businesses, undermining competitiveness. Moreover, the diversion of public security resources from essential services like health and education burden countries already facing high debt and fiscal challenges.

“Fighting organized crime is not merely a law enforcement issue; it’s a development priority. It undermines governance, distorts investment, and exacerbates inequality. We must address this issue head-on to prevent it from becoming a permanent drag on growth,” said William Maloney, Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.

To address these challenges, the report calls for a robust agenda to enhance state capacity against organized crime, including police reform, improved prison systems, and strengthened judicial processes. Well-equipped institutions are key to achieving growth and development in the region.

Economic policies also play a crucial role in combating organized crime, promoting growth and job-creating reforms while providing youth with options through improved education and training. These initiatives raise the opportunity cost of crime, reducing its labor supply.

Finally, the report stresses the need for long-term research to inform government actions, as the absence of regular, comparable surveys hampers the development of effective policies

Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025. 92p.

By Perez-Vincent, Santiago M.; Puebla, David; Alvarado, Nathalie; Mejía, Luis Fernando; Cadena, Ximena; Higuera, Sebastián; Niño, José David

Crime and violence have plagued Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) for decades. For the region’s inhabitants, living amid violence disrupts everyday life, while also complicating the operations of the State and private companies, and reducing societal well-being in multiple ways. The fear and experience of being a victim of crime can affect people’s physical and mental health, lower productivity, and shape fundamental decisions, such as where to live and how to pursue academic and professional development. For the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) Group, the leading development institution in LAC, the high levels of crime and violence in the region pose a serious obstacle to achieving its strategic objectives of strengthening sustainable economic growth, reducing poverty and inequality, and addressing climate change. Quantifying the cost of crime is fundamental to understanding the gravity of the situation and aligning the dialogue to find concrete actions to remedy it. However, doing so is not a simple task. Measuring the cost of crime requires estimating what the lives of LAC citizens would be like if they were not exposed to crime and violence, and comparing this alternative scenario with the current situation. The complexity of the phenomenon of crime and violence—which affects and is affected by multiple individual and social factors—makes such a comparison difficult. The lack of accurate, up-to-date, and comparable data on crime and victimization in most countries in the region further complicates the task. Moreover, crime generates costs not only from the occurrence of criminal acts but also from the anticipation and fear of them, underscoring the importance of incorporating perceptions of insecurity in analyses of its costs and in shaping public policies. The response to crime also implies a reorientation of resources. Thus, these analyses should also include a review of the allocation and efficiency of public spending on security. Despite these difficulties, but mindful of them, the IDB has promoted a series of publications to aid in quantifying the cost of crime and violence in LAC. The most recent of these publications (Jaitman et al. , 2017) estimated that the direct costs of crime (in terms of (i) human capital lost due to homicides, reported non-lethal crimes, and deprivation of liberty; (ii) expenditures by private firms to prevent crime; and (iii) public spending to respond to and prevent crime) averaged between 3 and 3.5 percent of GDP in 17 countries in the region in 2014. This publication continues that line of research. Prepared in partnership with Fedesarrollo, the document expands, updates, and refines the estimates of these three direct costs of crime and violence. The updated results—covering 22 countries in the region—show that the costs of crime remain high, at around 3.4 percent of GDP in 2022. This is roughly equivalent to 78 percent of the public budget for education, twice the public budget for social assistance, and 12 times the budget for research and development in these countries. The new estimates also show the evolution of these costs over time. In addition to updating the estimates for these three direct costs, this new publication explores the indirect costs of crime and violence (i.e., dimensions affected by fear or by the experience of being a victim of crime or violence). It summarizes recent advances in the academic literature focused on quantifying the impact of crime and violence on various dimensions of development. The evidence, much of it from our region, reveals that crime and violence directly affect the objectives of the IDB Group’s new Institutional Strategy. They impact business and investment, reducing economic growth. They affect human capital accumulation and the health at birth of the most vulnerable populations, deepening poverty and inequality. And they are linked to the unrestricted exploitation of natural resources and ecosystem degradation, thus contributing to climate change. The study concludes with the analysis of three complementary studies, carried out within the framework of this publication, that seek to show how crime imposes costs on our region, affecting tourism activity, migration, and business productivity. Together, the analyses presented in both parts of the paper complement each other to provide a comprehensive look at the costs that crime and violence impose on LAC societies. However, much remains to be learned. Emerging dynamics, such as cybercrime, and complex ones, such as organized crime, pose challenges with likely profound impacts for the LAC region. These issues are evolving in a worrisome way. Organized criminal groups, which account for 50 percent of homicides in the Americas (UNODC, 2023), are increasing their presence and influence, raising concerns about rising violence across the region. In LAC, 54 percent of households report the presence of local criminal groups (Uribe et al. , 2022), and between 20 and 50 percent consider organized crime to be the greatest threat to their security (LAPOP, 2012, 2014, 2019). Improving the measurement of these phenomena and the quantification of their impacts should be an essential part of efforts to achieve an effective public policy approach. The IDB seeks to promote sound public sector institutions and policies that translate into more effective, efficient, and transparent governments that serve the needs of the people and foster sustainable and inclusive growth. The main objective of this publication is to provide information to support these objectives by raising awareness of the magnitude and variety of the impacts of crime and violence in our region. We also hope that it will promote debate and the development of new studies to deepen this complex but urgent research agenda.

Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank (“IDB”) 2024. 170p.

By Paul M Bisca, Vu Chau, Paolo Dudine, Raphael A Espinoza, Jean-Marc Fournier, Pierre Guérin, Niels-Jakob H Hansen, and Jorge Salas

Violent crime and insecurity remain major barriers to prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). With just 8 percent of the global population, LAC accounts for a third of the world’s homicides. Building on the existing literature, this paper aims to support economic policymakers and development partners by exploring the interplay between insecurity and macroeconomic outcomes, with emphasis on the relationship between violent crime and growth, the business climate, and public finances. The analysis shows that national-level crime indicators mask huge internal disparities, and that municipalities with 10 percent higher homicide rates have lower economic activity by around 4 percent. The paper develops an innovative measure of insecurity—the share of crime-related news—and shows its association with lower industrial production. Using firm-level data, it also estimates that the direct costs of crime, for firms, are around 7 percent of annual sales, and these are much higher when gangs and drug-trafficking organizations are present. Violent crime rises with macroeconomic instability, inequality, and governance problems. Using a large cross-country panel, the analysis finds that homicides increase when a country is affected by negative growth, high inflation, or a worsening of inequality. Victimization surveys indicate that where populations are concerned with the rule of law—impunity and police corruption—only one in five victims file their case with the police. Lack of trust and crime can be mutually reinforcing. Finally, the paper documents the fiscal burden of security provision and finds that spending tends to be inelastic to crime and that spending efficiency could be improved. The paper concludes with policy lessons and areas for additional collaboration between national authorities, international partners, and key stakeholders. These focus on data collection and analysis, economic policies that may address the root causes and manifestations of crime, strengthening rule of law institutions, and intensifying regional exchanges on security and public finance issues.

Washington, DC: : International Monetary Fund. 2024. 60p.

By  Colombian Organized Crime Observatory, Arlene B. Tickner, et al.

In Latin America, the participation of women in organized crime has been in the shadow of academic and public policy debate due to the male dominance in the different criminal economies and the tendency to see criminal activities as a “man’s activity”. However, a more detailed analysis of drug trafficking, human trafficking, and migrant smuggling, based on the application of a gender lens, allows the appreciation of the different roles that women play. After examining a series of documents, data and information collected through fieldwork, this investigation by the InSight Crime and Universidad del Rosario’s Colombian Observatory of Organized Crime, increases the complexity of female roles inside organized crime and questions the tendency to present women only as victims, or in some cases, as victimizers. From cooks and coca harvesters to owners of their drug empires or trafficking and smuggling networks, women operate in a versatile manner and move in a broad spectrum of roles, challenging the existent division of labor based on gender while at the same time coexisting with criminal organizations that continue to impose a patriarchal system. Through the description of these roles, the development of two case studies – one regarding women and gangs in El Salvador, and another tackling human trafficking and migrant smuggling in the Colombia-Venezuela border town of Cúcuta- and the construction of profiles of some of the greatest protagonists of organized crime in recent times, the investigation takes the shape of a woman. The document also analyses…..

