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Yves here. This article by John Ruell probes an important topic: why are crime rates in the Americas, with homicides as a proxy, so high by global standards? Inequality is not adequate as an explanation; there are other countries with high levels of income disparity that do not have US/Americas level crime rates. Our nation breaking in the region is a significant contributor but Ruell provides additional factors, such as drug trafficking, and discusses possible remedies.
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
By mid-2025, U.S. homicide rates were lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. It is a welcome sign, though the decline has been uneven across the country, and wider trends in violent crime remain mixed throughout the Americas.
Since the latter half of the 20th century, outside of war zones, few regions have experienced comparable levels of lethal violence to the Americas. Even Canada, generally low in crime and consistently ranked high on global peace indexes, recorded a higher homicide rate than any other G7 country in 2023 apart from the United States.
Accurate global comparisons remain difficult. Think tanks such as the Igarapé Institute compile extensive data, but differences in recordkeeping, definitions of violence, and underreporting complicate the process and fail to capture an accurate picture. Even so, underreporting is global and cannot obscure the violence experienced in the Americas.
Home to just 13 percent of the world’s population, the region’s 154,000 killings accounted for roughly one-third of global homicides in 2021, according to UN data, which stated, “The Americas have the highest regional homicide rate in the world, and high rates of homicidal violence related to organized crime.” The regional homicide rate, around 15 homicide victims per 100,000 people, was nearly triple the global average of 5.8. In fact, 43 of the 50 most violent cities in the world were located in the Americas in 2023.
Young men are disproportionately the victims, largely through inter-gang violence, though many other citizens are caught in the crossfire. While much of the violence is related to criminal activities, it is sustained by a wider set of factors. Addressing the problem will require coordinated, continent-wide efforts, which have so far proven elusive or been shaped by policies from Washington.
Sources of Violence
Inequality and poverty are major drivers of violence in the Americas. High inequality often fuels crime by breeding resentment, eroding social cohesion, and limiting legitimate work opportunities. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, consistently places countries in the Americas among the worst worldwide. South Africa, which has Africa’s highest homicide rate and is the only country outside the Americas with multiple cities on the world’s most violent cities list, has a relatively high GDP per capita among African countries, but suffers extreme inequality
Yet inequality alone does not explain the picture. Saudi Arabia also ranks poorly on inequality based on 2019 data, but maintains a very low homicide rate. Additionally, although Pakistan’s GDP per capita is lower than that of most countries in the Americas, its homicide rate is lower compared to theirs, showing that poverty alone is not the only cause for violent crime. Corruption is also widespread in the Americas, but by Transparency International’s measures, it is no worse than in many African or Asian countries.
The region’s experience with urbanization, particularly in Latin America, has been an important contributing factor to the rising crime rates. Latin America’s rapid urbanization during the latter half of the 20th century took place before large-scale industrialization, the reverse of what happened in Europe and much of Asia. The region now has some of the highest urbanization rates in the world, with the rush creating sprawling informal settlements outside state control and social services. Combined with limited employment and education opportunities, these conditions have left large populations vulnerable to exploitation and violence.
The region has also fallen victim to geopolitics. Latin America has long been considered Washington’s backyard, and since the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has worked to keep out European and later Soviet influence, often backing pliable governments at the cost of strong institutions. This left many states weak, prone to instability, and unable to impose a monopoly on violence or law and order. According to “The Global Safety Report” 2024 by Gallup, the Americas scored lower than most regions outside Africa.
The U.S.-led war on drugs, beginning in the early 1970s, further exacerbated the problem. Washington simultaneously targeted and, at times, cooperated with cartels for geopolitical ends, enriching criminal groups and fueling decades of violence across Latin America and also in U.S. cities, impacted by these actions. These policies continue to be adopted under the Trump administration, leading to “regional tensions.”
Drug trafficking supercharged criminal economies, and homicide rates soared. While some of the worst-hit countries, like Colombia, have seen improvements in the crime rate since 2005, and U.S. violent crime is down from its late-20th-century peaks, the drug wars have left a lasting impact on the Americas.
Firearms have been another accelerant. Roughly 73 percent of murders in Latin America were gun-related, similar to the 80 percent in the U.S. in 2024, compared with a global average of about 40 percent. The flow of weapons stems from legal imports, corruption, local production, and constant smuggling, much of which is tied to the United States. Alongside private purchases, scandals like the “Fast and Furious” and “Wide Receiver” operations revealed the U.S. government’s involvement in helping spread guns to illicit actors in the Americas.
