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According to the Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security's annual ranking, about 80% of the most dangerous cities are in the American continent.

Is there a political explanation to this? Are the people there more aggressive? Drugs are a worldwide problem, why are so many of these countries in a drug war (against the government, or among criminal organizations)?

Quora Feans
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    your source is not convincing me: colombia is ommited, the figures are not referenced, it defeats studies from UN. Moreover the organization hosting the slide pressentation seems to strongly promote Law&Order policies in disrespect of alternatives not based on the armed force of the states – choklo Oct 20 '19 at 11:13
  • ... can you explain/cite the method used to obtain the figures or reference another study? – choklo Oct 20 '19 at 11:27
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    @choklo: Colombia will be omitted if it's considered a war zone. – Quora Feans Oct 20 '19 at 12:28
  • @Quora_Feans, i agree on that. Beyond the statitics of the UN report being focused on countries and not on cities like the one from the mexican organization, do you see any possibility to explain the very different results exposed on both reports? – choklo Oct 23 '19 at 16:20

3 Answers3

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Cocaine

Coca leaf is native to South America and grows best there, so that's where the cocaine comes from. Not only does this produce a huge amount of profit for organised crime, the drug itself promotes aggression. Almost all the drug wars are primarily concerned with cocaine and secondly with marijuana which also grows well there.

Colonialism, Communism and Coups

Latin America suffered brutality from Cortez onwards. Many of the smaller states had to fight wars of independence; Haiti was made to pay reparations to France for freeing its slaves, for example.

After World War 2, the US made a practice of opposing any government in the south that it considered too left wing. Frequently a democratically elected socialist government would be violently overthrown by CIA-backed forces and replaced with a dictatorship. See e.g. Guatemala from Wikipedia:

In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was toppled by U.S.-backed forces led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who invaded from Honduras. Assigned by the Eisenhower administration, this military opposition was armed, trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (see Operation PBSUCCESS). The directors of United Fruit Company (UFCO) had lobbied to convince the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Colonel Arbenz intended to align Guatemala with the Soviet Bloc.

The resulting weak but brutal governments and ongoing wars with rebel groups have consumed many of the past decades. The war with FARC has been going on since 1964, for example. The Colombian right-wing militia are strong enough to kill a lot of people but not strong enough to actually end the conflict. Perhaps unsurprising in a large country of trackless jungle.

CJ Dennis
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pjc50
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    How was Latin America’s level of violence before Cortez? – blud Oct 17 '19 at 17:07
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    @blud That's a question for [history.se] – divibisan Oct 17 '19 at 17:37
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    India was a former colony of Britain that is now independent but doesn't suffer from the violence issues like South America. Therefore, the fact that it was a former colony isn't a reason to why it is so violent. – user3163495 Oct 17 '19 at 17:58
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    @ user3163495 well, apart from Partition, the Kashmir conflict, and an ongoing Maoist insurgency. Colonialism doesn't guarantee violence but it certainly makes it more likely. – pjc50 Oct 17 '19 at 18:23
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    rephrasing: How could we even know the levels of violence pre-Cortez, given the fact that European record keeping differs from whatever record keeping (if any) was around before the arrival of Europeans? – blud Oct 17 '19 at 18:43
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    Another factor is that Latin America, by and large, is not experiencing violence that is classified as a war. In places that have conflicts classified as a war, violent deaths are generally attributed to the war rather than to a criminal case. So, for example, while the illegal opium trade is at the heart of the economy of Afghanistan, drug trade related murders that might be treated as crimes in Latin America are instead classified as civilian war casualties in the ongoing military conflict in that country, mostly between the Taliban and the current U.S. allied and supported regime. – ohwilleke Oct 17 '19 at 19:08
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    That sounds more like "anti-Communism". – Oleg V. Volkov Oct 18 '19 at 11:48
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    @blud The Aztec empire notoriously practiced human sacrifice, so it was also pretty violent. However, most of the population of South America is primarily descended from colonists rather than indigenous peoples. My "from Cortez onwards" refers to that being how far back the continuity of states (with good written history) goes rather than a claim about what went before. – pjc50 Oct 18 '19 at 13:30
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    (Also, both pre- and post-colonialism South America is huge, making generalisation dangerous. Costa Rica is the opposite - a country with no military.) – pjc50 Oct 18 '19 at 13:32
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    @user3163495 what about beating unmarried couples to death? What about parents killing their daughters. (https://unwanted.interactivethings.io/#/)? It sure looks like violence to me. – Eric Duminil Oct 19 '19 at 06:40
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    @EricDuminil You're taking the answer out of the context of the question. India certainly has nothing like FARC, or like the Mexican or Colombian drug gangs. – Graham Oct 19 '19 at 07:38
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    @Graham The question is about "dangerous cities" in general. user3163495 was claiming that violence isn't a problem in India. – Eric Duminil Oct 19 '19 at 08:35
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    @EricDuminil And on the scale of Columbia or Mexico, the numbers say he's right. That doesn't mean there's no violence, because clearly that would be a ridiculous claim for any location anywhere in the world, but that wasn't the claim. – Graham Oct 19 '19 at 09:43
  • @pjc50 about your comment "colonialism doesn't guarantee violence but it certainly makes it more likely" - can you name a nation today that hasn't been colonized or tried to colonize someone else at some point in history? Every nation today has dipped its toes in the waters of colonization (even the Native Americans did it to other tribes). Therefore, we don't know what a "non-colonization-affected" nation even would look like – user3163495 Oct 21 '19 at 21:31
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Because they're not at war.

