Latin America Leads The World!

In murder rates.

The new United Nations UNODC report on violence around the world is out and you can download your copy from this link right here. Meanwhile, here's a chart with mainly LatAm counties featured (though not all-inclusive, with just a selection named) as well as a couple of other non-LatAm counties thrown in for comparative purposes. If you want the a complete lists and numbers for all countries, you'll surely care enough to download the full report anyway.

And we have a winner! Honduras is the world's most violent country according to the UN, with 82.1 murders per 100,000 population. Second comes El Salvador, with Ivory Coast in Africa taking third spot. Fourth is Jamaica and then Venezuela makes the top five with a bad rate (though not the "world's most violent", as it's often portrayed in the silly Northern media channels).

Notice Brazil, with a high rate of 22.7 murders/100k, but also with 43,909 murders registered in 2010 it's the biggest absolute killer (almost three times as many as the 15k murders in the USA, for example). Notice Colombia, which is still very high but has been dropping considerably in recent years. Notice Mexico, far less than you'd imagine from the newspaper reports, no? That's because the narcos tend (with headline-making exceptions) to kill each other, not the general population. Then notice places like Argentina and Peru, way down on the lists and comparable to The USA in relative safety. Finally, China has its murders of course, but it also has lots and lots and lots of people....which helps the stats no end.