But even when firearms are excluded, violence in the Americas stands out. In the U.S., the country recorded about 0.5 stabbing deaths per 100,000 people in 2021—triple the rate in France and six times higher than the UK.
People are also more likely to commit violence when they believe they can act with impunity, which remains high in the Americas due to overwhelmed or reluctant police and fear of retaliation. “Police forces, judicial systems, and other key institutions struggle with inefficiency and lack of resources. Moreover, the politicization of these institutions further erodes their credibility and effectiveness. … High impunity rates across the region [Latin America]—where only a fraction of homicide cases result in convictions—highlight systemic failures in the justice system. This ineffectiveness not only emboldens criminal organizations but also perpetuates a cycle of violence and lawlessness,” accordingto an article in Americas Quarterly. In Latin America, only about eight in every 100 homicides lead to a conviction, while in the U.S., nearly half of murders now go unsolved.
Together, these factors create a volatile situation, and violence can quickly take hold. In 2006, Mexico recorded a homicide rate of about five per 100,000 people. After the launch of the government’s war on drug trafficking that year, the reliance on military force against the cartels fractured existing groups, fueling violent competition, and killings soared to roughly 27 per 100,000 people by 2020. Ecuador, once relatively calm, saw homicides more than double from eight per 100,000 in 2020 to 46 per 100,000 in 2023. Even Costa Rica, one of the region’s safest countries, saw its murder rate almost double from 9 to 17 murders per 100,000 people from 2014 to 2023.
Addressing the Issue
Many regions have endured ongoing periods of violence, with Europe suffering from high homicide rates for centuries before they declined in the 20th century. Today, governments from local to national levels across the Americas are testing different approaches to curb violence.
In the U.S. city of Baltimore, long one of the country’s most dangerous cities, its homicide rate has dropped sharply since 2022 under Mayor Brandon Scott, who has pushed a mix of violence intervention programs, more aggressive prosecution, and coordinated community partnerships. San Pedro Sula in Honduras, once the world’s murder capital with 142 killings per 100,000 people in 2014, dropped to 26 per 100,000 by 2023 (alongside declines in other Honduran cities) after police reformssupported by the Honduran government, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Still, concerns remain over corruption and the prolonged state of emergency in place since 2022.
Other leaders have opted for harsher measures. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, suspended civil rights and jailed thousands of suspected gang members, curbing homicide rates from 53 per 100,000 people in 2018 to 2.4 in 2023. The crackdown remains widely popular, showing how dire the situation was, though its long-term consequences are still uncertain.
Ecuador has followed a similar path. After violence rose rapidly in 2020, Daniel Noboa won the presidency in 2023 on a tough-on-crime platform and backed a 2024 constitutional referendum tightening security laws. Following his 2025 reelection, the electoral council approved his request for another referendum on further constitutional changes, with violence remaining high.
Other countries have pursued reconciliation with criminal groups. Venezuela, for instance, had 11 cities among the world’s 50 most violent in 2021, but by 2023, only Caracas remained on the list. This decline is often attributed to government-brokered understandings with gangs, as President Nicolás Maduro consolidated greater control over the country, in a common but controversial tactic.
Multilateral institutions like Interpol exist to combat crime, but coordination among American countries is limited, and the scale of violence is enormous. U.S.-backed security partnerships, such as those with Colombia, meanwhile, depend heavily on political alignment with Washington, alienating some governments, and tensions between the U.S. and Colombia now threaten the continuity of such partnerships.
The region’s crime crisis has also led to a boom in private security beyond traditional war zones. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, has been exploring security ventures in Haiti, Ecuador, and El Salvadoras of 2025. Private city initiatives, like Honduras’ Próspera, are experimenting with their own security models. Yet private forces have proven to be frequently infiltrated by organized crime and rarely address the root causes of violence.
Countries in the Americas continue to rely on fragmented national strategies tailored to their circumstances to address the crisis, with little effective coordination in the region. The underlying conditions that fueled the turmoil, including rapid urbanization before industrialization, inequality, firearms prevalence, and weak states, are also present in parts of Africa. Countries like South Africaand Nigeria have experienced rapid rises in their homicide rates over the last few years, and Africa had the “highest absolute number of homicides” compared to other regions in 2021, with data suggesting no decrease in the homicide rate, according to the UN. Without preventative measures, African nations risk seeing their violent crime rates continue to rise, making the Americas an important reference for cautionary lessons and potential responses.
