A Look At Who Is Being Killed In Mexico

Just as spring break commences, with wary but excited residents of the United States descending upon the beaches of Mexico, the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego has released its third annual report on drug violence in the country.

The bottom line: Mexico is more dangerous than ever, at least it was last year, but the carnage is slacking off.

You can read the entire 29-page report here, or you can just mull over these gleanings:

- Since President Felipe Calderon took office on Dec. 1, 2006, some 50,000 killings in Mexico have been linked to his war on organized drug-related crime. At the start of his administration, one drug-related homicide was recorded every four hours. Last year, one drug-related homicide occurred every 30 minutes.


- This past year alone, around 16,000 persons were killed in drug-related showdowns, up 1,650 from 2010. That's an 11 percent increase, but down sharply from a jump of nearly 60 percent the year before.

- About half of all homicides in Mexico last year were tied to drug violence. Two of every five killings occurred in just three states - Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Nuevo Leon.


- On average, some 40 people were killed daily in Mexico this past year, three of whom were tortured, one of whom was decapitated, two of whom were women, and 10 of whom were "young people" (undefined in this section of the report, though the document elsewhere suggests "young people" are between 15 and 29).

- Mexico's overall homicide rate is 18 per 100,000 inhabitants. As the report notes, however, that's not so bad when compared with other Latin American countries, like Honduras (82), Guatemala (41), Brazil (22) and Puerto Rico (26). The homicide rate in the U.S., incidentally, is about 5 per 100,000 residents.

- An estimated 2,000 persons were killed last year in each of just two cities, Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, compared with 613 in Los Angeles, 441 in Chicago, 318 in Philadelphia, 209 in New York City, and 133 in Dallas.

- Nevertheless, of all the killings in Mexico the proportion in border towns fell from 29.5 percent in 2010 to 17 percent in 2011. The killings in Tijuana, for example, slipped from 349 in 2010 to 166 in 2011.

- Increasingly, women have been the victims of killings related to organized crime, up from 194 in 2008 to 904 in 2011.

- The drug wars are the leading cause of death for "young people," who in this section of the report are defined as persons between 15 and 29. Their death toll has jumped from 366 in 2007 to 3,741 in 2010. They generally are called "ni-nis," for "ni trabajan" and "ni estudian," meaning they neither work nor study.

- Last year, eight reporters were killed n Mexico, at least three of them for reporting on the drug trade. That's down from the 10 journalists killed in Mexico the year before.

The report is long on methodology and statistics, but doesn't shy from analysis and advocacy. The killings clearly stem from government efforts to curtail the drug trade and from conflict among cartels competing to produce and deliver narcotics, the authors conclude. Efforts to show that the rise in drug-related homicides reflect domestic insurgency or narcoterrorism, a view that looks to be gaining currency in the United States, "seriously misdiagnose the problem," say the authors.

Mexico's inept and corrupt criminal-justice system complicates the issue, indicates the report, which more than once calls for more transparency, efficiency and fairness in law enforcement. As a measure of the population's lack of confidence in police, more than 75 percent of all crimes go unreported, the authors say. And of those reported, only "one or two of every 100" results in a sentence.

Though the report urges politicians to consider more seriously alternatives to Mexico's current drug policy, it also notes that little evidence has been accumulated to support decriminalization or legalization of the kinds of drugs involved in the crackdown on trafficking. Nonetheless, the researchers criticize politicians for dragging their feet in discussing frankly liberalized options to current drug laws.

The Trans-Border Institute, based at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, aims to promote understanding a cooperation between the United States and Mexico. The authors of the report are Cory Molzhan, Viridiana Rios and David A. Shirk.