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  the use of violence by women, a characteristic that is usually attributed to men and masculine behavior. However, violence is a tool often used by women in some organized crime structures. Based on this, as well as the examination of the main factors that push women to organized crime activities, a series of public policy recommendations are set forth for governments and local authorities. These are aimed at understanding a phenomenon that, aside from being under-analyzed, is continuously growing.   

Washington, DC: Washington, DC: InSight Crime, 2020.   41p.

By Jenny Pearce

While Latin America’s high levels of chronic violence are mostly carried out by poor young men and mostly cost the lives of poor young men, the conditions for its reproduction are generated by logics of elite power and wealth accumulation. Drawing on more than 70 interviews with oligarchic elites from Colombia and Mexico, the paper offers propositions for further empirical research into these logics. It discusses why it makes sense to use the term “oligarchic elites” to analyse both the failure to invest in the rule of law and also the elite preference for a fragmented security state whose permeability facilitates influence trafficking. It studies the direct and indirect relationships between elites and varied forms of violence, exploring how they have affected the nature of the state in Latin America, the diffusion of criminal violences, and the emergence of micro criminal orders in many parts of the region. Latin America’s history of social action against violences – not least disappearances, feminicide, forced displacement, and state torture – should extend to de-sanctioning violence as a phenomenon. This could open up spaces for social and political participation to create the conditions of social justice which reduce violence.   

London:  LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre, 2018. 30p.

By UNODC and EUROPOL

The cocaine market presents a clear threat at global level. Well-defined locations of production in South America and large consumer markets in the Americas and Europe lead to trafficking routes from a circumscribed origin to specific, even if far-flung, destinations. While some parts of the world play a crucial role as transit regions, the routes, modalities and networks employed by criminal actors continue to evolve, diversify and become more efficient. The increasingly globalized, interconnected, digitalized and technologically sophisticated nature of society, as well as a growing affluent demographic in some regions where cocaine use has traditionally been low, can potentially catalyse and accelerate the dynamism and expansion of the market. 

Vienna: UNODC and EUROPOL, 2021. 28p.

By Livia Wagner

Throughout history, man has venerated gold. Gold was the first of the three gifts of the Magi to Jesus. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the values of world currencies were fixed in terms of gold (the Gold Standard). Olympic athletes vie for gold medals and the best footballer in the world is awarded the Ballon d’Or. An extremely well behaved child is ‘as good as gold’ and a generous person has ‘a heart of gold’.

It is only natural to think positively about gold, just as it is equally natural to think negatively about drugs. But, as the Global Initiative proves in its latest research report: “Organised Crime and Illegally Mined Gold in Latin America”, illegally mined gold is now more important to organized crime in some countries of Latin America than narcotics:

In Peru and Colombia – the largest cocaine producers in the world – the value of illegal gold exports now exceeds the value of cocaine exports.

Illegal mining is the easiest and most profitable way to launder money in the history of Colombian drug trafficking.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, 2016. 100p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

The report provides a regional analysis of the key trends and emerging developments of the synthetic drugs and NPS market as well as options for response in Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past years, the synthetics drug market has experienced a massive expansion and diversification in the region and seen a rapid emergence of a wide range of NPS.

The latest developments include an expanding methamphetamine market, growing concerns around the non-medical use of ketamine, the emergence of fentanyl and MDMA manufacture, as well as new “ecstasy” trends such as higher dosed MDMA tablets and new forms of presentation such as crystalline MDMA. Moreover, the report sheds light on the comparatively high prevalence of use of hallucinogens in the region and the high prevalence of use of tranquilizers among women.

Vienna: UNODC, 2021. 56p.