[MichaelGG]

Guatemala numbers are less because they only count it as homicide if someone dies at the scene. If you manage to get into a hospital then die, it's not in the stats.

There's no "fine tuning" of police operations in Guatemala. Everyone is incompetent, and the UN and other "human rights" groups fuck it up even more. Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. Said criminals continue to run gangs from inside prisons. Most "good" people just leave as soon as they can. My ex finally called it quits when Telefonica, the multinational phone company, got extorted. Someone calls them up, tells them they owe $X/week, and then just starts shooting employees. It's getting worse, not better.

The only hope I've had here in recent times was several people, including young women, talking fondly about Rios Montt and how they wish a leader would come clean stuff up. Even a semi-indigenous person told me that (despite him supposedly being genocidal). Unfortunately GT has a preference for electing nitwits that can't even steal without getting caught. That's how incompetent they are. So it's unsure if we'll ever see a strong ruler come back in. But now more than ever are people ready for that.

Turns out, when you can't safely walk around, when you can't start a business because any day you'll get a phone call that means either bankruptcy, death, or exile, yeah damn right you start preferring a military rule. As one woman told me, "at least I could walk anywhere, anytime with my purse and no one ever troubled me".

[lostlogin]

> Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution.

This is a good thing usually. What are you meaning?

[didYouNotRead]

The implicit idea is that the courts uphold the letter of the law (an unnatural death is always somehow murder, prosecute impoverished people with a blanket policy of lenghty jail terms for any manslaughter at a minimum) without considering the spirit of the law (maybe some murders should be counted as self-defense, given that the constant ambient background noise of implicit corruption and disorganized chaos creates an environment of death by a thousand small cuts, making it profoundly difficult to obey the rules perfectly while keeping one’s head above the proverbial water).

[MichaelGG]

It is a good thing in countries that are fairly low crime. In places where the criminals operate with impunity, we need a bit more reactive violence. If the police are useless, criminals should at least be worried about being summarily executed during their attacks on other citizens. Instead, it's backwards. Law abiding citizens have no recourse.

Civil liberties aren't worth much when you can't freely travel and live in the first place. Sure, a few innocents will lose out with an abridged justice system. But that's already happening at a high rate.

And sure, they could also just turn the country around. Get foreign countries to run ministries, get a whole new police force, increase resources to the justice system 10-fold. But tell me what's more probable, that, or just taking a hard stance, have swift summary justice and giving citizens strong defence rights?