The VAPF dataset is currently under construction, but as soon as we can, we hope to make our data available to the public.
Round 1
Countries Included: Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua
These are the three countries were the VAPF project PI, Laura Blume, conducted fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation (for more on her work click here.) As a result, this was the first data she collated for the VAPF project.
Years Included: 2008 - 2022
Categories of Public Figures Included: Politicians, Activists, Judicial Workers (judges, lawyers, prosecutors) and Media Workers (e.g., journalists, radio hosts).
Status: We are almost finished with the preliminary verification of all rows in Round 1 of the data. Once each row has been double-checked for accuracy, we hope to make this round of data available.
These are the three countries were the VAPF project PI, Laura Blume, conducted fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation (for more on her work click here.) As a result, this was the first data she collated for the VAPF project.
Years Included: 2008 - 2022
Categories of Public Figures Included: Politicians, Activists, Judicial Workers (judges, lawyers, prosecutors) and Media Workers (e.g., journalists, radio hosts).
Status: We are almost finished with the preliminary verification of all rows in Round 1 of the data. Once each row has been double-checked for accuracy, we hope to make this round of data available.
Round 2
Countries Included: El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Belize
Years Included: 2008 - 2022
Categories of Public Figures Included: Politicians, Activists, Judicial Workers (judges, lawyers, prosecutors) and Media Workers (e.g., journalists, radio hosts).
Status: Data collection and coding is on-going.
Years Included: 2008 - 2022
Categories of Public Figures Included: Politicians, Activists, Judicial Workers (judges, lawyers, prosecutors) and Media Workers (e.g., journalists, radio hosts).
Status: Data collection and coding is on-going.
Future Plans & Additional Rounds of VAPF Data
Our priority right now is to finish coding and verifying all lethal violence incidents against politicians, judicial workers, media workers, and activists over the course of 15 years (2008 – 2022) in the 7 countries in Central America. Once we have finished with these two initial rounds, we hope to expand the dataset to include data back to 2000 for all these countries. We also plan to expand the categories of public figures we include. We hope to include murders of security personnel (police and military figures involved in domestic law enforcement). As part of our coding of activists’ murders, we have also begun collating data on individuals killed at protests in the region. While we have not coded first time protesters as “activists,” their deaths nonetheless are important, and we hope to include protesters in subsequent rounds of data collection. Additionally, while we like to hope that the need for the VAPF dataset will go away due to these lethal attacks decreasing in the future, until that happens, we plan to update and continuing including new years of data into the dataset. Lastly, the VAPF dataset currently only includes incidents of public figures who have been murdered, but many more have suffered other forms of violence (kidnapping, violent threats, assassination attempts, etc.) and we hope in future to be able to collate data on these non-lethal attacks as well.
