Trump's Many Wars

Trump has declared wars on small boats in international waters in the Caribbean and the Pacific, claiming that they are drug boats, without proof, claiming a right to kill the people on them, contrary to international law.

Trump invaded Venezuela and seized its leader.

Trump has involved U.S. military forces in striking a Mexican cartel chief, leading to a bloodbath there.

Trump has unilaterally made strikes on Iran.

Trump has now deployed the U.S. military in Ecuador.

Trump is trying to impose an oil embargo on Cuba.

Trump deployed the National Guard to peaceful American cities.

Trump has deployed ICE as his private secret police to lawlessly terrorize American cities with scant regard to what they are actually legally authorized to do.

Trump has deployed U.S. forces to interdict Russia's shadow fleet of oil tankers trying to evade sanctions arising out of the Ukraine War. The Ukraine war itself is ongoing and Trump and blown hot and cold on it, prolonging the war by giving Putin hope.

Trump has threatened, but not yet struck, Greenland, Canada, and Panama.

And, while only metaphorical, Trump has declared trade wars on the entire world.

In most of these cases, Trump hasn't had even a whisper of Congressional authorization or legal authorization to act. The uses of force (and the tariffs) have violated domestic and international law. 

Life After Death

Belief in life after death is an interesting choice to compare religiosity. 

It is a belief shared by all of the widely adhered to religions in the region without being strictly tied to any one of them, and also captures residual metaphysical beliefs in contrast to metaphysical naturalism among people who are nominally non-religious and may have a problem with particular denominational or institutional religious structures but not with a somewhat religious worldview at a broad level.

The percentage of people believe in life after death considerably exceeds the percentage of people who regularly attend religious services or pray regularly. But it is below 50% in most of the historically predominantly Christian countries  of Europe, and just barely above 50% in several of the remaining ones in the face of a long term trend towards declining belief in an afterlife. Most of Europe is majority secular, or very nearly so. In the homelands of most of my ancestors, belief in an afterlife is less than 40%.

Related from a May 12, 2016 post:

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be.

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance.

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.” 

The Data

Belgium, Moldova, Ireland and Kosovo are omitted, presumably for a lack of statistically significant amounts of data. Vatican City is almost omitted but one presumes that this belief is near 100% among its couple thousand permanent residents.

Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey are the only countries on the map over 60%. 

The lowest rates are in Bulgaria (25%) and Albania (22.7%), presumably as legacies of communism in places where religious institutions didn't play a large role in their emergence as non-communist states, and where the juxtaposition of these states against their Muslim neighbors, made an emphasis on state imposed atheism more salient.

In Turkey this is due to an overwhelmingly Muslim population. In Bosnia, the 51% of the population that is Muslim brings up the average. Predominantly Muslim Kosovo is probably higher than the 65.9% of Bosnia, but due to its long membership of nominally secular communist Yugoslavia and a somewhat larger non-Muslim minority, is probably less than teh 91.8% of Turkey. 

Poland is predominantly Catholic and the only predominantly Christian country on the map over 60%. This makes sense as Catholicism played an important and recent role in its departure from its former Communist regime, less than half a century ago.

Below Poland, but above 50% are Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and Macedonia, with a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox adherents and a range of economic development and historical ties to the Western and Eastern economic blocks of the Cold War. And, more generally, there doesn't seem to be a strong Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox skew to the likelihood of believing in life after death among Europeans in predominantly Christian countries. 

Belgium probably splits the difference between France (41.2%) and the Netherlands (34%) and is probably under 40%. 

Moldova probably splits the difference between Romania and Ukraine, which are also former Eastern block countries that were historically Eastern Orthodox, and is probably close to Romania than Ukraine and may be a bit over 50%.

I don't have a great intuition regarding where Ireland falls. It is probably under 60%, but probably higher than the U.K. (41.7%), as it is one of the more religious observant Christian countries in Europe, and Catholicism played a major role in sustaining Irish culture in the face of centuries of English rule in 1921 (now more than a century ago). It is probably in the high 40s or low 50s, percentage-wise.

