The 1978 statistics presented in this publication cover the 1950-1977 period. Some were obtained in reply to an ILANUD survey of Latin American governments, while others were collected in the field. Coded and tabulated manually, the data were classified to reflect crime patterns, crime rates, and geographic distributions of the various types of crime. The information is also presented in graph form. The countries were divided into five zones: (1) Central America and Mexico (including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Mexico); (2) the Caribbean (Dominica, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas); (3) the Andean zone (Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador); (4) the Southern tip of the hemisphere (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay); and (5) the rest of Latin America (including Brazil, Paraguay, and Guyana). The statistical data are arranged into three broad topics representing the three consecutive stages of the criminal process; i.e., law enforcement, criminal justice delivery (courts), and corrections. Despite their serious inherent limitations, including the fact that they reflect only reported crimes and the bias and lack of uniformity of reporting sources, these crime statistics are a reflection of the criminological realities and a basis for criminal policies. A classification of crimes in the five geographic zones surveyed is appended.