This article in Norte de Ciudad Juarez says that the figure of 952 is for the STATE of Chihuahua, not just the city of Juarez. If the number is really 952 for the state and roughly 540 for the city (as reported by El Diario) then the city still accounts for more than half of all of the murders tallied in Chihuahua. Note also this article in InSight Crime–an analyst reports 510 “organized-crime-related” or “ejecuciones” for Juarez… It is still very confusing (actually I believe it is impossible) to realistically distinguish between those homicides counted as “organized crime related” vs. other homicides… The criteria are never clearly stated in any of the sources that report these numbers. The information comes from media accounts in almost all cases, according to the article in Insight… And those reports contain only the most superficial characteristics of the crimes scenes and the killings such as the type of weapon used, the number of people involved, etc. No real investigation is actually completed to determined who killed whom and why.
Note that the analyst’s report used by
InSight says that there were “7,022 murders linked to organized crime” from January thru June 2012 in Mexico. And in a parenthetical note, the report mentions that the SNSP “tallied 8,662 murders nationwide through May, though the June figures have not yet been released.” My estimate for the half-year point for murders nationwide (based on the earlier monthly averages) was about 9,996. But if we take the 8,662 number for Jan-May and divide by 5 we get a monthly average of 1,732 and if we add that to the Jan-May total to estimate the mid-year tally we get a higher estimate of 10,394. So if the trend continues in the second half of the year, the total homicides in Mexico for 2012 will be about 20,788. This would bring the total number of homicide victims for Calderon’s term to about 110,000.
That said, the trend is that murders are going down in Juarez and yet Juarez is still the city with the highest number of murders. And while the murders are going down in Juarez, they are going up in the smaller city of Chihuahua.
molly
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