Crime levels in Lima will start to fall in six to eighteen months – whoever wins next the upcoming elections.
Between end June 2016 and end June 2017, the wave of shootings, street attacks, house robbery and murder will decline. Whether or not the new president sends armed soldiers to patrol the streets.
It will happen because 20 years ago, lead poisoning on the streets of Lima started to reduce. It will follow a pattern seen all over the world, but apparent a little later in Peru. So buy cheap property in Callao today.
Lead poisoning has been normal in cities worldwide since the introduction of leaded petrol. But no-one realised. As cities, one by one, stopped using leaded petrol, they have seen dramatic decreases in crime – twenty years later.
In Sao Paolo, Brazil, lead in the air decreased by 65% from 1980 to 1985, as they began to fuel cars with sugar cane alcohol. So what happened to crime in Sao Paolo? It fell dramatically, twenty years later – murders more than halved from 1999 to 2007. The fall was even greater in Rio de Janeiro.
Bogota in Colombia stopped using leaded petrol in 1991. Violent crime in Bogota fell by 50% from 2001 to 2010. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, lead was banned in petrol in 1996. Violent crime fell in Buenos Aires by 50% from 2003 to 2010.
The same happened throughout the USA, state by state. Twenty years after lead levels in cities reduced, crime also fell. You can see the pattern – lead clean up started in Sao Paolo, then Colombia, then Buenos Aires. 15-20 years later, in each city, step by step, crime levels fell rapidly.
Co-incidence? Maybe. But in Europe too, as in Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires and Bogota, as in the USA, crime reduced rapidly and dramatically. In fact violent crime has been falling dramatically in much of the world in the last ten years. These diverse countries have had different policing policies, laws, and governments. But they have all changed from leaded to unleaded petrol.
Except Venezuela, one of only four countries in the world still selling leaded petrol. Still one of the most violent countries in Latin America.
In Lima, crime levels are still increasing. Lead levels in Lima streets were still rising in 1998. But from 1998 with the introduction of unleaded petrol, they began to fall rapidly.
Petrol companies continued to sell leaded petrol to Peru until 2004, eight years after Buenos Aires, 13 years after Bogota. If we can draw parallels, crime will start falling eight years later than in Buenos Aires, 13 years later than Bogota, 18 years later than Sao Paolo – around 2011, 2014, 2017.
If we take as our baseline 1998, when lead levels in Lima air peaked, and add 15-20 years, to when the damaged teenagers and young men are getting a little older and more controlled, crime levels will fall between 2013 and 2018.
With a little faith and a little optimism, that suggests that in six to eighteen months crime in Lima could start to fall. The evidence is mixed, circumstantial and with plenty of counter-indications. But it is probably more reliable than political promises.