Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Raúl Gutiérrez *
Some of the highest murder rates in the world are reported in Central America: 68 per 100,000 population in El Salvador, 45 in Guatemala and 43 in Honduras.
Central America is the most violent subregion in Latin America and one of the most violent in the world, says the recent study “Los costos económicos de la violencia en Centroamérica” (The Economic Costs of Violence in Central America), commissioned by the National Public Security Council of the Salvadoran presidency’s office.
According to the World Health Organisation’s “World Report on Violence and Health”, the average global homicide rate in 2000 was 8.8 per 100,000 population a year, while the 2007 study “Understanding High Crime Rates in Latin America: the Role of Social and Policy Factors”, by Rodrigo R. Soares at the University of Maryland and Joana Naritomi at the World Bank, put the Latin America average at 21.8 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The Salvadoran study evaluated four areas – spending on health (medical care, lost production and emotional damages), specific institutional costs (law enforcement, public safety and justice), private spending on security, and material losses – using data from 2006 and drawing on previous studies on the region and the world to make comparisons.
Direct health costs – health services for prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation for those affected by violence – totalled 229 million dollars in 2006, while indirect costs, reflecting lost production and productivity caused by absenteeism, temporary or permanent incapacity and premature death, ran to 1.21 billion dollars.
In addition, intangible health losses were estimated at 1.9 billion dollars, based on the monetary value of compensation for victims of violence.
“Pain, suffering and any other reduction in the quality of life are intangible and, thus, very difficult to measure,” says the study.
Acevedo said the report reveals “the approximate magnitude of the costs.” And although he added that the results should be taken “with some caution,” because there are gaps in the available statistics and information, “the general outlook would not change” with respect to which countries are the most violent and pay the highest costs as a result (El Salvador and Guatemala) and which is at the other extreme (Costa Rica).
The study says the soaring wave of crime in the subregion absorbed nearly 11 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in El Salvador, 9.6 percent in Honduras, 7.7 percent in Guatemala and 3.5 percent in Costa Rica. It provides a 10 percent figure for Nicaragua, although Acevedo warned that this proportion may actually be lower because the country’s GDP in 2006 was underestimated.
In total, the costs of violence amounted to 2.29 billion dollars in Guatemala, 2.01 billion dollars in El Salvador, 791 million in Costa Rica and 529 million in Nicaragua.
The area of “institutional expenses” (legal, judicial and police) was calculated at 1.137 billion dollars, but on the basis of the budget assigned in 2006 to the institutions in question, which included “only those allotments most directly related to policies for preventing and combating violence,” says the study.
The “preventive” costs in terms of private security in homes and companies, ranging from alarm systems to walls and fences and private security guards, totalled 1.238 billion dollars. And material losses, of goods or assets stolen or destroyed as a result of criminal activity, were estimated at 780 million dollars.
According to figures from 2005 and 2006, El Salvador’s homicide rate of 68 per 100,000 inhabitants is not only a far cry from the rates in Costa Rica (7.7 per 100,000) and Nicaragua (12.5 per 100,000), but is also higher than that of Colombia (43 per 100,000), a country that has been in the grip of civil war for nearly half a century, and of Brazil (24 per 100,000), home to the notoriously violent cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Besides the loss of human lives – “mainly young lives” – crime exacts a “heavy toll” that affects development as well as “human and social capital,” says the 22-page report published in late July.
The study acknowledges the link between poverty and violence, but points out that it is not always the poorest nations and individuals that are most prone to crime, while drawing attention to the deadly combination of enormous income gaps and unequal opportunities with other social, cultural and psychological factors.
In Guatemala and El Salvador, expenditure on health and education does not exceed five percent of GDP, notes Acevedo, who was assistant coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report on El Salvador.
In Costa Rica and Nicaragua, meanwhile, public expenditure on health stood at 5.1 and 3.9 percent of GDP, respectively, in 2004, while expenditure on education was 4.9 percent of GDP in Costa Rica in 2004 and 3.1 percent in Nicaragua in 2003, according to the World Resources Institute.
Countries with lower social expenditure as a proportion of GDP tend to have higher violence-related costs, says Acevedo, who adds that Costa Rica pays a lower price for violence because for decades it has spent more on social programmes.
Costa Rican sociologist Isabel Román told IPS that Costa Rica’s higher levels of social investment in comparison with neighbouring countries is an important aspect to be taken into account, “because it has to do with providing opportunities” and because the state “invests in people, not weapons” – a reference to the fact that the country has no armed forces.
Javier Meléndez, director of the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies of Nicaragua, agreed with the results of the study overall, but told IPS that he believes that the figures cited for his country are “50 percent true and 50 percent myth,” because “the under-reporting of crimes is much more serious than what is generally believed.”
In Acevedo’s view, if El Salvador would “redirect part of the resources that currently go towards dealing with the consequences of violence, and dedicate them instead to education and health, the country would be much more productive.”
“Providing education to a child from the first grade up to high school is five times cheaper than keeping a person in prison,” in terms of annual costs.
According to the latest Human Development Index for El Salvador, it costs the state 1,200 dollars a year to keep someone in prison, while spending on education in primary and secondary school ranges between 200 and 250 dollars a year per child.
“So the key questions are: what kind of countries do we want in the long term, how much does it cost us to achieve that, and are we willing to finance it,” Acevedo concludes.
* Myriam Blanco in San José and José Adán Silva in Managua contributed to this report.