Ecuador and Italy sign agreement to fight against organized crime
Ecuadornews:
The National Anti-Mafia Directorate of the European country will provide assistance and cooperation to the Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office and exchange experiences. The authorities of the two state agencies inaugurated a workshop meeting yesterday.
In order to share information and research techniques to fight against transnational organized crime, based on the Italian experience, the State Attorney General, Carlos Baca Mancheno, and the Antimafia procurator of Italy, Pier Luigi Dell’Osso, signed a letter of understanding.
According to the document, the parties are committed to the exchange of experiences in the investigation of organized crime, the development of training activities, meetings with experts, academic conferences, among other actions. Regarding investigative techniques, when required, the Italian Procurator’s Office will ensure maximum availability to activate other judicial authorities in the country, as well as the European judicial network.
The agreement was signed yesterday at the opening ceremony of the ‘Ecuador-Italy Meeting, Corruption, Organized Crime and Terrorism’, which began at the Eugenio Espejo Convention Center in Quito, and will continue until today, with the presence of judges, prosecutors and authorities of the justice agencies.
For Baca Mancheno, with this event the State Attorney General will know the scheme of operation, powers and results obtained by the National Anti-Mafia Directorate (DNA) of Italy, in order to obtain inputs that can address the intentions of the Prosecutor’s Office in its process of creation of a national structure similar to the Italian one.
Pier Luigi Dell’Osso has been a fundamental part of DNA since its formation in the nineties, Baca said that “the Italian strategy of fighting the mafia through the creation of DNA is one of the most successful models to global level of fight against organized crime and related crimes “.
The Office of the Prosecutor established the need for a highly technical national tool aimed at investigating organized crime from its structure, with inter-agency investigative processes and through international cooperation. The Prosecutor added that the Italian experience will help the training of judicial personnel. The Italian official highlighted the work of Baca, especially to present a very well articulated project on the extinction of domain, which aims to fight against mafias, corruption and money laundering. “The extinction of dominion has as its objective to neutralize the illicit riches”.
In his opinion, in the fight against organized crime, the priority is to fight corruption, because it is a source of crime. “I speak of political, institutional corruption. It should never be left aside because the mafias always try to corrupt, because they have money. ” For Dell’Osso, transnational crime does not have to be organized, as it can be of different types. (I)