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Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Four US cities are among the most violent in the world

Por Feco

Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico are countries in which violence has widely spread. The cases of Venezuela and Mexico are highlighted because of the inefficiency of their governments in facing such a difficult social problem. However, The United States does not escape the situation and entered the list with four cities.

It is a city that is losing population, but that in five years it has almost doubled its homicide rate. Their figures are comparable with those of Salvador, in Brazil, or Cali, in Colombia, but it is in the middle of the United States. St. Louis, the main city of Missouri, registered a rate of 60.37 homicides per 100,000 people during 2016. This was reported by the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, a Mexican organization that every year delivers the list of the fifty cities with the most homicides.

To make the list, the institution takes into account the data proportional to the population of localities of more than 300,000 people, omitting places that are in war conflicts. Usually, the list is headed by Latin American cities. In this case, Caracas was in the first place, with 4,308 homicides and a rate of 130.35 homicides per 100,000 people. In second place comes Acapulco and in third place was San Pedro Sula, both with rates above 100 homicides per 100,000 people. Then there is another Honduran area, the Central District. In the last five years, four US cities have also been consistently on the list. After St. Louis is Baltimore, which has a rate of 51.14 homicides per 100,000 people, similar to Guatemala City or Kingston, in Jamaica.

But it does not stop there. Further down are New Orleans and Detroit, both locations that have higher rates of violence than Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, or Fortaleza, in Brazil. What do these four American cities have in common? These are highly segregated metropolitan areas, where historically African-American minorities have had fewer opportunities to succeed. The list is marked by a strong Brazilian, Mexican, Venezuelan and, to a lesser extent, Colombian presence. "Despite the inclusion of yet another Colombian city in the ranking, Colombia is the country that continues to show a greater and consistent success in reducing homicidal violence. Cali and Palmira presented significant reductions in their homicide rate in 2016”, José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, president of the organization, said in a statement. "In contrast, we must reiterate the case of Venezuela and the upsurge of violence in Mexico, in this case, due to the negligence and ineptitude of their rulers and their complete disdain about the way in which impunity has grown, especially in the face of homicide". Can we say the same about the US government? Does it care about these problems?