Venezuela murder rate soars - Telegraph.co.uk

But according to the Observatory, a think tank set up by public and private universities, it now has a murder rate of 73 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 67 in 2011.

The rate is well above neighbouring Colombia, and Mexico which has been engaged in a bloody drug war, and is closing in on Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate.

There are more murders in Venezuela than in the United States and the 27 countries of the European Union combined. In Caracas the murder rate is more than 200 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Observatory said: "Killings have become a way of executing property crimes, a mechanism to resolve personal conflicts and a way to apply private justice."

President Hugo Chavez, who is recovering from cancer surgery in Cuba, rarely talks about violent crime.

In 2010 when the newspaper El Nacional published a picture of a dozen murder victims at a morgue, a court ordered the newspaper to stop publishing images of violence.

Venezuela's murder rate has soared since Chavez took office in 1999, growing from 4,450 murders in 1998 Criminologists expected the rate to fall with decreasing poverty, but income inequality has fallen dramatically and murders are going up.

In a report earlier this year The Brookings Institution said: "No one would guess Venezuela's crime crisis from looking at these (poverty) figures.

Above all, it offers a cautionary tale about the limits of easy explanations, prescriptions and predictions when it comes to crime."

Estimates put the number of legal and illegal firearms in circulation at between nine and 15 million, in a country of 29 million people.

In June this year the government banned private gun ownership, meaning only the army police and security groups could buy them. It also offered an amnesty allowing people to give up illegal firearms.

Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, announced the number of murders there fell 19 per cent this year to the lowest level since records began in 1963.

There were a total of 414 homicides in 2012, compared to 515 last year. In 1990, the city saw more than 2,260 murders.