Muslim v. Christian Approaches To Heresy

The very high rates in belief in life after death among Muslims is notable in light of a big difference in how Christianity and Islam have historically approached heresy at the individual level.

Christianity conceptualized heresy as an internal and subjective matter - not believing in the doctrinal truths of the established church.

Islam, in contrast, has focused on insisting that people outwardly comply with religious edicts concerning prayer, fasting, etc., without trying to punish or even really condemn people who are outwardly compliant with its demands even though subjectively, deep down, they have doubts or even outright don't believe in Islamic doctrines.

Yet, modern Islam has much higher rates of belief in the afterlife than modern European Christianity does, where the median rate of belief in the afterlife is probably half what it is among Muslims, if not a little lower.

Paces On The Path To Secular Humanism

Another possibility is that predominantly Islamic countries are simply on the same path towards secular humanism induced by modern scientific thinking and modern societal conditions as predominantly Christian countries, but are just less far along that path.

Many of the Islam driven doctrines and practices that are striking to us today in historically Christian countries, were once present in Christianity.

Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia is executing people for witchcraft now. Christians in Europe and North America were doing this into the 18th century. 

The last known execution for witchcraft in Europe was that of Anna Göldi in 1782 in Glarus, Switzerland, while in the British Isles, Janet Horne was the last person executed for witchcraft in 1727. The last known witchcraft trial in North America was held in Virginia in 1730, where a woman named Mary was convicted of using witchcraft to find lost items and sentenced to be whipped 39 times. There are still witchcraft persecutions (and lots of focus on fighting demons and exorcisms) among African Christians and animists.

Witchcraft prosecutions died, in part, because nobody believed that witchcraft was real any more.

Charging Interest

Islam prohibits the charging of interest now (although work around doctrines exist in Islamic finance to allow the equivalent of simple interest but not compound interest).

Interest was condemned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, in writings of the fathers of the Roman Catholic church during the Roman Empire, and by Luther and Calvin at least as late as the 16th century, although usury came to be redefined in Western Christianity as a bar only unfairly high interest rates and not charging interest at all, and became a minor issue for Christian clergy, with the established or formerly established Christian churches now relying on interest on their endowments to operate.

The gap in the focus on barring the charging of interest in the period between the Roman era and the Reformation, moreover, was as much due to the lack of banking activity entirely during the Middle Ages in Christendom, where feudalism prevailed, as it was due to a change in Christian religious doctrine in that time period, per se. 

Modesty

The Islamic world is known today for its greater expectations of modesty in how women dress, and its less equal treatment of women than in the modern Western world. But this too was recently a part of the Christian world, often with religious justification.

Certainly, there is a range of how this manifests within the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban impose absurdly strict modestly standards. American Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia, in contrast, are still more strict than modern Americans and Western Europeans, but are far less extreme than Saudi Arabians.

European and American styles of dress for women were common in Afghanistan and Iran in the 1970s, but this shift was rolled back in Islamic revolutions.

Still, Victorian England, and most predominantly Christian countries in that era, were similar in standards of female modesty to many Islamic countries today. In the early 19th century, women were still wearing swim wear that looked suspiciously similar to "burkinis" in Europe and the U.S. Women were still getting arrested and held in contempt of court for wearing pants in the United States, in the early 1900s. 

Not wearing a skirt or dress to school, even at the collegiate level, was something that women got in trouble for doing up to the early 1960s in the U.S., and skirts are still part of mandatory school uniforms for girls in Japan, much of Asia, and some places in the British Commonwealth.

Marriage

Polygamy and cousin marriage ended much sooner in countries that became Christian than it did in the Islamic world where it is still common in much of the Middle East, West Asia, South Asia, and Africa, although polygamy is banned in both Turkey and Tunisia as a matter of secular law and is quite rare in most Islamic countries. And, cousin marriage is not common in much of the Islamic world.

Polygamy has been very rare, outside the early Mormons in the 19th century and some small splinter Mormon sects after that, in places that have been predominantly Christian at the time, although tolerance for mistresses and concubines who are not Christian wives, instead of, or in addition to, Christian wives, has varied in European and Latin American history, and to a lesser extent until the early 19th century especially in places where slavery was permitted in North America and the Caribbean. Polygamy was at least as common as it is in modern polygamist countries in the Mediterranean world and Europe in the pagan era, and remains common today among animists in Africa.

