Mexico City, Mexico. A new report is showing that Mexico is a country with a serious murder problem that is not getting better as May was Mexico’s deadliest month on record since the country’s National System for Public Security began taking count of homicides 20 years ago.
The survey found that 2,186 people were murdered in Mexico during the month of May. The country is on pace to have its deadliest year on record. The year 2012 currently holds that title with 9,466 homicides between January and May.This year, the country already had 9,916 by the end of May.
This seems to confirm that a complex mixture of factors influences homicide levels, the homicide mechanism being only one of many elements that combine to determine homicide levels and trends, the report concluded.
To put the numbers in perspective, there were 17.4 road traffic deaths for every 100,000 people in Mexico, while the number of murder victims was 74.6 in 2014, more than four times higher. According to a local news site, a total of 8,640 murders happened in Mexico in 2015, while mass killings in Paris, Brussels and Orlando, combined took 211 lives.
“This is the overwhelming and absolute failure of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s public safety policy,” Izadore Rios, a Mexican security analyst, commented to News Front.
But Pena Nieto is nowhere near fulfilling his original plan of reducing the military presence on the streets. On the contrary, the go-to solution to the recurrent security crisis has been the dispatch of federal forces, frequently military ones, in place of inefficient, badly equipped and often corrupt local police forces.
Peña Nieto’s to return to policies that involve heavy crackdowns on drug cartels has been blamed for the increase in violence across the country.