6:15am -- Our Sincere Apologies to Juarez

By Bruce Daniels/ABQNews Seeker
Thursday, 26 August 2010 06:11
Online magazine says our neighbor to the south is NOT world's murder capital .

For months now, we've been doggedly passing on news of the latest atrocities and body counts from Ciudad Juarez, in the apparently mistaken belief that the city just across the border from El Paso is the bloodiest city in the Americas, if not the world.

Now comes an editorial in the online Investor's Business Daily that asks "Quick, what's the murder capital of the world? Kabul? Juarez?"

No, according to IBD, it's Caracas, Venezuela.

Ever since Hugo Chavez became president in 1999, the right-leaning IBD editors say, "Venezuelan cities have become hellholes in which murder rates have more than quadrupled."

At 233 per 100,000, or one murder every 90 minutes, the rate in Caracas now tops that of every war zone in the world, according to an official National Statistics Institute study released Wednesday, IBD said.

"By contrast, the murder rate in cartel-haunted Juarez, Mexico, is 133 per 100,000, with Mexico's overall rate 8 per 100,000, about the same as Wichita, Kan.," according to the editorial. "Colombia, fighting a narcoterror war since 1964, has an overall rate of 37 per 100,000, slightly higher than Baltimore at 36.9. The overall U.S. rate is 5.4."

Read more: ABQNews: 6:15am -- Our Sincere Apologies to Juarez http://www.abqjournal.com/abqnews/abqnewseeker-mainmenu-39/23524-615am-our-sincere-apologies-to-juarez.html#ixzz0xk51OwFC
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