The new year has brought a large number of articles about Mexico's conflict against organized crime and drug trafficking. To read all the coverage, you would be convinced Mexico is a very dangerous place.
Yet, Mexico with about 15 murders per 100,000 people nationally is far from the most dangerous country in the hemisphere.
In 2010, Venezuela and Honduras battled it out for the most dangerous country in the hemisphere (and indeed, the world) in terms of violent crime. Venezuela had more total murders than Mexico with about 1/4 of the population. Though statistics are hard to come by as the Venezuelan government doesn't publish them, parts of Caracas are believed to be more dangerous than Ciudad Juarez according to NGOs that track the body count in morgues. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization declared that Honduras faces an "epidemic of homicides" with a rate of homicide nationally about 70 per 100,000. While many of those killings were organized crime and gang related, there is also a political angle to some of the violence including the murders of journalists that needs to be investigated.
Venezuela and Honduras also have something else in common: in both countries the political situation overshadowed the security story in both domestic and international media coverage. In both countries, the bad political situation has allowed violent crime to worsen.
Beneath those two countries, Guatemala, El Salvador and Jamaica continue to have enormous levels of violence, all above the 45 per 100,000 range, also placing them among the most violent in the world.
Colombia remains significantly more dangerous than Mexico at about 32 killings per 100,000 people, though it has significantly improved over the past decade. Even Brazil has a slightly higher homicide rate nationally than Mexico according to the best statistics I can find.
None of this is to say that Mexico isn't facing a serious problem. Indeed, Ciudad Juarez is a facing a nightmare of violence and several states of Mexico, if they were their own countries, would be among the most dangerous in the world. The security issue dominates a significant amount of the national political debate in Mexico.
Still, the intense US and global media focus on Mexico's violence risks missing the "more dangerous than Mexico" countries. This hemisphere faces a serious violent crime problem and it does not start or end with Mexico.
Update: Tim has stats showing El Salvador as the second most dangerous after Honduras with 71 murders per 100k. I've seen slightly different statistics that show El Salvador a bit safer than that around 63 or 65 per 100k. But really, at this point we're talking statistical noise from data that are imperfectly counted (how many murders aren't reported?). Safe to say that Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador are all very dangerous, much more so than Mexico.
