‘Latin America is the most violent region of the world.’ This has been a fre- quent headline, both in the region and beyond, since April, when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Unodc) released its most recent (2013) Global Study on Homicide. It was not actually news but it did dovetail with the widespread use of homicide rates as the yardstick of insecurity in Latin America — even though there is no automatic correlation between those rates and the public perception of insecurity. It is not the only case of wide- spread reliance on assumptions that hinder a useful understanding of the issue. This paper does not pretend to offer the ‘correct’ formula, but to iden- tify and help avoid the pitfalls.
Understanding security in Latin America Contents
Unodc’s Global Study on Homicide 2013 explains its focus on intentional homi- cide on its belief that it ‘as the most readily measurable, clearly defined and most comparable indicator for measuring violent deaths around the world [it] is, in certain circumstances, both a reasonable proxy for violent crime as well as a robust indicator of levels of security within states [our emphasis].’