Latin Americans Least Likely Worldwide to Feel Safe

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http://www.gallup.com/poll/156236/Latin-Americans-Least-Likely-Worldwide-Feel-Safe.aspx

Venezuelans, Chadians, and Afghans feel least safe
by Clancy BertaneWASHINGTON, D.C. -- People living in Latin America and the Caribbean are the least likely in the world to personally feel safe in their communities, with slightly less than half of residents (46%) reporting in 2011 that they do not feel safe walking alone at night where they live.

People living in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northern America -- which includes the U.S. and Canada -- were the most likely worldwide to feel safe. At least three in four residents in each of these regions reported feeling safe, but as it does elsewhere around the world, people's sense of security varies by country. (Full country results are available at the end of this article.)

Latin Americans' sense of security varies across the region, from a low of 34% in Venezuela to a high of 69% in Trinidad and Tobago. Majorities in 13 of the 21 countries surveyed in the region last year said they do not feel safe, which may reflect ongoing struggles with violent crime in many of these countries, where murder rates are far higher than the annual global average of 6.9 per 100,000 people.

That one-third of Venezuelans do feel safe is not altogether surprising, given that Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with 67 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Venezuelans' perceptions about their safety are essentially on par with conflict-plagued countries such as Chad (30%) and Afghanistan (29%) -- illustrating that violent crime can be as devastating to one's sense of personal security as armed conflict.

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1. Counting by Murders

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/venezuelas-murder-rate-unmatched-among-middle-income-countries/

MONTREAL — One hundred fifty-five thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight. That, according to new research by the Venezuelan criminologist Fermín Mármol García, is the number of murders committed in Venezuela since 1999.

Imagine an attack on the scale of 9/11 every three months, for 13-and-a-half years. Or consider this: from the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion until this January, while 116,705 civilians were killed in Iraq, according to the Iraq Body Count project, 124,221 Venezuelans were murdered, says Mármol García. All that with no suicide attacks, no Apache helicopters, no I.E.D.s and none of the organized machinery of war: just an exceptionally violent gang subculture, the growing availability of cheap Colombian cocaine and a government asleep at the wheel.

Perhaps the closest parallel is the drug war in Mexico, which claimed some 12,000 victims in 2011 (for 19,336 in Venezuela). But even that’s not a very good comparison. Mexico’s population is four times larger than Venezuela’s. And there it’s a handful of well-funded, well-armed and well-organized drug cartels that accounts for most of the violence. The thousands of street gangs responsible for the bulk of casualties in Venezuela are small fry by comparison — just guys shooting it out for control of their slum’s tiny share of the retail drug business. More Stringer Bell than Pablo Escobar.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1998, the final year of what we now think of as the pre-Chàvez era, there were 4,550 murders in Venezuela, already an alarming figure. Fast-forward to 2011, the latest year for which statistics have been compiled, and the number had more than quadrupled. To place that figure into context, consider that independent estimates for the number of people killed in Syria since the start of the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad range from 9,183 to 15,000.