GAFILAT: Grupo de Acción Financiera de Latinoamérica on the record

What it addresses

GAFILAT is an intergovernmental body of regional membership grouping eighteen countries of South, Central and North America, created to prevent and combat money laundering, terrorist financing and the financing of proliferation. It belongs in this index for a structural reason rather than an operational one: the monitoring status recorded on every jurisdiction page is produced by a process, and for a substantial part of this dataset that process runs through this body rather than directly through the global task force. A reader who takes a listing at face value without knowing which body assessed it is missing the institution that did the work.

How it works

It is one of the regional groups of the global Financial Action Task Force and holds associate-member status with it, which means it participates in drafting, reviewing and amending the forty recommendations while also adhering to them. In practice its members commit to continuous improvement of national policy against these offences and to deepening the cooperation mechanisms between themselves — the mutual-evaluation model, in which states assess one another against a shared standard and publish the result. That is what makes a listing a finding about identified deficiencies rather than an opinion.

Where it applies

GAFILAT addresses 2 of the corridors described on the drug routes page: The Caribbean corridor, The Central American isthmus. The jurisdictions on each are listed there, and every one of them has a record setting out its treaty position, its confirmed national instruments and its current monitoring status.

That combination is what determines whether a programme of this kind can operate in a given place. Capacity-building assumes there is a legal power to build capacity around: an interdiction technique needs a statutory basis, a joint investigation needs a mutual legal assistance route, and a trace needs a record-keeping obligation. Where those are absent the constraint is legislative rather than operational.

Jurisdictions on those corridors — 20

Anguilla · Antigua and Barbuda · Barbados · Belize · British Virgin Islands · Colombia · Costa Rica · Dominica · Dominican Republic · El Salvador · Guatemala · Honduras · Jamaica · Mexico · Nicaragua · Panama · Saint Lucia · Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Trinidad and Tobago · Venezuela

This is the reach of the corridors GAFILAT addresses, not a list of participating states: participation is asserted by the inherited index and confirmed by no official source, so it is not published. What can be stated is which jurisdictions sit on the routes in question, and what the record shows about each.

Treaty basis

In substance the work operationalises not a treaty body: its standard is the forty recommendations rather than a convention, though the obligations it assesses against overlap heavily with the laundering and confiscation provisions of the 1988 Convention, UNTOC and UNCAC. The distinction matters: a programme of this kind creates no legal powers of its own. It builds the capacity of states to use powers they already hold under instruments they have ratified, which is why a jurisdiction that is not party to the relevant instrument gains less from participation than one that is. What each instrument obliges is set out on the conventions reference.

Questions

Sources

• GAFILAT — Grupo de Acción Financiera de Latinoamérica . Checked 2026-07-30.

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