Nicaragua remains one of the safest countries in Central America

February 6, 2015

Nicaragua was ranked as the seventh safest country in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 2014 Global Peace Index (GPI) by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). In this edition, the country improved eight positions from 66 to 58, out of 162 countries evaluated.

The GPI evaluates indicators such as the levels of military expenditure, its relations with neighboring countries, number of homicides, level of organized conflict and the level of respect for human rights. Among the Central American countries, Nicaragua is number three after Costa Rica (42), and Panama (57), followed by Guatemala (115), El Salvador (116), and Honduras (117).

The 2014 GPI shows that the world has become less peaceful; since 2008, 111 countries have deteriorated in levels of peace, while Nicaragua is among the 51 that have improved. According to the report, in Central America and the Caribbean, “Jamaica and Nicaragua were the strongest gainers, almost entirely on the basis of improvements in their domestic safety and security scores.”

The GPI is the world’s leading measure of national peacefulness. Now in its eighth year, it ranks 162 nations according to their ‘absence of violence’. It is developed by IEP under the guidance of an international panel of independent experts with data partly collated and calculated by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

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En español: Nicaragua se mantiene como uno de los países más seguros de Centroamérica