In one exception to the trend, divorce has been allowed in Islam from the outset, while it was banned entirely until the 16th century, and was virtually non-existent in most Christian countries until the 19th century (with divorces generally only available from the legislature). Complete divorce bans for Christians existed in Ireland and Italy until a quite late date, and this is still the case in the Philippines.

Women's Rights

Mary Wollstonecraft was famously battling for women's rights in the U.K. and Europe in the 18th century. The Married Women's Property Acts that formally gave married women many private law rights and ended coverture law that absorbed women's private law personalities into their husbands were mostly passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is close to where women's rights in private law are today in many Islamic countries. Shi'ite Islamic communities have tended to be afford women greater rights than Sunni Islamic countries, although this may be more a matter of coincidence and local cultures and conditions than it is a matter of the doctrines of the religious sects, both of which vastly predate widespread democratic government.

Political Rights

The United States, at its independence in 1776, was one of the earliest and largest Republics since the fall of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (although the Swiss, Iceland, and some city states had it earlier). 

Constitutional monarchies afforded considerable democratic rights to a fairly narrow franchise of middle aged property owning white men in the U.K., but the British monarch had real power into the 19th century as the franchise was expanded by fits and starts there.

The French Revolution in 1789 was another early experiment in democratic government without a monarch, but this revolution was not stable with some form on monarchy persisting intermittently until 1870.

Most European and Latin American constitutional monarchies and republics arose in the late 19th century. The modal year at which European colonies with mostly non-European residents gained their independence in Africa and Asia was 1960, in most cases with Western style Republican government followed not many years after by military coups and dictatorships and multiple false starts before stable democratic government was established.

Much of the Islamic world was subject to European colonial rule for a long time. But outright strong monarchies now persist predominantly in the oil rich states of the Islamic world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco and Jordan are fairly close to where the British constitutional monarchy was at the time of the American Revolution. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have shed their monarchs for a while, but still struggle to make those republics stable multi-party democracies. The Middle East, generally, is still playing out the final acts of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which was formally dissolved with country lines redrawn after World War I, at a time when most of Europe and Latin America has republics. But World War II hit the reset button on democratic government in almost all of continental Europe, leading to the organization of new democratic regimes with the demise of most of them under fascism during World War II.

Eastern Europe and much of Africa and some of Latin America has Soviet style communist regimes until the fall end of the Cold War around 1989, and in some cases beyond, with holdouts like Cuba and Venezuela, and the post-communist era in these countries have only sometimes yielded multi-party democratic republics, and those that did persist still often have a political culture marked by authoritarian tendencies.

Women's Right To Vote

In the U.S. women's right to vote came late. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's right to vote at the national level was adopted only in 1920. Unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The U.S. was neither first nor last in the women's right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to allow a wide cross-section of women to vote in national elections in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and Denmark (including Iceland) in 1915. Many European countries followed in 1917 and 1918. But women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990.

Women has the right to vote in national elections in Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy, a predominantly Islamic country then and now, from 1919 to 1929.

Relative to the time that Islamic countries have become democratic republics, in the places where they have, women have gained the right to vote, if anything, sooner than they did in predominantly Christian countries, often from the outset.

Best Case Scenarios

We spend a lot of time thinking about worst case scenarios. But we shouldn't discount the likelihood of better outcomes. Smart people of goodwill all over the world are trying to achieve them. And, by "best case scenarios" I mean outcomes that have some plausible chance of happening within time frames that people who are adults today can live to see.

China

China joins the rest of the world in backing away from coal as a power source and shifting to renewables like solar, wind, and tidal power, to nuclear power, and to improved energy conservation. Its high speed rail network and growing fleet of electric vehicles suggest that it isn't as indifferent to the environment as we might think.

A new generation of political leaders eases its authoritarianism and censorship, curbs its excessive use of the death penalty, checks China's territorial ambitions. It also cuts off tactic support for North Korea if it isn't conditioned on North Korean demilitarization and reforms.

