International crime reporter Donal MacIntyre selects his top 10 tough neighbourhoods and trawls the bloody streets from Mexico to New Orleans to see the decay and destruction at play in some of the most hazardous places on earth.
1. Ciudad Juarez
The Mexican border town tops the list of the world’s most dangerous neighbourhoods. The $90billion U.S. drug trade fuels the murder and mayhem in this cartel-run district. Added to that, the rape and murder of women on an unprecedented scale, and you have the world’s most dangerous neighbourhood.
2. San Pedro Sula
San Pedro Sula, the murder capital of the world, is nearly a brother in arms to its Mexican counterpart with its death toll also closely linked to the demand for cocaine in the U.S. The deportations from American prisons of illegal immigrants and members of feared gangs MS-13 and Mara 18 back to Honduras has spawned a gang culture and created a killing field within the city limits. It made headlines this week when a teenage beauty queen, Miss Honduras Maria Jose Alvarado and her sister, were gunned down an hour from San Pedro Sula. The chief suspect is a jealous boyfriend enraged when she danced with another man. In a city where a woman is murdered every 13 hours, it’s a common event.
3. Cali
The home of the Cali Cartel, Cali has been a byword for danger over three decades. In between the predictable drug business murders, left and right-wing militias battle it out for supremacy. FARC, the IRA-instructed left-wing organisation, has a particular foothold here. Planted bombs, kidnappings and terror attacks are part of daily life.
4. Belem
Belem, the main port on the Amazon, is a metropolis with a murder rate that cannot be accurately ascertained. The Brazilian city’s Klondyke reputation as a route for illicit drugs, valuable timber and the massacre of native indigenous Indians makes for a dangerous town.
5. Caracas
Caracas has a murder rate 100 times that of Ireland, most of which go unsolved. The capital of Venezuela is a bustling, vibrant city, but at the wrong time and in the wrong place, murder and violence is rampant and raw.
6. New Orleans
Just 80 miles away from Baton Rouge, also a high-ranking danger zone, New Orleans remains the most volatile and the most high profile of U.S. crime capitals. The murder rate ranks in the top 17 of murder capitals, but killings had exceeded 2013’s levels already by October this year. Police crime tape is a regular sight here and the discord around the destruction of the city by Hurricane Katrina did little to harmonise the city and reduce its crime rate.
7. Motor City, Detroit
You’ve got a serious problem in a city where the local police chief calls on law-citizens to arm themselves with concealed weapons to protect themselves against criminals. Motor City, a city within a city, has the highest levels of violence in any U.S. urban area. With houses going for as little as $500, and the city recovering from bankruptcy and unable to afford a sufficient police force, citizens have to defend themselves with their own weapons, mirroring a post-apocalyptic Hollywood movie script.
8. Cape Flats, Cape Town
The plague of methamphetamine or Tik (street name) and the legacy of apartheid, poverty and territorial disputes in the townships have made this part of the southern South African city of Cape Town a no-go area at night. Car-jackings and thefts often end up in murder unnecessarily, but when you can buy a gun for less than €25, then it is easy to understand why life is so cheap.
9. Tivoli Gardens, Kingston
In Jamaica, paradise comes with the visible cost of armed guards on key business outlets and banks in the country’s capital, Kingston. Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston was home to Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, the so called ‘president of the ghetto’ who ran the drugs trade and a great deal of the politicians, in this country. He was the ‘don’ and the head of the ‘International Shower Posse’ until the DEA extradited him on threat of armed invasion into the ghetto. His troops and young victims still run this area and it’s still a no-go zone for the security forces.
10. Guatemala City
In 2009, during the insurgency in Iraq, fewer civilians were killed in that war zone than were shot, stabbed or beaten to death in Guatemala city and only three per cent were solved. With 25 murders a week, currently it more than stakes its dubious claim to this top ten. The end of a civil war in 1996 resulted in a general amnesty for a range of killers and death squads, particularly those in the security apparatus and now they have mutated into highly-connected criminal businesses perpetuating the body count and the violence in this city and the country.
