Guatemala numbers are less because they only count it as homicide if someone dies at the scene. If you manage to get into a hospital then die, it's not in the stats.<p>There's no "fine tuning" of police operations in Guatemala. Everyone is incompetent, and the UN and other "human rights" groups fuck it up even more. Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. Said criminals continue to run gangs from inside prisons. Most "good" people just leave as soon as they can. My ex finally called it quits when Telefonica, the multinational phone company, got extorted. Someone calls them up, tells them they owe $X/week, and then just starts shooting employees. It's getting worse, not better.<p>The only hope I've had here in recent times was several people, including young women, talking fondly about Rios Montt and how they wish a leader would come clean stuff up. Even a semi-indigenous person told me that (despite him supposedly being genocidal). Unfortunately GT has a preference for electing nitwits that can't even steal without getting caught. That's how incompetent they are. So it's unsure if we'll ever see a strong ruler come back in. But now more than ever are people ready for that.<p>Turns out, when you can't safely walk around, when you can't start a business because any day you'll get a phone call that means either bankruptcy, death, or exile, yeah damn right you start preferring a military rule. As one woman told me, "at least I could walk anywhere, anytime with my purse and no one ever troubled me".
It makes zero sense to look at nationwide average for Brazil to draw any conclusions without looking at per-state or per-region data.<p>Northern region has places with 60+ homicide rate, southern region has places with 3-4 homicide rate.<p>Take a look at this article:
<a href="https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_do_Brasil_por_taxa_de_homic%C3%ADdios" rel="nofollow">https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativa...</a><p>And this map with some of the highest/lowest homicide rates:
<a href="http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/defesanet/site/upload/media/1496719292_1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-ea...</a><p>Both in Portuguese but I think it's not hard to make sense of the numbers (rate is 1/100k, map colours describe increase/decrease in violence, bottom lines show current top/bottom rates in cities with 100k+ residents).
For comparison, overall and by-race data for the US:<p><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm</a>
The Puerto Rico data does not tell the whole story. My island is 100×35 miles in size. It has a higher rate than Mexico.<p>But numbers don't tell the whole story. I remember waking up and laying on the floor of my bedroom because there was a drug gang shootout with automatic AK-47s in front of my home. Seeing the blood stains of victims on a neighbor's walls (someone was executed against a wall). The sound of weapons always being a part of the night.
From the article:<p>- Venezuela leads unsurprisingly with 89 per 100,000<p>- Chile has the lowest number, 3.3 per 100,000<p>Compare that to<p>- Germany: 0.3<p>- US: 4.9<p>Source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...</a>
The color scheme here is really poor. It took me too long to realize that bright orange was not a step down from bright red, but in fact dark red, pink, and dark orange were between them. So the brighter red indicates <i>more</i> violence, but the the <i>darker</i> orange indicates more violence? Just use a single color gradient and spare us all the headache.
I could not find official data yet for 2017, but they're missing a big one on this list and that's the United States Virgin Islands. 2015 brought 32.9 murders per 100,000 and they are consistently ranked as having one of the highest murder rates per capita of anywhere in the U.S.<p>That's a U.S. territory with a higher murder rate than Brazil.<p>This includes St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix.<p>I lived there for only a few years and experienced the loss of two friends due to homicide in that short time, on an island that is only 13 miles long, and 32 square miles.<p>Many of these crimes go unsolved despite such a small population, in such a small place, due to corruption, fear, and lack of resources.
There are a bunch of interesting ways to break down homicide rates. I find by cities to be the most interesting, I think correlates stronger to how safe I "feel" in an area compared to national rates.<p>Top homicide rate for cites in the world:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate</a><p>US cites (sort by murder):<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...</a>