Submitted 2 weeks ago by atro_city@fedia.io to [deleted]
Despite representing just 8% of the world’s population, the region accounts for nearly one-third of global homicides.
Breaking Latin America’s Cycle of Low Growth and Violence
North and Sub-Saharran Africa are poorer than Latin America but have much less murder going on. What's going on in Latin America?
Life has the same value to every living human. Everybody has got only one, and without it, there isn’t much else.
But some do not recognize it (until late in their life).
Life has the same value to every living human.
That’s an extreme oversimplification, and that way of looking at it completely ignores people with depression and people committing suicide.
Obviously a life in suffering is more likely to cause depression, and a life in depression is subjectively worth less.
I get the point you’re making but in the context of the OP the reply didn’t seem too far off. Yours though is getting pretty close to declaring a depression epidemic in Latin America, I presume because your saw red in their reply
Most people have their sufferings. In the end, most people even die from some suffering or other. That is just a part of life, and you cannot substract it away from it.
I don’t know why depression should be so different from all other troubles. I don’t know why it should affect the value of life? How would you value a life with no arms and legs, for example? How would the person with no arms and legs value their own life? Have you ever asked one?
The article doesn’t seem to show any context to this, are equally poor countries on other continents better or worse?
My guess is the main problems are probably poverty inequality and corruption. Catholicism may also be a problem, as every crime can be absolved by the church, and Catholics are free from the ultimate personal consequences of their crimes.
So the corruption and inequality may create a sense of need for many people to need to balance the injustice, and combined with a lack of perceived ultimate consequence may be a toxic cocktail that stimulate violent crime.
This however is pure speculation on my part. But it seems evident there must be some kind of social factor to cause things to be so bad.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Your linked article says this:
atro_city@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Those are relative explanations as in relative to the region. Compare it to Africa where the crime rate and murder rate is quite different despite there being active wars on the continent. Violence is of course present but not at the same level as in South America.
LeapSecond@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is entirely speculation but the fact that there are active wars in the continent might affect how the data is classified. I don’t know how the article you posted defines homicide. There are some rules here www.unodc.org/unodc/en/…/iccs.html and it seems that deaths during war conflicts might not be counted as intentional homicides. Latin America hasn’t had many wars but had/has many conflicts involving guerrillas, cartels and political groups. Is it possible that many of the resulting deaths are counted as homicides whereas similar violence in Africa is counted as, for example, civil war deaths?
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
if things are static in africa, then the base level of violence may be maintained, wheras increases in factors can lead to increases in violence.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Relative?
There is a long list of correlations.
A lot of the “relative” is within the same country and just a given time frame so your interpretation is flawed.
You seem to need simplistic answers and the quote above pretty clearly points out recessions, gang activity (presumably related to drugs), inequality and governance as having some correlation so you could look up rates and compare if you wanted to have an idea of where some things might be different. That would be hugely speculative though
Are you conflating violence (a broad term) with homicide?