Despite drug war, Mexico is safer
By The Associated Press
MEXICO CITY—Decapitated bodies dumped on the streets, drug-war shootings and regular attacks on police have obscured a significant fact: A falling homicide rate means people in Mexico are less likely to die violently now than they were more than a decade ago. It also means tourists as well as locals may be safer than many believe. In Fact they may be safer than in the US.
Mexico City's homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C.
Yet many Americans are leery of visiting Mexico at all. Drug violence and the swine flu outbreak contributed to a 12.5 percent decline in air travel to Mexico by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, a blow to Mexico's third-largest source of foreign income.
Mexico, Colombia and Haiti are the only countries in the hemisphere subject to a U.S. government advisory warning travelers about violence, even though homicide rates in many Latin American countries are far higher.
"What we hear is, 'Oh the drug war! The dead people on the streets, and the policeman losing his head,'" said Tobias Schluter, 34, a civil engineer from Berlin having a beer at a cafe behind Mexico City's 16th-century cathedral. "But we don't see it. We haven't heard a gunshot or anything."
Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.
By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.
Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.
"In terms of security, we are like those women who aren't overweight but when they look in the mirror, they think they're fat," said Luis de la Barreda, director of the Citizens' Institute. "We are an unsafe country, but we think we are much more unsafe that we really are."
Of course, drug violence has turned some places in Mexico, including the U.S. border region and some parts of the Pacific coast, into near-war zones since President Felipe Calderon intensified the war against cartels with a massive troop deployment in 2006. That has made Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, among the most dangerous cities in the world.
"The violence, homicides and cruel and inhuman assassinations, which fill the pages of our media, make us feel that there has been much more violence since this war against drug trafficking," said Bishop Miguel Alba Diaz of La Paz, a vacation city at the tip of the Baja California peninsula.
Mexico's violence is often more shocking than elsewhere in Latin America because powerful cartels go to extremes to intimidate the government and rival smugglers.
In just one week in December, the severed heads of six police investigators were dumped in a public plaza, kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva died in a two-hour shootout with troops at a luxury apartment complex in a resort city and gunmen slaughtered the family of the only marine killed in that battle.
In the new year, it's become even more grotesque. Three weeks ago, a victim's face was peeled from his skull and sewn onto a soccer ball. Days later, the remains of 41-year-old former police officer were divided into two separate ice chests.
Authorities say the vast majority of victims are drug suspects, but bystanders, including children, sometimes get caught in the crossfire.
Mexico has the same problems with corrupt police, gang violence and poverty as other Latin American countries with higher homicide rates. So why the decline in murders?
Experts say while drug violence is up, land disputes have eased. Many farmers have migrated to the cities or abroad and the government has pushed to resolve the land disputes, some centuries old.
During the height of the Zapatista uprising in the mid 1990s—a rebellion fueled by land conflicts—southern Chiapas state had a rate of nearly 40 per 100,000 people with 1,000 homicides a year. By 2008, that fell to 8 per 100,000 people with 364 killings.
De la Barreda attributes the downward trend to a general improvement in Mexico's quality of life. More Mexicans have joined the ranks of the middle class in the past two decades, while education levels and life expectancy have also risen.
Critics of Calderon's drug war say his frontal assault on cartels is giving Mexico a reputation as a violent country but doing little to stop the drug gangs' work.
"It's a bad international image that affects foreign tourism and foreign investment," said Jose Luis Pineyro, a sociologist at Mexico's Autonomous Metropolitan University who has studied the drug war.
Drug violence has encroached on the resort towns of Zihuatanejo, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta and Cancun. The millions of foreign tourists who visit each year are almost never targeted, but a handful have gotten caught in the crossfire. In 2007, two Canadians were grazed by bullets when someone fired into a hotel lobby in Acapulco. In January, a Canadian couple was shot and wounded in a robbery attempt just outside Zihuatanejo.
The U.S. State Department travel alert says dozens of U.S. citizens living in Mexico have been kidnapped over the years, and warns Americans against traveling to the states of Chihuahua and Michoacan.
Chihuahua, home to Ciudad Juarez, had a horrifying homicide rate of 173 per 100,000 in the city of 1.3 million, or more than 2,500 murders last year.
Michoacan, famed for its Monarch butterfly refuge, Day of the Dead celebrations and picturesque colonial capital, is now also widely known as the place where five heads rolled across a dance floor. Drug violence is blamed for many of the state's 660 killings last year.
But in many parts of Mexico, villages are more tranquil than ever—a fact that retired nurse Marilyn Wells struggles to drive home with her American friends back home in LeMars, Iowa.
"'We're OK, there's no problem,'" Wells said she tells friends about the home she bought four years ago in Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. "I don't feel any less safe down here than I did before."

