Violence in Venezuela and Colombia

This is an article from the New York Times about Venezuela's soaring homicide rate. They compare it to Iraq's rate, though I'm not sure what the statistics qualify as civilian deaths as opposed to military deaths. For example, I wouldn't agree if a murder by a neighborhood death squad in Baghdad were qualified as "military" while a gang killing in Caracas weren't. To me they're the same thing.

Though in the past I've complained about the paper's shallow, biased coverage either of negative or frivolous stories on Venezuela, I think this is an important issue to report. I don't think a soaring murder rate implies an existential flaw in a given government, as this article seems to imply, but it certainly does cast doubt on the policing and judiciary of that government, as the article rightly points out.

Anyway, we can compare this to Colombia's murder rate, which dropped a lot this decade, though it seems to be rising again. At the beginning of the decade our murder rate was even higher than Venezuela's now, though it's been cut about in half. Even after adding in another four thousand annual deaths due to our war (this graph doesn't depict civilian war deaths), we're still better off than Venezuela, for now. In Colombia lately we have about as many people murdered per year as in Venezuela, but our population is 1.6 times that of our neighbor, so they're in much worse shape than we are. Anyway, I'm glad Colombia is less violent than it used to be. However, this drop in violence has occurred at the same time as an increase in state power, economic inequality, and human rights violations (plus a lot of forced disappearances, which I'm not sure if they're accounted for in our statistics). So we may be in for a new, Venezuela-esque rise in murders in the near future, if the methods we've used to "solve" our murder problem end up favoring more violence in the future.