07/12/2022
The EUROFRONT program has coordinated a series of training courses for border agents with the participation of the National Police.
New forms of document counterfeiting are a challenge for global security. This crime precedes other more serious crimes such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, migrant smuggling and, in general, any attack on human rights committed by international criminal organizations. In order to generate harmonized mechanisms of action to combat this threat, EUROFRONT has led a cycle of seven training courses, developed over nine months of knowledge exchange between Latin America and Europe.
A total of 235 border agents from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay have been trained in this cycle, coordinated by FIIAPP. Its development throughout 2022 sets a starting point for EUROFRONT’s long-term objective: to create a Latin American network of specialists in the detection of counterfeit travel documents. This network, in cooperation with the Athens Point of the Spanish Policía Nacional, would provide a rapid and effective response to queries about questionable travel documents.
The trainings have been conducted jointly by EUROFRONT staff and experts from Migración Colombia and the National Directorate of Migration of Argentina. The session held in May at the TBA was also attended by specialists from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security of Brazil and the Criminalistics Division of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.
The seven training sessions have combined technical assistance and institutional visits to several of the border facilities with which EUROFRONT works: Bermejo-Aguas Blancas (Bolivia-Argentina), Triple Border (Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil) and El Dorado Airport (Bogota).
The methodology used, based on the exchange of experiences, broadened the participants’ knowledge and strengthened their commitment to regional cooperation. Priority was also given to practical activities, document analysis and the visualization of cases of impostors.
Among the 235 trainees, 35.32% are women and 64.69% men, figures that seek gender balance as one of the formulas for introducing this perspective in each of the activities developed by EUROFRONT.
