One third of all murders are committed in Latin America

27% of the 458,000 murders recorded in 2021 iIn the world, it was committed in Latin America and the Caribbeanwhich continued to be the most violent region on the planet for another year, despite the fact that the general trend is still downward, with exceptions in countries such as Ecuador, Nicaragua or Panama.

In 2021, eight of the ten countries with the highest rates of this type of crime in the world were located in this region, according to data collected in the Global Homicide Study of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

That report states Jamaica had 52.13 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the country in the world with the highest murder rate, while Brazil with 47,722 murders (11% of the world total), according to data from 2020, has the highest number in absolute numbers. In addition, Brazil averages almost 131 murders per day, or five every hour.

“Latin America and the Caribbean not only consistently has the highest homicide rate of any subregion, but also had the highest share of organized crime-related homicides worldwide in 2021,” UNODC says.

The situation is very different between different countries. For example, the highest homicide rate in Central America in 2021, that of Honduras, was seven times that of Nicaragua. In South America, Colombia, the largest that year, had a rate eight times that of Bolivia.

However, the study shows that the region has generally experienced a downward trend in homicide rates since 2017, particularly due to the decline in Brazil.

From that year until 2021. the last one for which complete data is available, the homicide rate in the entire region fell by almost 14%.

The evolution in that period was very uneven

There were more or less pronounced declines in South American countries such as Venezuela (60%), Brazil (26%), Peru (27%), Argentina (13%) or Paraguay (8%).

Homicides also fell in Central American countries historically associated with violence, such as El Salvador (71%), Belize (18%) and Honduras (5%), because of these cases, according to the UNODC “aggressive interventions against gangs”.

In the case of El Salvador, the study shows that the government attributes this decline to “strong anti-gang measures and the imprisonment of more than 61,300 alleged gang members since the imposition of a state of emergency in March 2022.”

In Central America, there is a sharp increase of 46% in the number of homicides in Nicaragua between 2019 and 2021, with no data for 2020.

The development in Guatemala is also striking, where between 2017 and 2020 the number of murders fell by 35%, a development that changed in 2021 when the rate increased by 7%.

In Panama, the upward trend that began in 2017 was halted last year, with a 10% decrease in the homicide rate.

In Mexico, which accounted for approximately 77% of all homicide victims in Central America in 2021, the downward trend that began in 2018 continued last year, with a 10% drop.

As in Brazil, the Study links this decline to the so-called “pax mafia”, or the tendency of criminal groups to reduce the violence they carry out when they gain control of a territory.

More worrying is the evolution in Ecuador, where after years of relatively low homicide rates, a 470% increase was recorded between 2016 and 2022, which the UNODC attributes to “intensification of violent competition between rival drug-trafficking gangs”.

For the first time in 2022, Ecuador had the highest homicide rate in all of South America, at 27 per 100,000 inhabitants. That year, the number of murders doubled compared to 2021.

In Colombia, despite as rates are now a quarter of those of the early 1990sthe downward trend that began in 2018 was reversed in 2021, with an increase of 14%, although the numbers stabilized again last year.

Among the countries with an increase in the frequency of murders in 2022 are Chile, with 45%, Uruguay (25%), Bolivia (14%) and Costa Rica (12%).