Financial Transparency Coalition

This blog is part of a series ahead of our annual conference, which takes place next week. Each piece is written by a conference speaker and aims to give a preview of some of the issues to be discussed. 

There is just a week to go before the start of the Hidden Money, Hidden Resources conference in Lima, organized by the Financial Transparency Coalition and Latindadd, and the agenda covers a number of topics which are highly relevant to the Americas.

The panel I´ve been invited to moderate, for example, will be exploring the links between citizen security, organized crime, corruption and money-laundering. Latin America and the Caribbean as a region has the highest levels of citizen insecurity in the world, and is the only region where criminal violence increased between 2000 and 2010 according to UNDP.

While each of these issues could easily be the subject of a conference in itself (and they have – see for example here and here), we hope to focus specifically not just on how these issues are connected, but also on how to improve the coordination of responses to them.

The problem of organized crime – perhaps most often associated with Central America in the international media – is increasingly affecting the entire continent. The conference´s host country Peru is now the world´s number one cocaine producer, and is increasingly struggling to contain the influx of money from drug trafficking into the political system, with at least a quarter of candidates to regional governor positions currently under investigation for drug-related crimes.

Our guest speakers on the panel will include experts from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Financial Action Task Force (GAFISUD), the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy of Nicaragua (IEEPP) and Costa Rica Integra.

For more information please check in next week, when we will be blogging the main outcomes and recommendations from the panel right after the conference.