A chilling estate sale, today

[Cirsium]

123. I know

Most murders in the world. The US and Mexico combined account for about half of the homicides in the entire world.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country

Homicide rates are high across Latin America. Authoritarian police state regimes, civil wars, and economic inequality are contributing factors, and the US has played a large role in those factors, so yeah I guess America* does suck.

* The billionaires operating the sweat chops, mines and quasi-slave plantations, the banks and investors supporting and corrupting those police states, and the military that defends their interests against the people of Latin America.

A good article here:

Latin America ¡SinFiltro!

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the homicide rate is three times higher than the global average (18 versus 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants) and 50 percent of homicides are associated with organised crime, compared to 24% in the rest of the world. LAC is the only region where homicide is the main cause of death (accounting for 52 percent) —in the rest of the world, diseases and accidents top the list. In Latin America, people kill each other.
The World Bank had shown a strong link between demographics, economic and social development and criminality: poverty fuels criminality. Studies show that a 1 percentage point increase in the growth rate of GDP is related to roughly 0.24 fewer homicides per 100,000 (all else equal, including income per capita). But for gains to be sustainable, the strength and credibility of judicial systems and law enforcement institutions must improve in tandem with economic development.

Other researchers have shown that economic and labour market shocks provide incentives to partake in criminality. Job opportunities play a key role as a driver of the opportunity cost of engaging in crime, with researchers showing that weaker manufacturing job prospects in caused by competition with China has spurred violence in Mexico.

We also know inequalities fuel crime in the region, and that urbanisation plays a part too. Social and spatial divides in cities or regions can deepen inequality and create fertile ground for organised crime groups, street gangs, and private security entities substituting the role of the state. Violence is highest in poor urban neighbourhoods and on the outskirts of cities where 160 million people (about 25 percent of the urban population) lives in low-income informal settlements lacking title and access to basic services. About 50 percent of crime across all crime types occur in just 2.5 percent of the street space in Latin America and the Caribbean. The IDB argues these dynamics favour the concentration of “pockets of fragility”—cities or territories where populations are subject to extremely weak state capacity and/or different criminal forms of governance and service provision.