Referencing this paper, Wikipedia clarifies the methodology:

The following 50 cities have the highest murder rates in the world of all cities not at war, with a population of at least 300,000 people

If cities within warring nations were including, the rankings would change. For example, in Damascus (population 1.7 million) 1,600 civilians were reportedly killed between February 18 until March 21 2018 -- the death toll from that one month alone would put it at fourth place.

Whether these deaths should be considered murders for this purpose is perhaps unclear -- but for the purposes of deciding which cities are "the most violent in the world" or "the most dangerous cities in the world", it may become more clear.

To be explicitly clear: If Venezuela invaded Mexico tomorrow, they would instantly have zero cities on this list.

ə̷̶̸͇̘̜́̍͗̂̄︣͟
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Roger
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    There are many poverty-stricken countries not at war in Asia and Africa, so this alone is not sufficient reason. It only disqualifies some countries in the Middle East. – vsz Oct 18 '19 at 11:29
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    This answer makes no sense, there are many not-at-war poor locations in the world and most of them are not on that list. – Tomáš Zato Oct 18 '19 at 11:33
  • @vsz Good points -- I'll try to clarify. – Roger Oct 18 '19 at 14:02
  • @tomáš-zato Good points -- I'll try to clarify. – Roger Oct 18 '19 at 14:02
  • This begs the question, why are the most cities in South America instead of say America or China or Australia (also 'not at war')? – Chloe Oct 18 '19 at 17:47
  • You don't think it's mixing apples and oranges a little to include war deaths with murders? -1 –  Oct 19 '19 at 06:16
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    This is a very valid point (+1). when you observe statistical differences, the first question to ask is to what extend they are not merely the product of the way the data is collected. – user189035 Oct 19 '19 at 11:05
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pjc50's answer is good. I would add that proximity to the world's largest gun manufacturer - the United States, makes the flow of guns to the Central Americas much easier.

This opinion piece explains how the Cold War affected and the US affects gun ownership in Central and South America.

During the 1980s, El Salvador was the single largest recipient of U.S. military hardware and weaponry in the Western Hemisphere

A good example [...] can be found in the case of a Salvadoran officer who was sentenced in November for selling about 50 weapons on the black market ..

Mexico [...] has an estimated influx of more than 212,000 illegal firearms from the U.S. each year owing to straw purchases

With Russian support, Venezuela expanded its third-generation AK-47 manufacturing capabilities

Community
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vinayp
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  • Please add relevant parts of your link here. Try to quote the most relevant part using a > quote bracket. – JJJ Oct 18 '19 at 12:27
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    If this was the answer, then why aren't the cities near the #2 and #3 arms manufacturers, Russia and China also on the list? What does proximity have to do with anything when Germany can export 5000 rifles to Mexico? – Chloe Oct 18 '19 at 18:06
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    @Chloe Presumably it's not the manufacturing so much as the ease with which guns can be purchased in the US and then (hypothetically) smuggled to other countries. I would definitely want to see some data supporting that this is actually a real thing that happens – divibisan Oct 18 '19 at 18:08
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    The linked article actually cites the US as "the world’s largest arms exporter and importer", which sounds more relevant. – divibisan Oct 19 '19 at 00:23
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    @divibisan That would have to be explicated in further detail - exported aircraft carriers would not seem to have influence on the violence in question – Hagen von Eitzen Oct 19 '19 at 12:08
  • Yes, but guns don't just diffuse across the border like some kind of chemistry experiment - gangs, war, drugs, and politics make guns go across borders. It's the 21st century. I can have a kiwi fruit from the other side of the planet delivered in two days without barely lifting a finger. Proximity is not really the factor at play here. – J... Oct 19 '19 at 19:09
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    -1: I grew up i South America, 8000km from the closest US border (that's a 10-hour flight, if you want to think it that way; Moscow is closer to the US than that). Lots of violence. Violence is a consequence of poor access to education, fueled by populism. It's not a consequence of being near the US. – Martin Argerami Oct 20 '19 at 05:29
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    I have downvoted this answer because the evidence cited is insufficient, even though I would like to think it is true, it is not convincing. – gerrit Oct 20 '19 at 09:08
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    If ease of purchasing were an issue, there'd be many more US cities in the list. – Hobbes Oct 20 '19 at 14:37