Coincidentally, this discussion of the US stats appeared today; “Looking at males, aged 18-59, veterans are well over twice, maybe over three times as likely to be mass shooters compared with the group as a whole. And they shoot somewhat more fatally.”
“… our public dollars and elected officials are training and conditioning huge numbers of people to kill, sending them abroad to kill, thanking them for the “service,” praising and rewarding them for killing, and then some of them are killing where it is not acceptable. This is not a chance correlation, but a factor with a clear connection.”
https://davidswanson.org/32-of-mass-shooters-are-veterans-0-of-media-outlets-will-say-so/
the stereotypical US mass shooting (perp. shooting literal random strangers which to whom she-he has no or a parasocial connection) is a different plane of existence v. the drug-related crime…
US: guns + mental health + possible psych med side effects + massive psych med use during adolescence + undiagnosed brain trauma (whether via football or combat concussions)
whereas Americas’ drug-related violence (whether in Brazil or Baltimore) is often over turf…or a 2nd-order effect, people fighting over a widget made possible by drug-bia profits as the money and weapons flow through a local economy.
end the empire and redistribute the wealth fairly, and the problem goes away, on its own, eventually.
a billionaire is a policy failure, after all/
ordinary folks, anywhere i imagine, dont relish being gangstas and murderous thugs, if given another choice.
Devoiding ordinary folks of choice is what Western Democracies © are all about (also, redistributing wealth unfairly).
amfortas is EXACTLY right!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would only add to notice how many of these homicides are drug trade profiting from it’s illegality and the abject FAILURE of the mighty, capitalist approach of the “War on Drugs”, since if you have a problem “go to WAR against it’, here insert the triumphant marching music. More realistic? Legalize ALL drugs. Notice the absence of one European country? Portugal. They legalized all drugs years ago and their overall crime rate plummeted. Some people will use drugs, legal and illegal, and not become a crime statistic others have a predisposition to become addicted, they will eventually cause trouble, but if there is an interdiction prior to this occurrence, since it is a MEDICAL problem tied to their individual psychological make up, the health care industry will help solve, not a military or martial solution. But the first step will help usher in the addition of legalization. The ultimate question to ask is WHY does the person take drugs? Answer? To alter their state of reality, since their coping mechanisms are overwhelmed to the point they need help. The first step is inextricably intertwined with what amfortas has beautifully outlined, hence the solution is self-evident. Let’s TAKE it.
If you think that mighty, capitalist approach of the “War on Drugs” was an abject FAILURE, then you completly misunderstood what capitalist approach is all about. It’s not about winning the war, but prolonging it in order to squeeze as much profit as possible, and it was an astounding success from that point of view.
I have seen a short documentary about Portugal dealing with drugs, and they were asked if same approach would work in USA. The answer was no, beacuse of a different culture. That different culture is what we call capitalism. It’s all about the profit, and drugs are very profitable. Both legal and illegal ones. Way too profitable to get rid of.
The Americas are more violent than Europe because we exported our most ambitious/aggressive/dissident elements there for six hundred years through colonialism and for most of that time disenfranchised the population from any kind of civil society.
Not all colonies are created equal, though. I suspect Argentina, Uruguay and Chile do much better than the rest of Latin America because there were free white settler projects like Australia and New Zealand and not slave states. I suspect some of the “nations” within the US do better too, e.g. New England and the Pacific Northwest for the same reason.
I think the reasons in the article do not bear scrutiny. China had great urban centres a millennium before industrialisation, even if national urbanisation was not high. The article wants to find reasons other than (1) culture and (2) export of violent character traits.
Europe did have high murder rates pre 20th c but the article omits another confounder. England’s murder rate dropped in the 14th century far below the rest of the world and stayed there. All aggressors exported in the crusades? Or in the wars with Ireland and Scotland? Or various civil wars? Or the Black Death? Who knows but it is an awkward counterexample….
By that argument, Australia should be really violent since it was a prisoner colony… also, I don’t think the original settlers, criminal tendencies or not, managed to breed fast enough to out-populate all the further immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
NZ is a better example of free willed white settlers, although my numismatist friend of some 45 years has some good old Botany Bay convict blood in the family line, where his great great grandmother or something like that was sent down under for some minor malfeasance, and then the family made it across the Tasman to NZ.
