Three Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence have developed open-source tools to help the U.S. government combat transnational criminal organizations (TCO) and drug cartels in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
Researchers examined foreign government documents for the project called “Tracking Cartels: Exploiting Open Sources to Identify Trends.” The researchers also extracted geocoded information from social media data scraping and news articles.
The data was fed into a linked Gazetteer Search Tool and algorithm that can identify subtle trends that traditional analytic methods could miss.
“While it is impossible to determine from these records alone which violent deaths are associated with organized violence perpetrated by TCOs as opposed to other forms of violence, when these data are eventually joined with the other aspects of this project that are currently in development, we will be able to link many of these deaths with TCO violence,” a research brief said. “We expect to eventually be able to exploit these data to identify deeper trends and linkages across Guatemala and the wider region.”
The three departments are the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center, and the Center for Acceleration Operational Efficiency.