Let me rephrase then: average Latin American cities in many countries are comparable to average US cities.

There are trouble hotspots (and countries) just as there are trouble hotspots in the US.

It's not true that Latin America as a whole is "unsafe". It's not Ciudad Juárez everywhere. I live in Buenos Aires and there's crime comparable to any big city (with better and worse periods, of course).

And large portions of the population (much more than in the US) live in areas that have violent crime and murder rates higher than the worse parts of Oakland. And that isn’t even counting Guatemala as it’s just ‘adjacent’.

Southern South America isn’t bad, but also doesn’t have many people in it.