Syria being a dictatorship that makes people 'disappear' without official statistics, though.

Are you implying that the Salafist-Jihadist rebels in Syria don't do the exact same? Because they make people "disappear" too, in addition to brutally and savagely executing people in public (decapitation, mutilation, etc).

And I'm not just talking about the now-defunct Isil -- al-Qaeda (AKA Jabhat al-Nusra AKA Jabhat Fateh al-Sham AKA Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) are equally guilty of using religious pretext to subjugate and murder at their discretion.

There's more to the situation in Syria than what CNN and MSNBC spoon-feed the ignorant masses.

No, he's not implying that.

He's saying that prior to 2010 (pre civil war), a lot of people could quietly disappear in Syria due to the government.

CNN and MSNBC don't have anything to do with reading comprehension.

Exactly. Thanks.

Infographic showing per capita murder rates for that region, by country: http://www.insightcrime.org/images/2017/January-2017/17-13-1...

Edit: Though, of course, countries like Mexico and Brazil would look more alarming if this map was broken down into provinces/states.

Constant low grade civil war and dictators has been the offhand history of south america for a very long time, sadly. Definitely predates drug cartels and US influence.

See Darwin: http://imgur.com/Q68r0uD

From: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&...

I only raise this because there is a common and lazy supposition to Venezuela's state of affairs that goes something like, "It must be drug cartels or the US that caused all the problems, fundamentally." The country's problems are probably nuanced, deeper, and older.

Wow. How much of that is due to drug cartels and gang violence though?

A lot. However drug cartels often also fill in as a form of local government in the areas they control. Additionally they are often just as well armed as the police minus things like helicopters and armored vehicles.

> Additionally they are often just as well armed as the police minus things like helicopters and armored vehicles.

I wonder how big an impact the free flow of guns in Americas has had on the violence in the continent. It seems like one of the main reasons behind the extreme Mexican violence, at least, is the uncontrolled US weapons market.

Some but I'm guessing it is minimal. The countries from Mexico to the south have had unstable regimes and violence for a long time (probably because the Spanish institutions were exploitative and exacerbated differences between the landholders/other and Europeans/natives).

There have been lots of violent and terrorist movements from the 70s onward and even prior to that. Guns didn't help but the US is far from the only suppliers or cause.

Brazil is also a huge producer of guns. Given Venezuela's location at the edge of Central and South America, its hard to say where they would get most of their guns from.

People have been killing each other long before guns were invented, so I doubt very much it has any real effect. The "uncontrolled US weapons market?" Give me a break! The biggest seller of weapons to those countries is the US Government itself!

The scale of potential violence with guns vs. without guns should be obvious, so not commenting on that.

As for the US weapons flow to Mexico, there was a NPR article last year on the topic [1]. Wikipedia [2] mentions "many of the traceable weapons come from American weapons markets and festivals that do not have regulations for the buyers", which very much is the uncontrolled weapons market, right?

To be fair, the Wikipedia page also points to the other direction with "weapons [..] come from either government personnel who defect to the cartels, or are sourced from Central American black markets".

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/12/462781469/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War#Gun_origins

I wonder how the graph would look if you included police violence?

If the cartel is filling the void (granted the things they enforce are different) then you may as well make it an equal comparison.

I really wonder how the US graph would look if you included people killed by police.

Police killings are hardly equivalent to gang and cartel killings.

Gangs murder people out of cold blood.

The overwhelming majority of police killings involve people who present an immediate danger to the innocent and are violent, dangerous criminals.

That's generally true, but there are places where the police and cartels are intermingled.

Yes, I was writing about the US specifically

In 2014, estimated murders in US is about 14,249. Estimated people killed by police is 1111 according to one site. So a 7-8% increase.

Washington Post has a neat interactive page I came across. The most shocking thing is the unashamed misandry when it comes to police killings. This year, only 25 women were killed versus 556 men. That's rather ... disproportional.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

http://killedbypolice.net/ provides the numbers for the US (it's up to 714 this year - 23 more than last year by this date).

Last year the US police killed 1162 persons, so that's a rate of 0.36 per 100k inhabitants.

Imagine the amount of suffering these countries could be spare their people if they just legalized drugs of any kind (it's not like it not freely available anyway), and just swept the cartles income from under them.

Nothing would change much. The countries would still be exploited by small a oligarchy. They would still have one of the worst wealth distribution in the world. And they would still have a ultra violent police that routinely kills a lot of poor, black and indigenous people.

It's too late for that. The cartels are up and running in various industries like extortion and sex trafficking.

The Mexican cartels control politics anyway, so good luck just making them go away.

The drugs are mostly for export. Legalising them would run an increased risk of US military intervention.