Russia and the former Soviet Union

Putin dies. The Ukraine War is abandoned on terms not materially more favorable than the 2014 status quo. The Black Sea is demilitarized in a multi-lateral agreement. Maintaining a Soviet scale military becomes unsustainable and is curtailed. Ukraine joins NATO. Most autonomous regions of Russia gain more autonomy or gain independence.  

The declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy weakens autocratic powers in Russia and strengthens urban commercial and technology sectors. A grass roots political movement curbs the power of the oligarchs. Russia stops supporting North Korea, which together with Chinese tough love weakens that regime.

Former Soviet Republics continue to go their own ways with weaker ties to Russia and Russian expeditionary military activity is curtailed.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Belatedly, sub-Saharan Africa follows in the footsteps of Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia and becomes a global center for manufacturing, initially fueled by cheap labor and lax regulations, which leads to economic development, greater affluence, and a demographic transition. Improve rail, roads, and air travel link the continent. The declining importance of oil and gas weakens authoritarian regimes.

Regimes will start to leave the highly unstable coup and civil war prone phase of the transition to democracy and agricultural production in Africa will also improve and rise to global standards. So far, Africa has increased output by increasing the amount of land farmed, rather than by increasing productivity per acre, but this could easily change in the decades to come.

The Islamic World

The declining importance of oil and gas undermines the oil monarchies and authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, North Africa, Brunei, and Aceh. Without oil money to prop it up, fundamentalist Islam fizzles. Guest workers in the Arab world are replaced by domestic workers ending massive unemployment among young people in the region. Power shifts to commercial and technology sector firms forcing a transition to democratic regimes, peacefully or by revolutions.

The Islamic world, now in something of a Victorian era stage of cultural development, progresses, with less restrictive dress codes, less repression of women, less use of corporal punishment, and more commercial activity. Iran remains nominally a theocracy but with a great shift in the balance of power in favor of reformist politicians and away from religious leaders, until finally disestablishment arrives tracking the religious diversity and growing secularization of ordinary Iranians.

Latin America

More sensible regulation of guns and decriminalization of drugs in North America deflates and disarms the cartels of Latin America and opens the door for less corrupt government. Drug prohibition driven waves of homicides end, and a well-educated population comes to the fore. The disaster that is Venezuela eases as the declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy makes top down communist rule infeasible.

Climate change

We won't end the causes of anthropic climate change soon enough to prevent or reverse it. Sea levels will rise faster than expected, but not so fast that coastal urban centers can't be protected with sea walls that become island redoubts to a great extent, especially in places on the brink like Venice, southern Florida, and southern Louisiana.

Ski resorts move north with Alaska and the Yukon taking the center stage once held by Colorado, Utah, and Switzerland.

The great U.S. migration to the Sun Belt reverses itself as the heat in the Southern U.S. becomes intolerable and the winters in the Midwest and Northeast become more tolerable. The southern U.S. shifts in the direction of tropical and deep desert from subtropical.

The Sahara continues to expand before reaching a stabilized peak as fossil fuel use is discontinued worldwide. 

Petroleum and coal become as archaic as merchant and naval sailing fleets, while merchant ships start to universally rely in part upon wind power for propulsion. Natural gas fades more slowly but is eventually replaces by electrical grids fueled by wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear energy.

U.S. political divisions

As Baby Boomers die off and younger generations come to great power in society, Christianity withers, anti-LGBT sentiment fades, reproductive roots overcome a decade or so long stumble, anti-science movements return to crackpot status, and the Rehnquist court goes down in history as a second, regrettable, Lochner court. The filibuster is abolished, court packing ends the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories gain their rightful political rights. The U.S. adopts a popular vote for the Presidency either by interstate compact or by constitutional amendment, or by the former leading to the latter. Gradual cultural homogenization, and continued migration to major cities eventually undermines the worst facets of Southern/Country/Western culture.

The global economy's shift away from fossil fuels undermines the worst political factions in places like West Virginia, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The U.S. will finally get high speed rail in select, regional high traffic corridors, but will probably not develop a national high speed rail network.

