Latin American Drugs & links

[Bill Moore]

Interesting observation after the quick Google searches (so admittedly the data is not precise, but still should be in the ball park).

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 murder rate in El Salvador is 7 to 8 times greater than NYC. In and of its self I guess it doesn't mean much, but it does put in context. if NYC had the same rate, we would lose as many people in NYC to violence in one year as we lost in Iraq during all of OIF.

Easy to see how a how a government in a relatively poor nation was overcome with this level of violence and decided to negotiate. Is negotiating capitulation or a reasonable response in this case?

[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.

[tequila]

This is a New Yorker story from 2010 about the Rodrigo Rosenberg suicide in Guatemala that is a remarkably well-written portrayal of just how out of control Guatemala has gotten.

In 2007, a joint study by the United Nations and the World Bank ranked it as the third most murderous country. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of killings rose steadily, ultimately reaching sixty-four hundred. The murder rate was nearly four times higher than Mexico’s. In 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala.

...

Criminal networks have infiltrated virtually every government and law-enforcement agency, and more than half the country is no longer believed to be under the control of any government at all. Citizens, deprived of justice, often form lynch mobs, or they resolve disputes, even trivial ones, by hiring assassins.

Some authorities have revived the darkest counter-insurgency tactics, rounding up undesirables and executing them. Incredibly, the death rate in Guatemala is now higher than it was for much of the civil war. And there is almost absolute impunity: ninety-seven per cent of homicides remain unsolved, the killers free to kill again ...


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1qKeF8qSt