Violence, Democracy and Criminal Justice in five South American countries (2014-2020)

Abstract

Latin America is the most violent region in the world. Its average rate exceeds 20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, while the global average rate is 6 per 100,000 and the epidemic limit is 10 per 100,000. No consolidated democracy has uncontrolled rates of homicidal violence, none of them have high impunity and a low rate of rule of law. Our task in this paper will be to relate violence, the level of democracy and criminal justice as a proxy indicator of the rule of law in five representative countries in Latin America. To this end, we use the following as indicators for measuring, classifying and correlating these concepts: democracy indices from The Economist's Democracy Index; UNODC homicide rates per hundred thousand inhabitants as a proxy for violence; and the factor eight criminal justice indices from the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index (2021). Our theoretical argument, or conjecture to be tested, was that the indicators of violence, democracy and criminal justice as a factor of the Rule of Law are associated. In other words, the signs of statistical correlations and crossing data sets from the 2014-2020 time series point to a higher level of democracy when there is a higher level of criminal justice and, in turn, lower levels of violence. Data analysis confirmed our theoretical conjecture and, in the five countries analyzed, violence tends to fall with the improvement of criminal justice indicators (Rule of Law) and reflects a better quality of democracy.