Latin America Security: Venezuela Worse, Panama Safer

The safest and most dangerous countries in Latin America for foreign multinational executives.

BY LBC STAFF

Venezuela, along with Haiti and three Central American countries, is getting more dangerous for foreign multinational executives, according to the sixth annual Latin Security Index developed by FTI Consulting Ibero America for Latin Business Chronicle.

Meanwhile, Panama has seen an improvement. Overall, security for multinational executives in Latin America has worsened slightly the past year, the index shows.

The Latin Security Index takes into account how each country in the region is doing related to public insecurity, with a special focus on the business community.

Apart from polling its business contacts in the region related to issues affecting their security, FTI analyzes government statistics at the federal, state or province and municipal levels in areas such as homicides, serious crime, cargo theft, home invasions, kidnapping, political and labor unrest, riots and violent demonstrations and drug trafficking, as well as the efficacy of government programs put into place to combat these problems. FTI weighs the governmental data based on its reliability, and it also utilizes NGO and multilateral institution studies and statistics and information in all these areas as a part of its ranking. FTI conducts scans of all major regional media outlets in order to obtain more specific facts around certain phenomena as well as academic research on the issue.

“Latin America has been one of the regions of the world less affected by the financial crisis, and due to its relatively strong growth over the past years has made some improvement as a whole in social inclusion as well as resourcing the fight against crime, in some countries leading to an improvement in public security,” says Frank L. Holder, Chairman of Latin America at FTI Consulting. However, “drug trafficking and the cartels that spring from the activity continue to wreak havoc on several Central American countries as well as Mexico.”

This is not expected to change in the short term, although a ...

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Keywords:  Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela