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Sunday, August 30, 2026 · Guatemala CityQ7.6242 per US$+0.00%
ADVANCE GUATEMALA
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The investor atlas

Geography of extortion and its typical victims

Dossier
Operational and cargo security22-seguridad-operativa.md
Domain
Cargo theft, extortion and private securityseguridad-operativa
Room
Security/seguridad
Audited
Audited

Guatemala, Escuintla and Sacatepéquez account for 2 out of every 3 complaints; the department of Guatemala alone accounts for 52% (CIEN). The most common victims are bus and taxi drivers; also small shops, restaurants, corner stores, street vendors, schoolchildren, and local employees of US private companies and of the US Embassy itself (OSAC). Associated violence: 89 homicides linked to extortion in 2019 and cases of improvised explosive devices used against buses and taxis over non-payment (for example an IED on a bus in zone 7, January 2019, Barrio 18). Hard data by type of formal business (retail, construction, manufacturing) could not be recovered.

The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.

Figures

Concentración de denuncias en el depto. de GuatemalaCIEN
52%2023
Homicidios vinculados a extorsiónOSAC 2020
892019

Caveat

no breakdown by type of business

Sources

Related records

This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.