What are my chances of dying while travelling??

My Father, bless him, is paranoid that I will be killed in Columbia and doesn’t want me to go. According to his source, “a book he is reading by Jeffrey Archer”, there are 25 murders in the Capital, Bogota every day… That’s 9,815 a year!! Happily that is no longer true and if we look here we see the murder rate in 2006 was 18,8 for every 100,000 inhabitants. That’s dropped from 81,2 for every 100,000 in 1993. The capital’s population is around 8,5m so we have about 1600 murders a year, and a figure that is likely to have be dropping in the last 4 years. Incidentally, the murder rate for the whole country was 33/100,000 in 2006 so one could argue the capital is more dangerous than the rest of the country.

So, what are my chances of meeting a grisly end in the Romantic streets of old Cartagena.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a handy website that details the advise they give to British Nationals travelling around the world and it reveals that in 2008 out of all the 18,000 British tourist that visited only one was killed. That’s killed, not necessarily murdered… Can you really make a decent argument out of a figure that has only one statistic?

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

What is clear is that tourists (at least not British ones) are not dropping like flies in hails of bullets any more. It seems that people have very long memories when it comes to dangerous places. When I visited Uganda in 2006 and mentioned to a few people that I might go over to Rwanda, everyone was terrified for my life. I ended up near the border and didn’t have time to go, but I met several people who said it was perfectly safe. The genocide was 12 years earlier but in most people’s minds there were still bodies piled up on the street and gangs of machete wielding thugs roaming the streets. Columbia still has problems but the usual perception is that it’s still very dangerous.

The FCO site has a list of countries it advises against travel to as well as figures for deaths and other problems in nearly every country in the world. I decided to do a little digging…

Tags: columbia, tourist murders, safest country, statistics, crime