CICAD
Takes New Steps to Strengthen Partners
in Drug Use in the Hemisphere
In response to developing trends in drug trafficking, criminal organizations and substance abuse in the Americas, CICAD has developed and rolled out a set of initiatives by tapping the advantages offered by the Internet to share information and knowledge and to deliver specialized training, as well as by capitalizing on the unique expertise CICAD and its partners have built up over the past decade. This approach is cost effective, scalable and implemented in an abbreviated timeframe.
- Noting a need for the use of investigative techniques for the illicit distribution of controlled substances via the Internet, CICAD partnered with Microsoft Corporation in five countries to offer regional, four-day seminars on the tools, resources and techniques needed to investigate online sales in 2007. Nearly 150 investigators were trained.
- The Money Laundering Control Section commissioned and implemented an Internet-based application that enables participating law enforcement agencies to catalogue and update information on money laundering and terrorist financing practices in order to detect, gather intelligence, investigate and then prosecute such cases. The information classification system, also known as a typology database, allows authorized users to search for cases similar to those they are investigating and to learn the methods used to investigate and prosecute them.
- CICAD has pioneered the training of judges and prosecutors, police investigators and financial analysts in techniques for investigating and prosecuting money laundering cases in South and Central America. Now this methodology will be deployed as an online program on money laundering control in a university academic environment, enabled by the distance-education platform of the Spain’s University of Salamanca.
- A technical assistance project is supporting member states to better manage seized and forfeited assets resulting from drug trafficking and money laundering cases. It is being implemented initially in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
- Statistical profiles on drugs organized by country (socio-economic and bio-demographic information, supply and consumption data) are drawn from MEM reports and other information sources and made available online by the Inter-American Observatory on Drugs (OID).
- An on-line certificate program on addiction studies for the English-speaking Caribbean with the University of the West Indies: the program has drew sufficient student interest to be self-sustaining in its first academic year.
- The Alternative Development Knowledge Network (ADKN) is an online resource that allows specialists from around the world to share their expertise and know-how on rural development in mountain regions that already show the presence of illicit crops.