Latin America's Poverty Rates Are Down, But Violence Is Up. Why? Robert Muggah - Americas Quarterly
go to original October 24, 2015

Police in Bogota, Colombia during an anti-violence protest rally (Camilo Mosquera/Flickr)

With poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean at its lowest level in decades, why is violence off the charts? Although some countries are worse off than others, the region features the world's highest homicide rates. This relationship is puzzling and counterintuitive. Researchers tend to expect an inverse relationship between improvements in the welfare of the poor and reductions in violent crime.

First, the good news: Most Latin American and Caribbean countries have experienced dramatic reductions in poverty since 2000. According to United Nations data, the proportion of the region's 580 million residents suffering from poverty declined from 41.7 percent to 25.3 percent. In absolute terms, this translates to at least 56 million people lifted above the poverty line from 2001 to 2012. During this period, it was not just incomes that rose – health and education did too.

Now for the bad news: Parts of Central and South America are the most murderous on the planet. Though protracted wars in Colombia and Peru are winding down, the scale of lethal violence region-wide is breathtaking. Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 8 of the top 10 most violent countries and 40 of the world’s 50 most dangerous cities. Just four countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela – account for 1 in 4 violent killings around the world each year.

It was not always this way. In spite of civil wars and brutal dictatorships in some Latin American and Caribbean states, homicide rates were closer to the global average during the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, murder rates have declined in most other parts of the world. Yet with few exceptions, killing, assault and victimization across Central and South America and the Caribbean worsened.

The precise relationship between poverty and homicide is still a mystery.

Read the rest at Americas Quarterly

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