But apparently neither prayer nor police will keep down the murder rate. In the nine days of 2013, we've had eight murders - and one shooting victim, Marco Valle remains in a very critical condition on life support.
Police still have not released the official crime statistics for 2012 - so we are still going with the media's figures which show 145 murders, the most ever. That leaves Belize with one of the highest murder rates in this hemisphere.
According to sources culled from the internet, Honduras is at the top with 80 homicides per one hundred thousand inhabitants, Venezuela is second with 73 per hundred thousand inhabitants, the US Virgin Islands is third with 60 per hundred thousand, Salvador is next with 41.3, and Belize rounds out the top five with 40.7.
Now this is an adjusted figure - last week we told you it was 46.6 - but that was based on the 2010 Belize census figure which puts this country's population at only 313,000.
But to get the rates in all those countries we used the World Bank estimate of figures - and so to make the comparison uniform, we used their figure for Belize as well, which is 356,000 inhabitants - bringing the murder rate down to 40.6 homicides per one hundred thousand inhabitants.
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