Violence and Drug Trafficking

#114, June 2025

A short post today, just to highlight a recent study by Brian Martin of Wake Forest University that links the rise in violence in the Caribbean Basin (which has the highest murder rates in the world) to the closure of Chile as a cocaine transit point after Pinochet took power there in 1973. The rerouting of the cocaine trade from Chile to Colombia and the Caribbean, the paper suggests, triggered a surge in violence in the mid-70s.

For the Dominican Republic, comparable data do not go back before 1991, but the homicide rate doubled in 2003-05 and remains high even as the surge abated:

The global average homicide rate was 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022.

Check out the more extensive summary at VodouEconomics.substack.com or the original paper here