Looking a bit more at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission’s new report on citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean reveals a pretty startling statistic: nowhere is there a higher murder rate than the region’s 25.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants’ average. As EFE points out that’s almost triple the European homicide rate (8.9/100,000) and over four times that of Southeast Asia (5.8/100,000). [By sub-region, the Caribbean leads the region with 30 murders/100,000, followed by South America (26) and then Central America (22)].
In the words of one of the report’s presenters, Amerigo Incalcaterra of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, even though Latin America makes up just 8% of the world population, it is the region where 40% of the world’s homicides and 66% of its kidnappings occur. Young people (age 15 to 29), the IACHR notes, stand out amongst the numbers. When taken as a group, they have a murder rate of 68.9/100,000. [Youth who are either “poor” or “middle class” are at nearly 90 homicides per 100,000].
The issue of citizen security, say the experts in charge of organizing the report, is intimately tied up with the question of both human rights and democracy. “The region’s democracies still have not been able to overcome their authoritarian legacies in the area of security policy,” remarked Paulo Sergio Pinheiro,” member of the IACHR. In a place like Central America, the situation is “catastrophic,” he said Tuesday. There “children are the ones who are paying for the incompetence in their government’s fight against organized crime.”
The nexus between organized crime and formally democratic politics is one which Brookings Kevin Casas-Zamora looks at in the new issue of Americas Quarterly. The dilemma of democratic systems coexisting with “huge illicit industries” like the drug trade, he argues, “manifests itself [in Latin America] with uncommon intensity.” According to Casas-Zamora a combination of competitive electoral politics, lax enforcement, political decentralization, and a weak political party system have all made Latin American politics more vulnerable to infiltration by organized crime.
The struggle to provide citizen security goes beyond politics though; so too is it affecting the material well-being of the region, according to the IACHR. Citizen security has surpassed unemployment as the region’s top concern, the IACHR maintains, while the economic cost of violence allegedly fluctuates somewhere between 2 and 15% of the region’s cumulative GDP. It was recently predicted by the Economic Commission for Latin America that the region would grow by 4.5% in 2010. It’s disturbing to think that at least some of that growth could be erased if citizen security is not ensured.
In other stories this morning:
· A few more reports on the issue of drug policy in the region. Professor Harold Pollack has his break-down of the disappointments and improvements in the new US drug strategy released earlier in the week, at The New Republic. Too much emphasis on fighting suppliers; underfunding; and a lack of attention to “addictive substances” are the new strategies weaknesses, he argues. Its improvements: a changing attitude toward the issue of drug policy, in general; a new way of measuring of “success”; the fact that our healthcare system will finally be involved in the issue of addiction; and more effective international collaboration efforts.
· The AP highlights the failures of the drug war, with this statistic of the day: the US has spent over $1 trillion on the drug war over the last forty years, not to mention hundreds of thousands of lives lost. And, in drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s words, the drug problem today has, “if anything, magnified and intensified.” Via some FOIA requests, the piece also has some interesting information of exactly where that $1 trillion plus has gone over the last four decades.
· And regarding drug policy in Latin America, the Washington Office on Latin America and the Transnational Institute have released a new study on drug reforms in Ecuador – a country once considered to have some of the most punitive anti-drug laws anywhere in the region.
· In Venezuela, news that Chavez opponent and former governor, Oswaldo Alvarez Paz was released from police custody yesterday. He apparently still faces criminal charges for television remarks he made about the Venezuelan government supporting drug traffickers and the Basque separatist group, ETA, in March. Alvarez Paz will be free to live at home with his family while awaiting trial. However, he apparently cannot leave the country nor speak publicly about the case under the terms of his release. The release comes as Venezuelan security officials both moved five Colombians arrested weeks ago to a military tribunal where they will be charged as spies and arrested 19 other Colombians for illegal “tree trimming” and weapons possession. And the Economist this week has a long piece, examining Venezuela’s economic, social, and political challenges.
· Brazilian President Lula da Silva has begun his trip toward Iran, passing first through Moscow yesterday. His upcoming meeting with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the subject of talks with the Russians, who are apparently backing Lula’s attempt to mediate on the matter, according to the BBC. Meanwhile, in the US, Reuters says a senior State Dept. official believes Lula’s attempt at mediation “may be the last chance to engage Iran” over the nuclear issue. If Tehran does not change its stance following Lula's visit “countries like Brazil, Turkey and others on the [security] council should very definitely draw conclusions from that,” the official tells the wire service.
· The Nation’s Christian Parenti has a new investigative piece, offering a critical look at the “pacification” program Brazilian security forces are trying to implement in Rio’s favelas ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.
· In Mexico, the AP reports that PAN mayoral candidate, Jose Mario Guajardo, was killed by gunmen in Tamaulipas Thursday. Also, the LA Times and Washington Post both report on the significant setbacks that are accompanying Mexico’s idea of a “national cell phone registry.” The program was instituted as a means of cracking down on organized crime, particularly “virtual kidnappings,” but many Mexicans are refusing to turn over their data because they simply do not trust what the government might do with it. “The National Mobile-Phone User Registry has been declared a fiasco,” says the Post -- and “thousands mocked the government, registering their mobile phones under the names of celebrities, prominent politicians and law enforcement officials.”
· The Wall Street Journal looks at the textile industry and Haiti, saying the government is making the industry a “centerpiece” of its recovery.
· Finally, news that the oft-criticized UN Human Rights Council got two new Latin American members this week. Ecuador and Guatemala will take their seats on the UN body this year.
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