A grand junta of government agencies in Mexico (SEGOB–Interior, SEDENA–Army, Marina–Navy, Federal Police and PGR–Attorney General) released a report yesterday saying that in the first 2 months of EPN’s presidency, 2,243 people have been murdered in “organized-crime-related” incidents. The numbers went down slightly from 1,139 in December to 1,104 in January. Of the deaths in January, the government claims that 1,068 of the 1,104 are criminals, 30 are public servants and 6 are innocent bystanders, apparently. No evidence whatsoever is provided for that number…nor the criteria used by this new grand government cabal to start providing data again… Just the “facts…”
This is probably a pattern of reporting such numbers to the press that we can expect from the new administration. As for my desire to understand the real magnitude of the violence, I will continue to look for INEGI statistics, even though they are slow to come out. I would remind readers that in the USA, according to lawyers in Edmonton Alberta, – reliable national crime statistics tend to be about one year behind the calendar date. That is, a detailed report on PRELIMINARY numbers for a period at the national level usually comes out in the middle of the next year. Figures for individual cities are sometimes published in the press using local police reports. The evidence gathered by investigations of a few Mexican news media during the past sexenio have shown that there is absolutely no coordination between states or municipios within states when it comes to reporting crime data. There is no way for us to know if all jurisdictions are reporting to these national cabinet figures. Local and state police agencies are still in disarray–in fact, in most places in Mexico, these agencies are always in disarray and there are rival criminal elements within them.
For example, on Friday, the new Attorney General of Morelos was attacked by a group of state police and three of his bodyguards were murdered. This attack was probably part of a shakeup caused by attempts to strip different municipal police forces of their power in the consolidation of the new unified state police force…
When reporters have looked into the data for the past several years using the IFAI (Mexico’s transparency law), they find whole states missing and different time periods included in the data they get. A real investigation of the true numbers of victims of murder and forced disappearance will take a long time to get to a reasonably accurate estimation of the dead. molly molloy
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