wever, studies like this one are exacerbating Latin America’s violent reputation and discouraging would-be tourists, such as Emily, a 20-year-old student from London, from making the trip: “A girl-friend and I were thinking about coming to travel around Latin America but we changed our minds last-minute as we had heard some horror stories from people about the kind of danger that awaits female travellers there.”
The potential future economic gain from the bullishness of Argentina’s tourism business has been tarnished by the threat to the industry represented in the RITLA study.
Despite the negative outcome of the study, it was met with differing reactions over the region.
Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Nicaragua, has suffered a drastic increase in murder rates (partly attributed to the presence of youth gangs called maras in the central American area) and is dismayed by the situation, as Leonel Dubón, director of the Allied House of Guatemala, told Guatemalan online newspaper La Prensa Libre: “In the capital 60 adolescents are murdered a month. The problem has multiple causes: impunity, the use of legal and illegal substances and the extreme poverty which affects half our population.”
Conversely, RITLA’s findings were welcomed in Colombia. Rather than dwelling on the country’s position as the second most deadly in the world, Columbian newspaper Vanguardia lauded the government’s success in preventing the country from having the worst rate of youth murders in the world for the first time in ten years.
Colombia’s movement down the rankings represents a significant change in the map of global violence, as Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, who carried out the research at RITLA, explained: “Until 2004 and 2005, Colombia and Brazil constituted the crux of the worst violence. Now it is Central America. Colombia has started fighting violence in cities such as Bogotá and Cali while Brazil started improving after a disarming campaign in 2003.”
However, what unites opinion across Latin America is the desire to mitigate the tradition of violence. As Bonaldi said, solutions are difficult to implement but they do exist: “The problem requires complete and sustained political statutes which will ensure the control of the use and availability of arms, the proper training and equipment of security forces and the provision of an efficient justice system.”
Bonaldi also suggested that politics on a more general level had its role to play: “Fundamentally we need policies that guarantee access to the basic human rights with regard to work, housing, health and education, especially for the poorest sectors of society.”