By Robert Muggah and Katherine Aguirre
Americas Quarterly, April 21, 2025
RIO DE JANEIRO — Earlier this month, Juliette Dorson, a 50-year-old Haitian caterer, was shot while working an event in Port-au-Prince. Her business partner, Luc, died in the attack. She survived, but barely. For residents of Haiti’s capital, such horrors are tragically routine. Gangs now control four-fifths of the city, wielding not just pistols and assault rifles but sniper rifles and belt-fed machine guns. Few of these weapons are made locally. Most are smuggled from the United States.
Haiti now registers the highest homicide rate on Earth. But the island nation is far from an outlier. Latin America and the Caribbean, home to just 8% of the world’s population, accounts for roughly one-third of its murders. Unlike war zones such as Sudan or Ukraine, the region’s bloodshed occurs in the absence of declared conflict. It is driven instead by organized crime—and by the guns that make violence more lethal.
Image information source: U.S. Government Accountability Office analysis of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives data
