http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/01/holy-chavistas-venezuela-violent-deaths.html [rquoter]Numbers from icasualties.org Thanks to Gringo for pointing this out... Venezuelan Politics blog reported that an average 33 Venezuelans were murdered each day last year, which comes to 1000 murders per month. Iraq’s and Venezuela’s populations are roughly comparable: 27.5 million versus 27.7 million. In the last three months, there have been 1498 civilian fatalities in Iraq. During this same time, roughly 3000 Venezuelans have been murdered. For the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi. It looks like its time for Hugo to put more attention on his abysmal security situation and less attention on Hollywood. [/rquoter]
Just for comparison, I'd be interested in seeing the civilian murder figures for Iraq pre-2003 and for Venezuela pre-Chavez
This is a horrible little piece of analysis. For starters, these numbers don't include the normal murder rate in Iraq - that's only Iraqi deaths attributed to the war. The comparative number in Venezuela would be civilians killed in political violence - not murder. Second, the icasualties site, if you actually read it, includes this little disclaimer with it's numbers: http://icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx This is not a complete list, nor can we verify these totals. This is simply a compilation of deaths reported by news agencies. Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are much higher than the numbers recorded on this site. Basically, it only counts things that are reported in the news - and it links to each article it references. If you think that every single death in Iraq is reported by some news agency, well.. wow. Those numbers are useful as a comparative violence tracker - looking at reports from Dec 2006 vs Dec 2007 for example to see trends, but not as actual comprehensive numbers.
yeah, but then for the current stats of iraq we'd also have to include all the blackwater-esqe murders, too... in any case, i doubt the reported stats for either country are actually accurate....they're more likely drastically under-reported......also it's good that the civilian murders in iraq are starting to trend down but if you still look at 2007 on the whole, looks like there were a lot more iraqi murders than in venezuela......so it's really not much for us to get all excited about at this point... that being said, i hope same time next year you'll be able to still tell us about this downtrending in iraq..
How many Americans are the cause of the deaths in Venezuela? How many Americans are dying in Venezuela?
You never know what the real numbers are under tyranny, the tyrants control the information. Although, apparently Saddam did keep pretty good records of the people he tortured and murdered...guess the CIA guys learned something from that. It would be beneficial to know whether the numbers of atrocities are higher in a state of tyranny or in a state of chaos. Then people would know which side to join. I'd of course prefer the middle ground of civil stability but it doesn't look like the monkeys with guns are ever going to ever arrive at that conclusion.