While business may be booming across parts of Latin America, whatever the trajectory, security is moving fast up the leadership agenda.
With Argentina, Paraguay, and the Dominican Republic faring well as they migrate to service-based economies, compared to Brazil and Mexico lagging with subdued manufacturing and resource growth. Latin America faces growing security problems, covering the rise of economic volatility, organized crime, hybrid threats, and cowboy-style competitive risks.
Typical Business Risks Faced by Latam Business
As with almost any business around the world, enterprises and high-growth companies in Latin America face a growing number of operational security challenges. Production sites, offices, and vehicles need protection from risks like economic or political espionage, theft, and the rise of organized crime.
Protecting a business requires both human skills and the use of technology to create a comprehensive and joined-up commercial security system that can protect office equipment, retail goods, materials in the supply chain, employees, and any other item across and beyond the business.
Commonplace examples include theft by staff, and casual criminals targeting stores or offices, all the way up to transnational crime, where money laundering or tax avoidance across businesses and international boundaries helps some companies reduce their exposure.
Risks in other areas unrelated to crime, see some 74% of Latin American and Caribbean countries as highly exposed to extreme weather events, according to a new UN report. Security can support worker safety, productivity protection, and rescue efforts in the worst cases.
Identifying Workers and Advanced Risks
Those working in logistics, retail, and the energy business face wider risks from cargo theft, bribery, and infiltration by casual labor or contract workers. Security teams and systems must be able to track and identify anyone going beyond their legitimate office or factory area, performing unusual tasks, or communicating with outsiders.
A mix of digital, physical, and intelligence-gathering security can help. This extends to cybersecurity, where criminals might try to physically breach a firewall to plant malware directly onto office computers. Latin America is a hotspot for ransomware, information stealers, and AI-powered malware, often targeting critical business infrastructure, healthcare, and financial services companies.
Another area of risk is political instability, where local or national politicians might try to threaten businesses (using middlemen and other functionaries) to encourage them to pay bribes, make deals with their own businesses, and so on. Hard to track through conventional means, this type of crime requires strong governance, transparency, and monitoring of communications for signals of criminal activity.
Business Leaders Need Greater Visibility
In a chaotic business climate, leaders are often hyper-focused on their traditional goals and immediate executive office needs. But they also need to take charge, through leadership and sponsorship of security efforts, to protect the company from all of these threats and emerging challenges.
In startups and SMBs, a deeper inspection of new hires' resumes is vital to ensuring they are bona fide recruits. In enterprises, partnerships, and executive hires require thorough due diligence to understand what your company is getting into.
But, at the end of any working day, most offices and industrial premises are protected by some smart cameras and boots on the ground to keep workers safe. But this is only the baseline for any modern organization, with AI able to monitor hundreds of cameras across a large business or one with a large public footprint like an airport or business park.
These systems can provide security managers and business leaders with the insights and trends that help a business become more secure through smart response and evolution to a changing landscape and business threats.
Only a decade away, 2035 promises much, but will also see the risk in digital risks, from transnational crime, cyberattacks, and even greater geopolitical instability. Organized criminal networks are expected to expand into digital extortion and supply chain infiltration, while AI-driven cybercrime will target financial and infrastructure sectors.
Political volatility and weak institutional frameworks may hinder investment and regulatory enforcement. Additionally, rising influence from global powers like China could reshape trade dynamics, creating both opportunity and strategic risk, requiring intense security oversight.
Businesses must invest in adaptive security, digital resilience, and regional intelligence to navigate this increasingly complex threat landscape.
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