The prevalence of drug trafficking, coupled with emboldened organised crime teams and armed non-state actors with huge monetary assets, has turned Latin America and the Caribbean into hotspots for inside battle and violence in recent times.
Based on the United Nations Workplace on Medicine and Crime (UNODC), eight of the ten nations with the very best murder charges on this planet had been within the area in 2021, which the organisation mentioned instantly correlates to the misuse of firearms.
Of specific observe, legal and militant entities have capitalised on the widespread availability of Small Arms and Mild Weapons (SALW), a class that features handguns in addition to semi-semiautomatic and automated rifles. UNODC notes these teams can purchase weapons from sources together with home markets, non-public sellers, black markets, authorized and unlawful North American and Western European channels, and even by way of the diversion of regulation enforcement and navy stockpiles.
This makes evaluation of ongoing tendencies within the unlawful weapons market important to understanding the rise in violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. A instrument that may assist open supply researchers perceive the problem is the SALW Dashboard, a geospatial database that tracks the utilization, seizure, and trafficking of SALW within the area.
Developed by the Regional Coordinator for Social and Financial Analysis (CRIES), a community of regional analysis centres of which the writer of this piece is director, and the Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Coverage & GIS Heart at Florida Worldwide College (FIU), the SALW Dashboard launched in 2021. The instrument applies open supply analysis methods to keep up a strong, up-to-date and publicly out there database that tracks SALW incidents within the area inside an easy-to-use dashboard.
To perform this, the open supply intelligence (OSINT) group at CRIES has crafted a customized methodology that merges typical analysis strategies with specialised open supply instruments, optimised for distinctive circumstances throughout greater than 30 nations. This incorporates methods reminiscent of social media monitoring and Google “dorking” — the latter of which refers to utilizing superior search syntaxes like “website:” or “filetype:” or “intext:” that permit researchers to unearth hidden or obscure paperwork or net pages on websites.
What information goes into the map and the way is it vetted? The SALW Dashboard begins by aggregating open-source data scraped from the online and changing it to a standardised format which is organised and displayed on the dashboard, which makes use of GIS to plot the information on an interactive geospatial map.
The scraping of information is compiled from 4 principal avenues:
- Google Alerts utilising conventional dorking methods that permit us to cowl the most typical technical, strange and slang phrases that discuss with weapon varieties, in addition to police/judicial incidents within the area;
- Queries on X, previously Twitter, centered on key phrases used to discuss with firearms, seizures and theft/loss;
- Nation-focused lists of X customers composed of official accounts, journalists and researchers that normally cowl SALW-related incidents; and
- An inside listing utilized by researchers to continuously monitor a variety of Instagram accounts that cowl SALW-related incidents.
Extra just lately, the handbook scraping work achieved by CRIES and FIU researchers for locating SALW incidents has been overhauled and modernised by the combination of generative AI that gives information scraping capabilities and centralises all processes below a single person interface to streamline the recollection, processing, curating and information entry.
Google Alerts are checked every day, with roughly 700 to 1000 hits per week, of which round 5 per cent truly meet the venture’s standards for inclusion. Researchers search X queries and lists each three days and on the similar time monitor the pre-identified Instagram accounts.
From these search outcomes, the factors for together with an incident within the database are:
- If the incident entails the seizure of SALW, except for single pistol or single shotgun seizures,
- All cases of theft, loss or destruction of SALW, and
- Incidents of unlawful use or possession of SALW through which visible or audiovisual content material will be time-stamped and geolocated to the precise website of the incidence.
As soon as the scraping group has accomplished an preliminary collection of incidents, researchers together with a SALW Identification Specialist enter each in a standardised format for the SALW Dashboard database. This features a title containing the nation the place the incident occurred and a one-sentence description of the occasion, an extended abstract detailing in two to 5 sentences what reportedly occurred, the identification of weapons concerned, and hyperlinks to authentic sources the place the incident was recognized. Every incident is assigned a singular report ID quantity and, the place out there, contains supplementary data reminiscent of the kind of incident, whether or not it concerned diverted weapons, if any notable teams had been concerned, and if any multimedia is on the market.
