| | | Excerpt: vdare.com
 Its ranking was determined by counting the number of fatalities in each country. Syria had 50,000, Mexico second with 23,000, Iraq with 17,000, Afghanistan 16,000, Yemen 7,000. [ Report: Mexico was second deadliest country in 2016 by Elizabeth Roberts, CNN, May 10, 2017]
The Mexican government objected to the report, disputing the number of fatalities and asserting that the Mexican situation was not comparable to that of other countries.
Two days after Trump’s tweet, CNN ran a more nuanced article asking, Is Mexico the world’s second most dangerous country, as Trump says? That depends [by Jeanne Bonner, June 24, 2017]. “If you go with raw numbers, Trump is right”, writes Bonner, but “based on population, Mexico is right”.
To complicate matters further, IISS itself subsequently issued a statement:
One of the findings that attracted attention and debate centered on the figures for Mexico, which placed the country second in terms of total estimated armed-conflict fatalities in 2016. We accept there was a methodological flaw in our calculation of estimated conflict fatalities that requires revision. Our researchers are working to rectify this and we will share the results in due course. We anticipate this will result in Mexico’s conflict remaining among the ten most lethal in the world, by estimated fatalities attributable to an armed conflict.
[ IISS statement on 2016 Mexico conflict fatalities, IISS Press Release, June 23, 2017]
The statement also pointed out “The Armed Conflict Database and Survey do not measure homicides on either an absolute or per capita basis. We estimate deaths directly related to conflict. We do not provide an assessment of the levels of violence in any country.” The difficulty is determining which murders are related to the drug war and which are unrelated to the drug war.
But both types of murder are still murder.
For murder rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, a good source is the InSight Crime website, which on January 16 2017 published InSight Crime’s 2016 Homicide Round-up [by David Gagne]. According to that source, here are the ten most murderous countries (per capita) in Latin America and the Caribbean.
- El Salvador, 81.2 per 100,000.
- Venezuela, 59 per 100,000 (but probably higher).
- Honduras, 59 per 100,000.
- Jamaica, 50 per 100,000.
- Guatemala, 27.3 per 100,000.
- Brazil, 25.7 per 100,000.
- Colombia, 24.4 per 100,000.
- Puerto Rico, 20 per 100,000.
- Mexico, 16.2 per 100,000
- Dominican Republic, 15.8 per 100,000.
The 2016 murder rate in the U.S.: 5.3 murders per 100,000 people–with a big jump due to the “Ferguson Effect”. [ The Murder Rate Jumped Again In 2016. A Handful Of Cities Are Largely Responsible., by By Ryan J. Reilly, Huffington Post, April 18, 2016]
So Mexico doesn’t have the highest murder rate in Latin America but it’s still in the top ten and its rate is over three times higher than the American murder rate.
Note that Puerto Rico, which some want to make a U.S. state, has an even higher rate than Mexico. El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the sources of a great number of illegals who pass through Mexico, are ranked #1, #3, and #5 respectively. |
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