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According to the Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security's annual ranking, about 80% of the most dangerous cities are in the American continent.
Is there a political explanation to this? Are the people there more aggressive? Drugs are a worldwide problem, why are so many of these countries in a drug war (against the government, or among criminal organizations)?
Coca leaf is native to South America and grows best there, so that's where the cocaine comes from. Not only does this produce a huge amount of profit for organised crime, the drug itself promotes aggression. Almost all the drug wars are primarily concerned with cocaine and secondly with marijuana which also grows well there.
Latin America suffered brutality from Cortez onwards. Many of the smaller states had to fight wars of independence; Haiti was made to pay reparations to France for freeing its slaves, for example.
After World War 2, the US made a practice of opposing any government in the south that it considered too left wing. Frequently a democratically elected socialist government would be violently overthrown by CIA-backed forces and replaced with a dictatorship. See e.g. Guatemala from Wikipedia:
In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was toppled by U.S.-backed forces led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who invaded from Honduras. Assigned by the Eisenhower administration, this military opposition was armed, trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (see Operation PBSUCCESS). The directors of United Fruit Company (UFCO) had lobbied to convince the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Colonel Arbenz intended to align Guatemala with the Soviet Bloc.
The resulting weak but brutal governments and ongoing wars with rebel groups have consumed many of the past decades. The war with FARC has been going on since 1964, for example. The Colombian right-wing militia are strong enough to kill a lot of people but not strong enough to actually end the conflict. Perhaps unsurprising in a large country of trackless jungle.
Because they're not at war.
Referencing this paper, Wikipedia clarifies the methodology:
The following 50 cities have the highest murder rates in the world of all cities not at war, with a population of at least 300,000 people
If cities within warring nations were including, the rankings would change. For example, in Damascus (population 1.7 million) 1,600 civilians were reportedly killed between February 18 until March 21 2018 -- the death toll from that one month alone would put it at fourth place.
Whether these deaths should be considered murders for this purpose is perhaps unclear -- but for the purposes of deciding which cities are "the most violent in the world" or "the most dangerous cities in the world", it may become more clear.
To be explicitly clear: If Venezuela invaded Mexico tomorrow, they would instantly have zero cities on this list.
pjc50's answer is good. I would add that proximity to the world's largest gun manufacturer - the United States, makes the flow of guns to the Central Americas much easier.
This opinion piece explains how the Cold War affected and the US affects gun ownership in Central and South America.
During the 1980s, El Salvador was the single largest recipient of U.S. military hardware and weaponry in the Western Hemisphere
A good example [...] can be found in the case of a Salvadoran officer who was sentenced in November for selling about 50 weapons on the black market ..
Mexico [...] has an estimated influx of more than 212,000 illegal firearms from the U.S. each year owing to straw purchases
With Russian support, Venezuela expanded its third-generation AK-47 manufacturing capabilities
