The acceptance with which crimes such as homicide are assumed, is making Latin America the most violent continent in the world

According to the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice of Mexico, which annually makes a list of the 50 most violent cities in the world, 42 of 50 cities are from Latin America.

Leer en español: ¿Por qué Latinoamérica es la región más violenta del mundo?

For the 2017 list, Latin America had 17 cities in Brazil, 12 in Mexico, 5 in Venezuela, 3 in Colombia, and 2 in Honduras as the most violent. Likewise, there was a city in El Salvador, another in Guatemala, and one in Puerto Rico.

Keep in mind that in this ranking only those cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants are taken IGNORE INTO account and those submerged in open war conflicts are excluded.

What are the factors that influence the growing violence facing Latin America?

According to the Mexican entity, the pronounced and rapid decrease in homicides benefits Honduras, in addition to the existence of an action for the systematic eradication of the private militias of the criminal groups.

It must be said that in Latin America, we come from past times marked by armed conflicts, dictatorships, among other factors that left consequences in the violence that is lived today. However, one cannot continue to claim that violence is cultural and that it is part of a process. On the contrary, we must start working from the laws and even more, from education to contribute to the denaturalization of violence and reduce the number of victims.

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Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza and José Luis Pardo Veiras, journalists from Mexico and Spain respectively decided, with the project " In bad steps ", to visit the most violent countries in Latin America to understand why the phenomenon is happening, for example homicides, analyzing a average of 400 people killed per day.

Some of the conclusions they have reached are worrisome, because there is standardization of homicide, which is supposed to be the most punishable crime, because of the inequality that exists and the oblivion to which many of these acts are destined. In addition, it is emphasized that this culture of violence so old that is rooted in the daily life of citizens.

With their experience, they reaffirm more and more that culture, context and sometimes fear force us to naturalize violence: "It kills so much and so fast that we no longer care about our dead, that also has to do with a defense mechanism in poor and marginal areas. If you see that every day they kill people in your neighborhood, in your community, you have to resist and the next day make your life", they say.

As they reiterate, there is violence that we already perceive as normal, to the point of hearing expressions such as, "he deserved to be killed", or, "I hope they kill them all", reinforcing the idea that they are normal.

However, what must be combated, from my point of view, is to avoid assuming the repetition of crimes as something normal, since our behavior ends up inheriting the new generations. Therefore, we must pay for the construction of another world, a world without violence, a world in which it is more uncomfortable to see people violent than to see them loving each other.

LatinAmerican Post | Natalia Isaza Chavarría
Translated from “¿Por qué Latinoamérica es el continente más violento del mundo?””