More on Crime in Guatemala

On Saturday, I wrote that crime was down in Guatemala. I should have said that murders were down. I have no idea whether the overall level of crime is up or down compared to last year. As we know in the US, measuring crime is difficult. So many crimes go unreported that we have educated guesses. In Guatemala, as elsewhere, we focus on murder because it is the ultimate crime and they tend to be reported.* The authorities might not uncover the murderer or convict anyone for the crime, but they can tell if a person has been murdered or not. It's not perfect. I'll try to be more careful in the future.

And we should all be careful when we refer to the Northern Triangle of Central America as the world's most violent region (at least when one does not include countries suffering from civil war). Here are the murder rates for the Northern Triangle between 2000 and 2010 from Carlos Mendoza at CABI.

Guatemala - 38 per 100,000

Honduras - 51 per 100,000

El Salvador - 53 per 100,000 

Guatemala looks better in terms of murders per 100,000 population than it does when we look at total murders. Guatemala's total murders comprise 37% of Central America's total for the 10-year period.  Honduras makes up 27% and El Salvador 24%. Guatemala's first place ranking is driven by the fact that its population is roughly equal to that of Honduras and El Salvador combined. On average, violence has been worse in Honduras and El Salvador during the last decade, including the most recent 2010 numbers.

And while Guatemala's national murder rate is obviously very high, there is a variation within the country as well. Take a look at this figure from Plaza Publica on the murder rate by department. While the departments of Guatemala, Peten, Santa Rosa, Jutiapa, and Izabal are alarmingly high, several other departments' murder rates are well below 10 per 100,000. Like every other country in the world, there are some areas of Guatemala that are very dangerous and others where the violence is much less pronounced.

*Disappearances do throw the numbers off a bit. You don't know if the victim has been kidnapped, has fled, or has actually been killed. It reminds me of the dirty wars in Latin America particularly Argentina's film The Official Story where some of those disappeared were not disappeared at all. They had, of course, gone abroad for whatever reason.