In terms of violence, both countries are interesting…
The Aboriginals didn’t put up much of a fight against white setllers and lived lives of largely subsistence-not plenty.
I remember taking a Sydney train in the 1980’s to Redfern station to glimpse one, and it was as if they were hidden away similar to our Native Americans now.
Contrast that with the Maoris who show up around 1214 AD on paradise that had been a bird world country for 19 million years, and everything grew madly, there was plenty and then some, and they turned warlike at some point having so much (sound familiar?) and proved to be worthy adversaries against the British Army in a series of Maori Wars in the 1840’s to 1860’s.
Only vis a vis violence, were the Maori treated as equals, with settlers marrying Maori in the 19th century, something that would’ve been unthinkable with a settler and Aboriginal in Aussie in the same time frame.
Those ‘transported’ to Australia were mostly the people who were at the very bottom of the ugly capitalist system in existence in GB. Their crimes were essentially those of theft to survive. They were not migrating to take hold of more resources, they were being dumped in a ‘hell-hole’ as punishment. How that kind of origin fed into the long term development of a pretty safe community is however very complex. We had no shortage (sadly) of racism and have a history of disgraceful massacres of aboriginal peoples. The lack of widespread slavery in Australia meant that the government was not heavily oriented to using state sanctioned violence to enact control, so gun ownership was low (mostly used as tools of management in agriculture). Ironically, had those being transported to Australia recognised how much they shared with aboriginal culture, the collaboration could have been amazing.
Yes, there are problems in the Americas. I am not persuaded by the argument that urbanization before industrialization produces crime — in the case of Brazil, an industrial powerhouse, urbanization may not have caused a difference from rural crime rates.
Some of the issue is cultural, and some is related to impunity, as the author notes. I will add a malfunctioning penal system, too, based on punishment, exploitation (see: prison firefighters and Kamala(!)), lack of training programs in prisons, lack of reparative justice, and prison as plain slavery.
I have been contemplating the data for some time. If you go to the Statista G7 graph, you’ll see that the U.S. murder rate is 13 times as high as Italy. U.S. = 6 per 100,000. Italy is about 0.5 per 100,000. Japan is ever lower, somewhere around 0.3 per 100,000.
Culturally, in Italy, it has to do with Italy remaining a high-trust culture, with little tolerance for crime of any sort, including littering. There are limits on gun ownership, although plenty of Italians have hunting rifles, which are almost never used for crimes. (USA is different on that score.) Also, in Italy, you have two cultures that may seem contradictory but that both place much stress on personal rectitude: left/communist traditions, as well as Catholicism. Further, many of the immigrants to Italy are from Muslim countries, especially Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, who then maintain social support.
The U S of A is a low-trust culture. At this point, the Second Amendment is operating in this low-trust culture. Recent events indicate that gun ownership in the U S of A also leads regularly to suicide, murder/suicide, and suicide by being shot by the cops.
I have no answers to the conundrums. Another irony is that because handguns are less in evidence in Italy and because of general social support, when a murder happens, it can be spectacular. Murders are almost always national news, because there simply aren’t that many. Italians use knives. Enough said.
Just shooting from the hip, but might there be some socio-historical background to those homicide rates?
1) The American continent was the earliest to be subjugated under the European colonial rule (starting in the late 15th century) — which was slavery-based to boot.
2) The colonization of South Africa, the most violent African country, started in the mid-17th century.
3) The colonization of what is nowadays Pakistan, which despite its comparative poverty is not as violent as those other countries, started only in 1839.
Colonial regimes are inherently exploitative, unequal, racist, and resort to violence — economic, symbolic, and physical — as a standard operating procedure. After several centuries of that treatment, perhaps mentalities get a bend towards sheer violence as a relatively normal way of handling difficulties and conflicts.
From the Wikipedia page, it appears that Asia (2.04), Europe (2.10), and Oceania (2.94) have murder rates (per 100’000 in 2023) considerably lower than Africa (10.57), and especially America (14.37), but there are a few outliers that reach or exceed the rates in the USA:
4) In Europe: Liechtenstein (how come?), Russia.
5) In Oceania: Kiribati, Papua, Samoa.
6) In Asia: Iraq, Mongolia.
