Public Perceptions Exacerbate Security Problems in Mexico

By Patrick Corcoran
InSight Crime

Mexico's newest survey of popular perceptions of public security reveals a country of citizens pessimistic about their physical integrity and distrustful of their leaders, as well as a government unable to make meaningful advances.

As Excelsior recently reported, the National Survey on Victimization and Perception of Public Security highlights a series of significant challenges for Mexico's government, both in the realm of public relations and in terms of actually improving the institutions charged with combating crime.

According to INEGI, the statistical agency charged with carrying out the poll, Mexican citizens are highly unlikely to report crimes they see. The national average of reported crimes is just 12.2 percent of the total, but in the state of Guerrero, which registered the lowest such level in the country, the rate of reporting dropped all the way to 6.7 percent. (As a comparison, in a recent study the US Bureau of Justice Statistics said that a little more than half of all violent crimes were not reported in the United States.)

See also: Mexico News and Profiles

In what are both a cause and a consequence of the poor rates of reporting crimes, Mexican citizens have very pessimistic attitudes about the likelihood of crimes being punished. Across the country, 83 percent believe that crime is rarely or never punished. That figure rises to 94.5 percent in Mexico City and 90.4 percent in the State of Mexico. Nowhere in the country is it lower than in Yucatan, where, despite being one of the nation's safest states, 69 percent perceive crime as being rarely or never punished.

Mexico Goes After the Narcos—Before They Join the Gangs

Time

By Ioan Grillo and Dolly Mascareñas / Nezahualcóyotl
Feb. 25, 2013

The gunshots at dawn woke residents of the cinder block homes in Nezahualcóyotl, a working-class city on the edge of the Mexican capital, making a few people duck for cover behind their beds. When they finally peered out their windows, they saw the corpses of two young men, one stacked over the other, besides a threatening note written on cardboard and signed by the drug cartel called La Familia. The double murder, which took place on Feb. 16, was the latest in a series of killings that have brought the drug war to the edges of Mexico City – the mountain capital that has long been viewed as a safe haven from cartel violence ravaging other parts of Mexico.

Recently installed President Enrique Peña Nieto hopes to reverse this trend with a new anti crime strategy – transforming poor neighborhoods like Nezahualcóyotl where cartels make their bastions and preventing young people from joining their criminal armies. On Feb. 12, Peña Nieto announced there would be more than $9 billion for crime prevention aimed at 57 hotspots. “We must put special emphasis on prevention, because we can’t only keep employing more sophisticated weapons, better equipment, more police, a higher presence of the armed forces in the country as the only form of combating organized crime,” Peña Nieto said. Rather than just shooting or incarcerating the seemingly endless ranks of cartel gunmen, the president hopes to stop young people from becoming assassins in the first place.  Read more.