The foundation Insight Crime, which is dedicated to the study of organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean published its yearly “InSight Crime’s 2017 Homicide Round-Up”, with the purpose of giving a snapshot of murder rates in the Latin America region.

Murder rates are calculated by InSight Crime, based on the number of reported homicides and the country’s 2017 estimated population total.

According to this report these are the number of murders in Central America for 2017:

El Salvador: 60 per 100,000 inhabitants
Honduras: 42.8 per 100,000 inhabitants
Guatemala: 26.1 per 100,000 inhabitants
Costa Rica: 12.1 per 100,000 inhabitants
Panama: 10.2 per 100,000 inhabitants
Nicaragua: 7 per 100,000 inhabitants

Nicaragua is the country in Central America with the lowest homicide rates in 2017, it is also the lowest rate in this country for the last 16 years, according to Nicaragua’s National Police.

Regarding the growing rate of homicides in Costa Rica, the report states:

Costa Rican authorities’ preliminary figures indicate that the country suffered 603 homicides during 2017, for a rate of 12.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants — the highest ever recorded in the Central American country traditionally considered one of the region’s most peaceful.

Amid signs that Costa Rica’s role within the transnational drug trade has expanded, authorities have been quick to blame organized crime for the growing violence. An estimated 25 percent of murders in 2017 were linked to the drug trade, authorities said, and another half were described as “score settling.”

But while drug activities could be responsible for increasing violence, the lack of hindsight and a vague methodology undermine the authorities’ efforts to blame organized crime. And while Costa Rica’s homicide trend over recent years is undeniably on the uptick, the country does maintain one of the region’s lower homicide rates.

In the Latin America region Venezuela is the country that tops the list of murders with 89 per 100,000 inhabitants.