This Is The Most Dangerous Country In The World To Visit

There's a case to be made that the United States is secretly the most dangerous nation on Earth. Not because of rampant gun violence but rather its damnable knack for making other nations dangerous through disastrous interventions masquerading as benevolence. Take, for example, El Salvador, which the World Economic Forum ranked as the world's most dangerous country not at war in 2018.

As the Nation details, the United States funded right-wing death squads to fight Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador during the 1980s. Seventy-five thousand civilians died and the United Nations Truth Commission determined that 85 percent of the torture, kidnappings, and killings committed during El Salvador's Civil War were committed by government forces which included the U.S.-trained death squads and paramilitaries. According to Vice, the violence from this period fueled future chaos in El Salvador and other Central American countries.

But per the Independent, the Travel Risk Map's lists Libya as being among the most dangerous countries on the planet to visit in 2020, alongside Somalia, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, based on estimations of medical, security, and road risks posed to potential visitors. The Intercept reports that President Barack Obama reluctantly invaded the country to take down dictator Muammar Gaddafi at the urging of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The rationale was to protect civilians during an uprising, but Obama later called his failure to plan for the aftermath the worst blunder of his presidency, lamenting that "Libya is a mess."

To be clear, Libya was an outlandish dystopia under eccentric despot Muammar Gaddafi. A man who infamously unleashed a torrent of thunderous 15-to-20-second farts during a BBC interview, injected his face with his own belly fat, and was infatuated with ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gaddafi was an oddball "Bond villain" who literally owned a golden gun, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. He also ruthlessly murdered and imprisoned opponents. 

The Guardian writes that Gaddafi ordered the torture, arrest, and shelling of civilians. So when the U.S. assisted in ousting the dictator during the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, the outcome was hailed as a "liberation." After the gruesome demise of Gaddafi, who was violated with a knife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came, we saw, he died." But nobody laughed at the horrors that followed. 

As Time describes, Libya devolved into a failed, lawless state with an entrenched slave trade. In 2017, a video surfaced of people being auctioned for $400. That year, between 400,000 and a million migrants searching for a way to cross the Mediterranean were held at detention centers where murder, robbery, and rape ran rampant. Libya is certainly far from liberated. In 2019, a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court told the UN Security Council that a "cycle of violence, atrocities and impunity" persisted in Libya as unaccountable combatants killed civilians, targeted migrants, attacked medical facilities and detention centers, and conducted "summary executions" of enemy fighters.