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Comparing the overall murder rate for an entire country to the murder rate of an urban area doesn't provide an accurate picture. For example, although there are urban areas in the U.S. with high murder rates, overall, the national murder rate in the U.S. is 4.88, almost 12 times lower than that of Venezuela.
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Absolutely.
I didn't compare it to give an accurate country-by-country picture, I did it to make it understandable that Venezuela is not some apocalyptic hell-hole, but it's actually not more violent (in average) than some cities in the US.
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If we use murder rate as the criterion for violent places then Venezuela is one of the three most violent places in the world.
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Which clearly shows that's not the right criteria to be used.
Let me put it in perspective:
Like I said, Caracas is the most violent city in the world. Now, contrarily to the US, where population is spread more evenly, Venezuela has 31 milion people (give or take), while Caracas (the whole metropolitan area) has over 5 million. That means about 1/6 of Venezuela's population lives in the "most dangerous city in the world", so when you're saying "Venezuela's murder rate", that number is highly influenced by Caracas' murder rate. Same happens in Colombia (for what I've been told), and in Argentina (and I can testify for it). So that murder rate is not really representative of what life is like, in most of the country.