Central America: Drug Trafficking and Death Tolls

Mexican Drug Violence Spreads Across Central America

November 27, 2011 | NPR

Nick Miroff

Central America now has the highest homicide rate in the world. Gabriela Ramírez is comforted at the funeral of her husband, Francisco Ortiz Franco, an editor of Zeta, a muckraking weekly in Tijuana, Mexico. Image by Knight Foundation, Flickr. Mexico, 2010.

The drug war in Mexico is taking a terrible toll in Central America. The region now has the highest homicide rate in the world, according to a new UN report, as traffickers move more and more U.S.-bound cocaine through Central America's struggling, weak states.