El Salvador, the nation of 6 million, has more murders than the entire EU. What made Latin America so violent? Is it a legacy of colonialism or a newer development?

by Kerkinitis

El Salvador has a murder rate of 83 per 100,000 people with 5,300 intentional homicides in 2016 while the European Union has a murder rate of only 1 per 100,000 with 5,000 homicides.

There is, of course, a chasm of difference between Chile and Cuba (lower homicide rate than the US) and Venezuela, Honduras and El Salvador, the three countries with the highest murder rate in the world. Still, the Latin America is the most violent region in the world, with a nitpick that intentional homicide rate does not include war deaths.

PeasantOfMonteCristo

If this is an acceptable follow-up question, could someone possibly explain why the UK is grey on OP's map? In my experience (which is admittedly mainly limited to Wikipedia) grey normally means no data, which seems strange to me given the similar status of the UK in terms of development, censorship and the infrastructure for collecting data, to the rest of Europe etc., who all have a colour. I could understand this for a country such as China for example, where censorship appears more prevalent, or some less developed nations in the world with little ability to collect the data but the UK fits into neither of these categories