Why do some homicides attract more attention than others?
That deceptively simple question raises all kinds of complex issues about our own prejudices — regarding culture, race, class, and even our notions of sexual attractiveness.
So, when a teenage beauty queen is shot dead just days before she was due to travel to London for the Miss World pageant, it’s a story.
That’s what happened this week to 19-year-old Maria Jose Alvarado, aka Miss Honduras. On Wednesday, police discovered her body, and that of her older sister Sofia, buried beside a river.
Violent death is hardly unusual in Honduras. In fact, the country has a truly unwanted claim to fame — it is the world’s most homicidal nation, at least for those not at war.
According to this 2013 United Nations study, Honduras’ 2012 homicide rate was a just-plain-scary 90.4 per 100,000 residents.
In other words, your chances of being murdered in Honduras that year were nearly 20 times higher than in the United States.
To put things further into perspective, Honduras’ rate were going on twice that of the world’s second most murderous country, Venezuela, which had just under 54 slayings per 100,000 residents, according to the UN.
Most of Western Europe hovered around a single murder per 100,000 people per year.
Although Honduras’ killing spree is extreme even compared to its neighbors, Latin America is by some counts the world’s deadliest region, with 24.5 homicides per 100,000 residents annually.
Note: This chart does not include statistics for the Middle East and North Africa. 2012 data weren't available for those regions.
Experts point to a gamut of reasons: from the US-backed drug war to income inequality, a history of armed conflict, corrupt police and courts, bad public education, and, in some countries like Honduras, easy access to guns.
The UN also has noted a rising tide of violence against women. Between 2005 and 2013, the number of females killed in Honduras more than tripled.
The authorities say Alvarado actually had no known links to the drug cartels and ultra-violent “mara” street gangs that are blamed for most of the country’s bloodshed. Police on Wednesday arrested the boyfriend of the elder Alvarado sister.
No doubt most readers will silently count their blessings they don’t live in Honduras.
But, for those in the United States, it might also be worth asking why America has the highest murder rate of any industrialized Western nation.
