Organized crime in LatAm: InSight Crime’s report

Steven Dudley and Jeremy McDermott look at the GameChangers 2016: Elites, Organized Crime and Political Firestorms.

Brazil:

In reality, it is her [impeached president Dilma Rousseff’s] Worker’s Party that more resembles a criminal organization than she does. Like a mafia, the party collected and distributed money to keep the wheels of political power moving and laundered that money through elaborate schemes involving construction companies and offshore accounts. Rousseff’s mentor, the celebrated former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was charged with what appeared to be the type of routine payments all Brazilian politicians and ex-politicians get from the movement of state contracts. Indeed, those who ousted Rousseff are facing similar corruption allegations, illustrating just how institutionalized the problem appears to be.

Read the full report on Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia and Peru. Importantly,

There was, amidst it all, some good news. Honduras purged 40 percent of the top brass of its troubled police force, and Guatemala increased its rehabilitation rate of incarcerated youths. Ecuador increased its drug seizures, while Peru rejected the presidential bid of Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of disgraced and imprisond [sic] former president, Alberto Fujimori amid allegations of drug trafficking and money landering. Peru also registered record lows of coca production.