Mexico is the third country with the highest crime rate in the world, only after Myanmar and Colombia, which occupy the first and second places, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), for its acronym in English.
The GI-TOC is a group of professionals who fight against the criminal economy and the actors that feed it. They do this through a network of civil society organizations that function as observatories of this criminal phenomenon. Its headquarters are in Switzerland.
The Global Organized Crime Index is a tool designed to evaluate the levels of crime and resilience to criminal activity worldwide, in the 193 Member States of the United Nations (UN).
In the 2023 report, with data from 2022, in America the region of Mexico and Central America was positioned at the “highest level of crime”, but Mexico drops to third place globally when considering crimes against flora and fauna.
Myanmar has an 8.15 overall crime rate; Colombia, 7.75 and Mexico, 7.57. They are followed by Paraguay, with 7.52; Ecuador, 7.07; Honduras, 7.08; Panama, 6.98; Brazil, 6.77; Venezuela, 6.72 and Guatemala, 6.60. These are the first ten worldwide.
The American continent is positioned as the most dangerous in the world and as the scene where organized crime has the most favorable space to develop, affirms the institution.
America is today the center of world crime and the regions that make it up “consistently appear among the top three positions, globally, in 11 of the 15 criminal markets measured by the index.”
The markets and criminal actors present in America operate at the same time in several countries in different regions and exert a much greater influence than on other continents.
In the case of America, since 2000 the trend of growth and influence of organized crime mafias has continued. It is evident that “they are protected by groups of economic and political power.”
In America, economic, social and political inequality is also the greatest in the world. In the last 30 years, countries have gone from hope to disillusionment with liberal-democratic or authoritarian populist governments. The big problems are still there.
The rule of law is threatened in fragmented and polarized societies, with a very unequal distribution of income and opportunities. It is in that space where transnational organized crime grows and expands. Mexico, as we see, is no exception.