Quote Of The Day

[H]e looked at me as if I had said "What is the square root of Naugahyde?"

- Dan Danbom (on Facebook on August 16, 2023). An honorable mention from the same post appears below:

the most interesting visitor to Printed Page today came all the way from Peru. It was his second time in the store. We started talking about the political situation, and he told me that now matter how turbulent ours is, it's nothing compared to most of the countries in South America. Drug lords and other criminals control governments, democracy is a battered concept, and assassination is as near as last week. He said that he came to the US in the Eighties to study. He thought the nature of American politics had deteriorated, but compared to South America? Hold my beer. I didn't know whether to conclude that we're lucky in America, or that we're becoming more like South America.

The Genetics Of Height And Weight In Hispanics

Height and weight have important environmental influences. Diet quality influences height at a population level. Similarly, the transition from traditional diets and active lives to modern diets and sedentary lives driving higher body mass index (BMI) levels for entire populations. But, controlling for diet and exercise, height and BMI are strongly genetic in character, as is the most subtle detail known as BMI-adjusted waist-to-hip ratio (WHRadjBMI).

Some of the relevant genes are common in many populations, but some genes relevant to these traits are found predominantly in specific ancestral populations, or are more notable there.

A new study (bioRxiv preprint here) by the HISLA consortium did an analysis of a large sample of Hispanic/Latino individuals (N=69,105) pooled from eighteen different genome studies to try to identify genes relevant to these traits. This is what they found:

[W]e discovered one novel BMI locus, two novel signals in established loci for BMI, and one secondary signal in an established locus for height. In our trans-ethnic meta-analysis, we identified three additional novel BMI loci, one novel height locus, and one novel WHRadjBMI locus. We also identified three secondary signals for BMI, 29 for height, and two for WHRadjBMI. We replicated 64 established anthropometric loci in Hispanic/Latino populations at genome-wide significance (28% of previously-reported index SNP anthropometric associations).

Identifying relevant genetic loci associated with these phenotypes, in addition to making it possible to construct a genetic risk index for individuals, also helps us to understand the biochemical mechanics of height, weight and waist-to-hip ratios, and to make educated guesses about the historical selective fitness factors that shaped modern genomes for these traits. This understanding can help us determine what approaches are and are not likely to be successful in reducing stunted growth and regulating weight in modern populations.

The large sample size makes it possible to identify genes with smaller effect sizes with statistical significance, while reducing the risk of false positive gene identifications.

The introduction to the paper provides interesting and notable context:

A complex interplay between political, social, and economic factors has led to an increasing obesogenic global environment.

In this modern context, many low- to middle- income nations have experienced a rapid transition from under-nutrition and growth stunting to overnutrition and obesity. Moreover, population-based surveys from 1975-2002 show that there is an inverse ecologic relationship between the prevalence of growth stunting and the prevalence of overweight seen among preschool children (0-5 years of age) in Latin America. Growth stunting of preschool children ranges from relatively rare (7%) in the Caribbean to notably common (20%) in Central America. Moreover, it is a risk factor for overweight/obesity independent of a child’s socioeconomic status. 

In Latin America, 35% of the total population was overweight and another 23% was living with obesity by 2016. In Mexico, more than 71% of adults are currently overweight; it is projected that by 2050 only 12% of men and 9% of women will have a healthy weight. And, in a recent study in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the prevalence of obesity was 36%, but when using waist circumference as a measure of central obesity, it was far higher (53%). Within each of these populations, there are also disparities by sex and education. 

Race, ethnicity, and ancestry may play a role in anthropometric-related health disparities in Latin American. Previous studies have described the historical contexts leading to admixture in Latin American populations as characterized by highly diverse (variable) ancestral proportions from any of the following regions: the Americas, Europe, Africa and East Asia. 

In fact, proportion of Native American ancestry is associated with numerous biomedical traits, like obesity-related traits, and is most strongly associated with height. Height is inversely associated with proportion of Native American ancestry, even after taking into account the fact that globally over time populations have become taller due to mainly non-genetic nutritional factors. 

