MOST parts of the world are getting safer. Not Latin America and the Caribbean, where the murder rate rose by 11% in 2000-10. This “epidemic of violence”, as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) calls it in a new report, has gone hand in hand with an increase in crime in general and in the fear of it. With poverty, unemployment and inequality falling, insecurity has become perhaps the single most pressing problem facing the region.In the decade to 2010 more than 1m Latin Americans died as a result of criminal violence, according to the UNDP. Around four-fifths of murders are committed with firearms, which are readily available. Robberies have tripled in the past 25 years, six out of ten of them involving violence. The vast majority of crimes are not reported to the police, in whom citizens have little confidence. Murder rates vary widely between and within countries, and in some cases have fallen (eg, in Colombia and more recently in Guatemala and El Salvador). Nevertheless, a poll commissioned for the report suggests that nearly two-thirds of Latin Americans avoid going out at night for fear of crime, and one in eight (about 75m people) has moved house in order to feel safer.Some of the factors behind this...
via The Economist: The Americas http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21589889-how-prevent-epidemic-alternatives-iron-fist?fsrc=rss|ame
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