Drug War: Violence in Mexico

Mexican embassy spokesman, Ricardo Alday, responds to a New York Times article .

NYTimes.com: "“Mexico Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe” (front page, Jan. 19) provides a sensationalist vision of what is actually happening in Mexico. I disagree with the essential premise of the article: that criminal violence has expanded geographically.

Deaths related to rivalries between criminal gangs remain geographically concentrated. From January to September 2011, 55.7 percent of all deaths related to rivalry between criminal organizations took place in just 5 out of 32 states: Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon.

Your article cherry-picks data in the case of municipalities. We simply do not agree that violence is spreading to more cities: 91.6 percent of the country’s 2,441 municipalities do not experience a serious public security problem, defined by the benchmark of more than 10 organized crime-related homicides a year." read more