Latin American Drugs & links

[ganulv]

El Salvador's population is a little over 6 million, while NYC's population is a little over 8 million.

Murders in El Salvador average around 4,000/per year, while murders in NYC average around 500/per year. NYC's population is 25% greater than El Salvador's.

The population of Puerto Rico is around 4 million and there were in the neighborhood of 1,000 murders there last year. I lived on the island for a year in the late ’90s when the rate was similar and it was pretty unnerving. I was forewarned about the crime rate beforehand but thought I knew what I was in for given that I had spent all of my youth on an Indian reservation and had just before that point spent a year in Guatemala as their civil war wound down. Neither of those experiences was comparable. Don’t know if it is still the case but when I was in PR you weren’t required to stop at traffic signals after 2200 due to the very real possibility of being carjacked and no one I knew stopped to get gas after dark unless they were running on vapors. So I don’t really want to imagine what life is like in the Central American countries right now.*

*For all the press the drug related violence in Mexico gets the reported murder rate there doesn’t approach that of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and is lower than Puerto Rico’s. My understanding is that it is highly localized, however.