Ecuador’s Homicide Rate Is Skyrocketing

Homicide rates are skyrocketing in Ecuador with official figures recording a death count of 4,800 in 2022. This is according to data from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Interior, published by the Rio de Janeiro based think tank, the Igarapé Institute. According to the Ecuadorian government’s latest estimates though, violent deaths are reported to have soared to 8,008 in 2023, indicating that the situation is by now significantly worse than the figures currently displayed by the institute.

The following chart tries to capture a sense of where Ecuador sits within the context of its Latin American neighbors. Venezuela’s homicide rate was the highest of the region in 2022 at 40.4 people killed per 100,000 inhabitants – that’s even with a fall of 20 percent since the 2019 figure, when it had been a rate of 50.6 per 100,000 people. As indicated here, many of the countries in Latin America have seen decreases between 2019 and 2022, with Ecuador as an outlier for its 288% increase from 6.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 up to 26.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2022.

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