Dominican Republic tops traffic death rate; Brazil is fatality king, EFE reports

Rio de Janeiro.- Dominican Republic’s 41.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants tops the list of countries with the most traffic violence, but whose absolute number of deaths of 4,143 in 2010, is nearly 10 times fewer than in Brazil,EFE reports.

The chilling figure appears in the World Health Organization (WHO) report which says that of a total of 980,838 traffic accident deaths in Brazil between 1980 and 2011, the number of victims reached a record 43,256 last year, according to a study released today by the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

The number of victims on streets and highways more than doubled from 20,203 in 1980 to 43,256 in 2011, “partly because of the increase in the number of vehicles but also from the omissions of authorities,” says the study by Flacso and the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies (Cebela).

"Institutions which by legal mandate should assume responsibility for safe mobility are exempted from doing so, blaming the victims" said the sociologist Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, Coordinator of studies on violence at Flacso and author of the report, quoted by EFE.

The study uses Health Ministry data and shows a initial success when a more rigorous transit code took effect in 1998, but has already lost its effect.