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Delinquency and violence are now the greatest causes of death in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela, according to a World Bank report. Since the 1980s, youth homicide rates have exploded 50% with young men between 15 and 20 years old at most risk.
The report “Violence, fear, insecurity and the urban poor” shows that violence has not only created social and political turmoil, but also wreaked havoc on regional economies.
Citing a 1999 Inter-American Development Bank study, the report estimates the economic toll of violence at US$16.8 million annually, or 14.2% of Latin America’s gross domestic product.
The World Bank emphasises that rampant poverty has made the region one of the most violent areas in the world, particularly in urban areas.
Young men majority of victims
Rio de Janeiro’s homicide rate in 1999 for young men between 15 and 24 was 86.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. For Brazil as a whole this year, young men 15-29 years old led all other age groups in homicide with 92.8 deaths per 100,000 people.
“ This age and gender in the metropolitan areas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo do not follow the general trend of reduction in the country’s rates of homicide. It is stabilising at an extremely high level (more than 200 per 100,000 inhabitants),” says the report.
In El Salvador, the rates are similar for males between 15 and 40 years old. Gang membership among this at-risk generation often means that there are as many victims as perpetrators of violence.
“ Gangs and their delinquency dynamic, appear to stimulate the conditions which permit their members to engage in the lethal exercise of violence and which impedes them from leaving the vicious circle of criminal violence. This is strengthened by a lack of employment, a low average of years spent in schools which tends to characterize gang members and a high index of overcrowding in their own households”, according to the study.
Although youth is one of the most common factors in violence, the report emphasises that being young does not mean young people are the only perpetrators: “This study has attempted to show that young people are, above all, victims of violence whether they participate in it or not.
Firearms
The widespread proliferation of firearms in Latin America is also a factor in the extremely high rates of violence, says the report: “The few opportunities for training and jobs, and, above all, the elevated level of permissiveness in the possessing and carrying of firearms has permitted the levels of violence to be maintained
it has been very difficult to root out violence.”
Sources: El Universal, The World Bank Group
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