USAToday Blew It

There is an article in the August 3, 2010 USAToday by Chris Hawley that never should have been printed. It is titled, Mexico's violence not as widespread as seems." The article is a total hatchet job. The writer got it all wrong because he did not understand the statistics he was looking at. Let me explain.

Mexico does not report its crime statistics the same way the FBI reports US crime statistics. When the FBI reports "homicide rates," it is reporting all homicides. Homicides include various categories of murders and various categories of manslaughter. Just for a frame of reference, the homicide rate in the US for 2009, as reported by the FBI, is 5.0 per 100,000 of population. That is the lowest it has been over the past 21 years.

Mexico reports murders and manslaughter as two separate and distinct categories: HOMICIDIOS CULPOSOS DEL ORDEN COMÚN and HOMICIDIOS DOLOSOS. HOMICIDIOS CULPOSOS DEL ORDEN COMÚN means "manslaughter". HOMICIDIOS DOLOSOS means "murder". In order to compare the FBI statistics on homicide rates to Mexican statistics on homicide rates, the two Mexican categories must be added together.

USAToday did not do that. Instead, they compared the FBI statistics to only the HOMICIDIOS DOLOSOS statistics. Here is an example of what was printed in the article:

•The state with the lowest murder rate is Yucatán, the Gulf of Mexico state known for its beaches and Mayan ruins. Its murder rate of 2 per 100,000 was comparable to Wyoming and Montana.

If USAToday had been prescient enough to do an apples-to-apples comparison, they would have discovered that the homicide rate for Yucatán is 11 per 100,000, when both murders and manslaughters are counted, and that just happens to be higher than the worse state in the US, Louisiana. Louisiana had 8.84 per 100,000. So, it turns out the Mexican state with the LOWEST murder rate is still 25% greater than the highest state in the US.

Based upon figures just released by Mexico last October, the murder rate in Mexico is 5 TIMES the murder rate in the US.

If you google the FBI murder rate (I'd give the source, but it's not possible on this site), you'll find that the Library Index states:

"The FBI defines murder and non-negligent manslaughter as "the willful (non-negligent) killing of one human being by another." The figures for murder do not include suicides, accidents, or justifiable homicides either by citizens or law enforcement officers. " That, I assume, means when a citizen of law enforcement officer kills someone in self defense.

The FBI's site, itself, states that "non-negligent manslaughter" events are, in fact, included in the murder rates they list for various U.S. cities. The FBI site goes on to state that comparing cities on the basis of the figures is a difficult thing to do because of differences in the way crimes are reported from city to city--however, manslaughter is included in the figures they use as long as it is not the result of negligence.

An additional interesting note can be found in the New Orleans paper May 13, 2010:
V.I. Answer Desk: How Does V.I. Murder Rate Compare?
By Source Staff — May 13, 2010
Source reader Julie King writes to ask about the territory's murder rate: "I had read somewhere recently that the V.I. has a higher murder rate than Mexico. Is this true? Where do we stand with our murder rate as compared to the rest of the U.S. and the rest of the world?"

Julie,
In a January 2010 article entitled, "Drugs, Gangs and Guns Fueling Caribbean-wide Crime Surge," The Source reported: "For a population of between 100,000 and 110,000 residents, the 56 homicides committed in the U.S. Virgin Islands last year pushed the territory alongside Jamaica and Trinidad, which have jockeyed several years running for the dubious title of 'murder capital of the world.'” So, yes, our murder rate is higher than Mexico's; and with 32 homicides in the territory in 2010 already, that rate could potentially climb.

The territory's murder rate is almost equal with America's homicide capital, New Orleans, which registered 64 murders per 100,000 people (according to FBI figures quoted in the Times-Picayune). The overall U.S. murder rate is 5.4 murders per 100,000 people.

Would you care to post the homicide rate in Pago Pago? It may have some relevance to your post.

Nothhing but the facts!!!

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/201012.danelo.mexico.html

How about these facts?

http://blog.diegovalle.net/201...nts-in-drug-war.html