The ultimate drivers of this association remain to be elucidated; it is possible that genetic factors and/or socio-economic factors strongly associated with Native American ancestry could be responsible for these findings. Recent studies are starting to provide relevant insights on this topic. 

As an example, a recent genome-wide association study in Peru19 identified a missense variant in the FBN1 gene (rs200342067) that has the largest effect size so far described for common height-associated variants in human populations (each copy of the minor allele reduces height by 2.2 cm). In the 1000 Genomes Project samples, rs200342067 is only present in two American samples (MXL: 0.78% and PEL: 4.12%), and yet the authors reported that this missense variant shows subtle evidence of positive selection in the Peruvian population. 

Obesity in Latin America has quickly surpassed the levels previously seen only among adults of high-income nations, like Canada and the United States (US). In Canada the number of people reporting Latin American origins grew by 83% from the 2001 census relative to the 2016 census, representing 1.3% of the total Canadian population. In the US, both the population size and diversity in national origins (backgrounds) of US Hispanic/Latinos have been increasing over the past several decades. If past demographic trends continue, 24% of the US adult population will identify as Hispanic/Latino by 2065. 

Obesity-related financial costs in the US are projected to double every decade to ~$900 billion by 2030. US Hispanic/Latino adults and their children/adolescents face a greater burden of obesity than their non-Hispanic white counterparts.  

Latin America's Homicide Problem

The United States is at the tail end of a steady decline in crime, including homicide and violent crime, which is just starting to level off from a peak in the early 1990s. The homicide rate in 1991 in the U.S. was 9.8 per 100,000 people per year. As of 2016, the murder rate in the U.S. was 5.3, after hitting a low of 4.4 in 2014. Further back in time, the homicide rate in the U.S. is estimated to have been over 30 per 100,000 people in 1700, dropping to under 20 by 1800, and to under 10 by 1900.

Colombia too, has seen homicides decline precipitously from a 2003 peak, although its homicide rates are still extraordinarily high. Homicides peaked in 2015 in El Salvador but remain extraordinarily high, and while homicides in Venezuela peaked in 2014, they remain very high in a country that is also in a state of economic collapse and hyperinflation.

Drug cartels (to a significant extent meet U.S. based, rather the domestic demand) armed with guns smuggled in from the United States are usually considered the leading cause of the high homicide rate in Latin America, although, as the Economist notes in the case of Columbia, it is more complicated than that.

Mexico's murder rate is near a peak of about four times the U.S. rate, although it is still much lower than many other countries in Central and South America. In Mexico, the homicide rate appears to be due to warfare between drug cartels caused by the decapitation strategy of its anti-drug law enforcement effort that has splintered and destabilized existing drug cartels without putting much of a dent in the volume of the drug trade itself.

Latin America boasts just 8% of the world’s population, but it accounts for 38% of its murders. The number of criminal killings in the region came to around 140,000 people last year. . . .  

In many Colombian cities murder used to be the leading cause of death. The rate in Cali in 1994 was 124 per 100,000, four times worse than New York at its most lethal. The mayor was a surgeon who realised that murder was like a disease. Following an approach pioneered in New York and copied across the rich world, he set up “violence observatories” to study precisely how people, places and behaviour led to killings. They found that, even amid a raging drugs war, most murders resulted from drunken brawls. Restrictions on alcohol and guns helped cut murders by 35%. . . Medellín . . . targeted drug cartels. . . . In 2017 Colombia’s murder rate was 24 per 100,000, the lowest for 42 years.

Via The Economist (April 11, 2018 article).

The power vacuums caused by demobilization of the FARC and a weak government are also blamed for the still high murder rates in Columbia.

More here. Basically, cartel and kingpin organizations have been replaced by more of a domesticated mafia. Homicide is also a big problem in Brazil:

In Brazil to the south (NYT):

In Rio de Janeiro state alone, more than 5,197 people have been killed this year — far more than the 3,438 civilians killed in conflict last year in Afghanistan, according to United Nations figures.

One-quarter of those may have been killed by the state, a sign of state weakness not strength.