The 50 most violent cities in the world

Reuters

Police officers patrolling in the Nordeste de Amaralina slum complex in Salvador, Bahia State, in 2013.

Latin America holds the ignominious distinction of having the most cities on Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security's annual ranking of the world's most violent cities for 2016.

Of the 50 cities on the list, 43 are in Latin America, including 19 in Brazil, eight in Mexico, and seven in Venezuela.

The region's violence is in large part drug related, driven by traffickers and supplemented by gang wars, political instability, and widespread poverty that has been exacerbated by sluggish economic growth or economic reversals.

The council's ranking contains cities with populations of more than 300,000 and does not count deaths in combat zones or cities with unavailable data, so some dangerous cities don't appear on the list

In some cases, the Council has determined homicide rates through estimates based on incomplete data.

In Venezuela, for example, the government has not consistently released homicide data (though it did this year), so to find the rate for Caracas, the Council made an estimate based on entries at the Bello Monte morgue - though, as the Council admits, that morgue receives bodies from an area much larger than Caracas itself.