Food for Thought - the Most dangerous Cities in the Americas?
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A new article in today’s LP forum about the most dangerous cities in the Americas. Unfortunately the contributor did not source from where he lifted the facts and figures. Reading today’s Lonely Planet Thorn tree forum on Colombia – I noted this scale. Pretty morbid I know but one that we are all likely to look at and probably think about. I for one find myself picturing the city mentioned and thinking about my time there. I can say that I have had some scrapes in Guatemala City, Rio and Quito, but for the most part my experiences are far better than just positive. So, I think it is always important to take the examples, like the one included below and taken from the forum into perspective. Per 100,000 people murders per year are as follows1. Recife, Brazil – 158 2. Caracas, Venezuela - 133 3. Guatemala City, Guatemala - 103 4. San Salvador, El Salvador - 95 5. Sao Paulo, Brazil - 55 6. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 53 7. Washington DC, USA - 34 8. Lima, Peru - 22 9. Bogota, Colombia - 18 10. Quito, Ecuador - 16 11. Buenos Aires, Argentina - 12 12. Santiago, Chile - 6
Quite obviously the figures for Santiago are low, having been to every city on that list and having lived at length in a few of them, I can vouch for the incredible security in Chile. There is no doubting that Recife due to its high unemployment and delinquency levels is up there…it is also unfortunate since the northeast of Brazil is a wonder to behold. Just a short bus ride to the north is Olinda, one of the most beautiful examples of Portuguese colonial architecture in that country. Caracas has been touted by some as being the most unsafe city in the Americas now and its new position as No2 would probably lend credence to this. I have friends who state that it will be at No1 within a year or so. Interesting to see Rio and Sao Paulo in their current positions. I wonder how many extra judicial killings take place that remain unreported. Certainly last year when I lived and worked in the Mangueira favela of Rio we heard a good many stories of this. Shocking stories. My heart aches for the Central American capitals on this list. Guatemala City’s problems are stemming this year from the upcoming elections (political rivals are being murdered) and the gang wars prevalent there. Gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha and 18 are responsible for, I should think, most of the deaths in San Salvador as well. No mention of Georgetown, Guyana on this list either. A city where I felt distinctly ill at ease. |
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For those of us that live in the states (I in the DC area), I'm not surprised that DC made the list, but I'm quite surprised that cities like Gary, IN, Detriot, MI, and even New York didn't rank as high.
We've got work to do in DC :(
Thanks for posting this!
I'm sure a lot of North Americans will be surprised to see that Washington is so far ahead of a number of South American cities - Bogota, for example. I was certainly always taught that Colombia = dangerous and USA = safe. And Georgetown is a perfect example of a city I would have expected to see here - I believe it's rated as a 4 on the Canadian government's five-point scale for awarding "danger pay" to its diplomats.
Of course, being surprised about the cities on this list means two things - one, we should question our assumptions about what is "dangerous" and what is "safe", and two, we should question the statistics of the list itself.
Incidentally, where is Port-au-Prince? And Kingston, Jamaica? Maybe the Caribbean wasn't included in "the Americas" for the purposes of this list? Which would answer novoarte's question about Puerto Rico as well...
Ricardo-
Thank you for this comentario, and for your suggestion to take any sort of presentation of "facts" of this sort into context and careful consideration. Yesterday, while reading a restaurant review on an online forum, I read an opinion that was presented as a statistical fact: "Mexico City is the world's capital of kidnapping." While I'm by no means naive to the problems of secuestros in Mexico, my sense is that the problem of kidnappings is even higher in other parts of Latin America, and that the problem is far more complex and nuanced that this individual made it out to be. I worry about the circulation of information like this, and the lack of critical thinking that goes into evaluating it; it's possible to perpetuate dangerous stereotypes and inaccuracies by simply recirculating information and--most importantly--without putting it into context. In Puerto Rico, for example, one of the newspapers cited that the island (the size of which is approximately 100 miles x 39 miles and has about 4 million inhabitants) is the 5th most violent country in the world. Yet not a single Puerto Rican city appears on the list you've posted, nor does it explain whether it takes other variables (such as total population) into account.