Intriguing…
Liechtenstein must be what I like to call the “small country effect”: because the population is so small, a small change in the absolute number of homicides is enough to make a huge difference in the rate. Liechtenstein is at 2 homicides, if it had been 1, it would be in line with Lithuania in the line below.
The root causes of violence? It’s kind of like the plant that I just repotted. It was so pot-bound that it broke the clay pot…more roots than soil.
In 1973, a librarian friend introduced me to Wisconsin Death Trip. I was shocked in the extreme by this book. How could these violent incidents happen in the placid late nineteenth century mid-west…murder, arson, infanticide, suicide…seemingly a regular part of the culture. Root causes or just more strange fruit.
Alcohol use during pregnancy affects fetus brain development. Historically WI has been on the high-end of alcohol use (a skew to German descent = cultural pervasiveness of social drinking).
Now could it be that X% of violence is from perpetrators w/altered brains due to fetal alcohol exposure (which affects impulse, anger management, etc)? Who knows…cuz there is no central warehouse of data, and no central, consistent national method of collecting data. Only grasping at hypotheses supported by anecdotes
Best that the US could hope for is that the NIH or Gates Foundation writes a check for $xx million to fund a 5-year study on all murders in XYZ area; and researchers get consent to get biochemical data from perps. whether alive or suicide by cop.
Not holding my breath. as the public debate has coalesced around: violence is guns’ fault versus violence is the fault of evil people.
Executive Summary: “Who knows?”
Vao, I think it’s quite misleading to refer to “Oceania.” Papua’s homicide rate is dramatically higher than Australia’s. Australia’s homicide rate is lower than Sweden’s. So much for the settler-colonial thesis!
Really, it’s all over the place, even within the Americas. For example, Jamaica is in a class almost by itself. The disproportion between Brazil’s murder rate and the USA’s is about as big as the difference between the USA ‘s and that of most of the European countries.
One finds many surprises, all over the world. Why does Russia have so much higher a murder rate than Belarus or Kazakhstan?
Why does the world’s bloodiest country, Israel, have a relatively low homicide rate? There are lots of guns in Israel, and they must have lots of traumatized or desensitized war veterans. That whole country is like an exaggerated parody of settler-colonialism. Then why so few murders?
Inequality? That can’t be it. Look at Egypt. The fellaheen really are long-suffering.
Substance abuse? That can’t be it. Look at South Korea–so many drunks, so few chalk marks.
Is ethnic homogeneity a factor? Look at Lebanon, which is an interesting case from many angles: a diverse population, lots of weapons, weak governance, a big refugee/migrant crisis, a currency crash, and perennial wars next door. But with all those factors lining up to get people killed, the Lebanese murder rate is still no worse than Canada’s.
Theories get bumped off almost as fast as drug dealers. But the traffic never stops. We can always find our supply.
“Why does Russia have so much higher a murder rate than Belarus or Kazakhstan?”
Russia had the most fanatical liberal socio-economic reforms (mass privatisations, gutting the social network) in the post-Soviet 90s, while Belarus had kept those to a minimum. Not sure about Kazakhstan, but I get the vague impression that (like pre-2014 Ukraine) it was somewhere in between. I’d guess that was at least one of the factors behind this. In any case, it certainly isn’t a surprise to me. From all I hear, even from liberal relatives who visited it, Belarus has much more social cohesion and mutual trust among its population and between it and the government, despite occasional contained flare-ups of political turmoil. Kazakhstan’s society also seems relatively harmonious.
If you compare the murder and arrest rates in different countries, you will likely notice an inverse relationship between them.
The USA has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, which means a lot of arrests and convictions. They still have a high murder rate.
The world can be weird, and a man can be ignorant. If you had asked me yesterday whether Cuba or Morocco had the higher murder rate, I would have blurted out, “Morocco,” and I would have been altogether wrong. Not even close.
Funny about Morocco. In 1991, within a few days, I was threatened with a knife in the night in Tangier, menaced with a submachinegun in Marrakech, and stalked by the seaside in Essaouira. I loved that country, for its sense of romantic peril. Turns out that Morocco’s murder rate in 1991 was a lot lower than Canada’s. Orientalism FTW.
What if US cities hired Blackwater, or one of the other “hire-a thug” companies, to protect their citizens from ICE abuses?
What if US citizens had the right to bear arms for protection, and maybe even create well regulated militias for that purpose?