Developing Methodologies to Assess Organized Crime Strategies in Latin America

Because of the increasingly organized and lethal nature of criminality in Latin America and the Caribbean, organized crime policy may be the single most important safeguard for regional security. A policy-relevant understanding requires disentangling these crimes’ many overlapping sources, removing embedded layers of methodological obstruction, and attuning responses with organized crime practice. Using embedded mixed methods to incorporate the ways in which available quantitative data and policies reflect the qualitative conditions of the agencies and processes that produce it, this report works to identify these broken, frayed or invisible inter-connections through a methodological framework as broadly flexible as the criminality it aims to measure and stop.