"Bullets from the military police ('PM') only kill black people". Protest in São Paulo, 2014. Image: Oswaldo Cornetti/fotos públicas. Some rights reserved.Latin America faces an increase in the use of violence as a way to resolving everyday conflicts. The overwhelming presence of organized crime in most Latin American countries has led to homicide rates which multiply world rates by four, to state-of-emergency and epidemic dimension levels.
Although the countries with the highest homicide rates are Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Venezuela, regional averages often obscure bloody local realities. The violence index in cities as diverse as Acapulco in Mexico, Trujillo in Peru and some Greater Buenos Aires areas in Argentina is also very high. So, if we are to integrate the geography of violence into our analysis of the diverse of phenomena which are degrading everyday life in Latin America, we must take care to use a specific and localized focus.
The resulting picture is necessarily multidimensional. In many countries which were not previously known for their violence rates, crime is now way higher than it used to be ten years ago. Available surveys show that almost a third of the citizens in Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile, for example, have been victims of some crime in the last 12 months. This makes it clear that a process of erosion of the quality of daily life is currently going on in many countries in the region.