At this level, the group additionally verifies the information and pinpoints the geographic location of every occasion (or as carefully as potential, on condition that many occasions protection could solely permit identification of a neighbourhood, metropolis or city). Extra verification is completed by checking the database, in addition to looking for related incidents within the neighborhood of the reported incident, to keep away from potential duplicates.
All photographs are reversed searched and verified to make sure that they’re of the reported occasion and mirror the kinds of weapons concerned. This verification course of additionally ensures that researchers can decide whether or not incidents nonetheless meet the factors for inclusion after particulars have been corroborated.
If two incidents are associated to the identical case or if further data is made out there for a selected case (reminiscent of further bulletins from regulation enforcement or a follow-up report within the media), the corresponding Incident IDs are included of their entries in order that researchers can join them..
As soon as incidents have been formatted in line with the standardised SALW Dashboard schema, an editor is accountable for fact-checking the incidents and cleansing up any technical and grammatical errors, together with revisions of SALW identification.
Lastly, the data is uploaded to ArcGIS by way of a survey123 type that emulates all of the objects already included within the standardised schema, resulting in the plotting of all the information factors in a single dataset.
This leads to a user-friendly technique to interact with the information by way of the interactive map and dashboard.
What will be discovered from this database?
The SALW Dashboard can be utilized to establish and perceive patterns within the presence of firearms in Latin America. One notable pattern is the move of firearms from the U.S. civilian market into Latin America, significantly AR-15 and AR-10 sample rifles.
In December, Bloomberg Information reported on how US authorized loopholes are exploited by weapons smugglers to flood the area with untraceable AR-10s and AR-15s. In reporting the piece, they contacted the SALW Dashboard group to entry your entire dataset, which their information group was ready to make use of to assist illustrate the provision chain.
One other pattern the database has been used to establish is the position state-diverted weapons, significantly explosive ordnance, play amongst legal teams in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. The move of Peruvian grenades into Ecuador, for instance, is of specific relevance contemplating the nation’s ongoing inside armed battle between the federal government and cartels.
In the meantime, Brazil’s illicit market has been topic to a noticeable inflow of Turkish-manufactured small arms, one thing the database sheds gentle on.
Voice of America Turkey used the database to establish over 60 separate seizures in Brazil, together with further information from Argentina. They did this by figuring out the weapons concerned, analysing frequent routes concerned in seizures, and cross-referencing import and export firearms information from concerned nations.
Our researchers additionally recognized and flagged the development of Turkish firearms within the area after figuring out a number of pistol seizures in Rio de Janeiro that contained Canics, AHSS and Sarsilmaz pistols slightly than Glocks, Rugers and Bersas.
Anecdotally, identification of those firearms was made simpler by accessing Paraguayan gun retailer web sites.
Much like a separate pattern of Paraguayan-assembled AR-15s and AR-10s, we additionally discovered that these Turkish weapons had been normally seized in giant caches close to the Brazil-Paraguay border. They had been additionally continuously captured from people in main cities like Rio de Janeiro.
An instance that showcases the pattern on the border is this seizure from January 2023 when Navy Police confiscated 161 firearms in Guaíra, Paraná, together with Canik pistols, Derya MK12 shotguns, and Faux Colt / Punisher AR sample rifles.
An instance of those Turkish weapons making their technique to their greatest market in Rio de Janeiro is that this July 2023 seizure of arms from a number of incidents by the Rio de Janeiro Navy Police.
Figuring out tendencies like these will assist researchers to know extra on a micro stage about an issue that exists on a grand scale.
Final 12 months, the US-based non-profit World Motion on Gun Violence known as on policymakers to cease an “iron river” of weapons flowing into Latin America. Simply final month, a US court docket greenlit a civil lawsuit by Mexico towards US gun producers for his or her position in arming cartels.
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