LA Times Blogs: Richard Fausset. MEXICO CITY -- A study has found that Mexico’s homicide rate rose for the fourth year in a row in 2011, this time by 5.6% compared with the previous year -- a fact that will come as little surprise to Mexicans who continue to be bombarded each morning with the latest stomach-turning details of the country’s drug war.
What is less clear, however, is what the new numbers say about outgoing President Felipe Calderon’s controversial and nearly 6-year-old decision to deploy the military to battle the country’s entrenched drug-trafficking gangs.
Is this the short-term pain that Mexico must endure in order to achieve a long-term peace? Or are the increased slayings the inevitable -- and ineluctable -- result of a strategy that Calderon’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, has essentially promised to continue, with a few alterations?
The new data, released this week by Mexico’s statistics and geography institute, show that 27,199 people were killed in Mexico last year -- or 24 homicides per 100,000 people. The rate in 2007 was 8 per 100,000. Last year it was 23 per 100,000. Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
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