Latin America & the Caribbean

The Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) records major incidents of violence against aid workers. Initiated in 2005, to date the AWSD remains the sole comprehensive global source of this data, providing the evidence base for analysis of the changing security environment for civilian aid operations. The AWSD is a project of Humanitarian Outcomes.

Caracas Mi Convive works to prevent and reduce violence in the most vulnerable communities of Libertador municipality in Caracas Venezuela. To do this, Caracas Mi Convive promotes community-driven development projects, evidence-based strategies, and local leadership to create environments of peace and coexistence. All of their violence prevention projects are designed to be replicated and become sustainable and effective citizen security policies.

The Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) is a research center that brings together a group of high profile academics from multiple disciplines to study social conflict and cohesion in Chile. The Centre’s objective is to contribute to the understanding of social cohesion and conflict through research that informs public policy and social dialogue, as well as raising general public awareness about these issues. COES focuses on four research lines that we consider to be of utmost relevance to the problems of social conflict and cohesion: the Socioeconomic Dimensions of Conflict; Group and Individual Interactions; Political and Social Conflict; and Geographies of Conflict.

DIALOGOS is a Guatemalan innovation lab that aims to contribute, through rigorous technical studies based on the use  of available evidence, to the dialogue and debate on social problems in the region. Their mission is to conduct in- depth research that leads to innovation for solving public problems at the local, national, and regional levels. Their main goals are the following: facilitate a serious, plural, and informed public debate; make specific contributions to public opinion, and provoke reflection of political actors, all of that from the perspective of academic research.

Fogo Cruzado (Cross-fire) is a collaborative digital platform that aims to record the incidence of shootings and the prevalence of armed violence in the metropolitan regions of Rio de Janeiro and Recife. App alerts are sent in real-time for users who are within a 4 km radius of the incidence of a shot, based on their GPS. Also, all information collected through users, social media chatter, news media and police agencies social media are carefully checked (to avoid misuse of sensible information) and aggregated in a database with geo-location, time of incidents, deaths, and injuries on each occasion, as well as the recording of the presence of public security agents.

Fogo Cruzado was created in July 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and then expanded to Pernambuco in April 2018. It was the first collaborative platform in Brazil to register and inform local populations about shootings, especially in regions where this phenomena causes several implications to daily routines – from physical and emotional damages to economic and mobility limitations. Its mission is to engage people in the debate about gunshot violence, using technology to break with governmental monopoly of knowledge about public security and, thus, produce open and free information that can, not only subsidize public policies that help to improve people’s lives, as well as help to save lives directly and immediately.

Front Line Defenders is an Irish-based international organisation, founded in 2001, with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs); people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Front Line Defenders addresses the protection needs identified by HRDs themselves. The organisation has special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and in 2018 Front Line Defenders was awarded the UN Prize in the Field of Human Rights.

Programa Estado de la Nación (PEN) is a public research center dedicated to the analysis of sustainable human development. Through innovation and collaborative research, PEN builds alliances with public and private organizations and international cooperation agencies, in order to carry out projects and activities that ensure methodological precision.

ProtectDefenders.eu is the European Union Human Rights Defenders mechanism, established to protect defenders at high risk and facing the most difficult situations worldwide. ProtectDefenders.eu is committed to reaching Human Rights Defenders working in remote areas and countries where it is particularly dangerous to work in human rights defense. It focuses on defenders who are especially targeted, including women human rights defenders, defenders of LGBTI rights, land and environmental rights defenders, economic and social rights defenders, defenders of minorities, lawyers, and those fighting for freedom of expression and association.

Sismología Social: Investigación de Protestas en Nicaragua is a research project that systematically collects and analyzes data on Nicaraguan protests. Through the Protests Event Analysis technique and the revision of more than thirty mass media sources, the record includes more than 3,700 protest events across the country since 2016. Sismología Social records several variables, including actors, locations, forms of protests, repressions, alliances, and the number of participants. Sismología Social has analytical innovations, such as the creation of the Protest Intensity Index (IIP), which allows the analysis of the protests in the country beyond their frequencies. The repository of this research, released every month, offers an original, rigorous, and understandable analysis and description of Nicaragua’s social, economic, and political dynamics.

WM Consulting monitors and maps “narco” killings, killing of journalists, and killings of tourists in Mexico. WM Consulting’s mapping project seeks to bring to light the violence related to the drug war in Mexico.