As a presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) claimed he would bring a new strategy to the country’s struggle with organized crime — one that de-emphasized the targeting of drug kingpins and focused on reducing homicides, extortion cases and kidnappings. 

One year into the presidency, Peña Nieto’s administration claims that the homicide rate has dropped by 18 percent; on the other hand, government stats point to a 35 percent increase in kidnappings. After the arrest of two major Zeta and Gulf Cartel leaders earlier this year, Peña Nieto’s strategy shift appears to be more rhetorical than real. Many scholars, analysts and civil society leaders have taken issue with the claim that drug-related violence has declined. Recognizing the importance of understanding drug-related violence in Mexico, Baker Institute Viewpoints invited five scholars to respond to the question, “Has drug violence in Mexico declined?” 

Read other posts in this series:

• In Mexico, security is in the eye of the beholder by Sylvia Longmire, former Air Force officer and special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations
• Perception and intent define the reality, but criminal violence in Mexico has metastasized by Robert Bunker, senior fellow with Small Wars Journal — El Centro
• Measuring mayhem: The challenge of assessing violence and insecurity in Mexico by John Sullivan, lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
• Mexico must address violence and profitability by Nathan Jones, drug policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute

Today, Molly Molloy — a research librarian and a specialist on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border at the New Mexico State University Library — weighs in with “Mexico’s national crime statistics show no significant decline in homicides and disappearances.”

“First, it is not exactly a war on drugs.”

— President Felipe Calderón, CNN, May 19, 2010

In May 2010, then-President Felipe Calderón responded to questioning on CNN about the 23,000 murder victims (according to official government figures at that time), saying that the killings were not exactly due to a war on drugs, but “to guarantee … safety for Mexican families.” Calderón insisted that 90 percent of homicide victims were “criminals killing each other,” despite admissions that Mexican authorities investigated fewer than five percent of the murders.

Regardless of what Calderón intended when he deployed the military into Mexican cities and countryside, the result was a huge increase in homicides from 2007 to 2012 that only began to level off toward the end of the latter year. According to statistics from Mexican government agencies, at least 135,000 people have been murdered since 2007, and more than 25,000 have disappeared. By the Mexican government’s own admission, it is not possible to distinguish “drug-related” homicides from other killings.

President Enrique Peña Nieto took office on Dec. 1, 2012, and pledged to bring peace. His administration claims a significant decline in homicides, but presents no evidence to support that claim. In fact, media reports often include no data at all. What has happened is that the epicenters of extreme violence have dispersed around the country, making it more difficult to know how many people are dying.

I have tracked Mexican reports on homicides since 2011 and compared media counts to cumulative statistics from INEGI (the Mexican official statistics bureau) and SESNSP (the Executive Secretariat of Public Security).

INEGI and SESNSP data count different things: INEGI reports deaths classified as homicides by a legal medical official; SESNSP data is compiled from preliminary investigations by police agencies in local jurisdictions around the country. The INEGI data reported here is for “homicidios dolosos,” intentional homicides. The SESNSP data also includes a separate count of “homicidios culposos,” negligent or accidental homicides.

Despite claims of declining violence, the SESNSP data show an average of 1,555 intentional homicides per month since Peña Nieto took office — about 52 people per day — only slightly less than the average across all six years of the Calderón administration.

Adding the 13,834 intentional homicides counted by SESNSP for January-September 2013 to the cumulative 2007-2012 INEGI total of 121,683 homicides, we get an estimate of 135,517 intentional homicides in Mexico since 2007 — the period spanning the beginning of President Calderón’s “war on drugs” through the first 10 months of the Enrique Peña Nieto administration.

For comparison, the table below contains INEGI homicide data for the past four Mexican presidential terms. Homicides trended down steadily from 1989 to 2006 and then doubled during the Calderón administration from 2007 to 2012.

Despite these numbers, most media, academic and policy sources in the U.S. and the rest of the world continue to report 50,000 to 80,000 as the Mexican drug war’s death toll.

So why does the media often report less than half of the actual number of homicides counted by the Mexican government’s own statistical agencies? Since early 2010, Mexico has sought to justify its militarization of the drug war by reporting a poorly-defined subset of 50-60 percent of the actual number of homicides in the country, along with a narrative designed to criminalize the victims. These numbers have been repeated for years as fact in the national and international press without reference to the actual homicide statistics from INEGI and SESNSP.

The methodology for identifying “organized crime data” has never been adequately explained by the government, nor have the media asked for evidence to support government claims. In an anonymous email communication with the author, a researcher at INEGI called the figures “quite shady and methodologically flawed.” Indeed, several months before the end of Calderón’s term, the government’s criteria for distinguishing “organized crime-related” homicides from other intentional homicides were questioned by the very officials involved with compiling and disseminating these statistics.

Despite a death toll from homicide comparable to those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria — where civil wars, invasions and insurgencies rage — Mexico is touted as a thriving democracy with a fast-growing economy, a middle-class majority and close, friendly relations with the United States. These visions of Mexico are repeated in the U.S. and world press, while at the same time, Mexico is the scene of violent conflict that has killed more than 135,000 and caused the disappearances of at least 25,000 people in the past six years.

Mexico and the United States continue to assert that they are waging a war on drugs, while providing no evidence that the drug trade has diminished despite the death toll and billions of dollars spent. Cocaine, heroin and other drugs are as cheap and as readily available today as during the 1980s. And the huge sums of money generated by the drug trade continue to flow unimpeded through Mexican and expanding global markets.

Data included in the tables is from SESNSP, INEGI and SINAIS (Sistema Nacional de Informacion de Salud).

Molly Molloy is a research librarian and a specialist on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border at the New Mexico State University Library in Las Cruces, N.M. She is the creator and editor of the Frontera List, a forum for news and discussion of border issues. Since 2008 she has provided detailed documentation of homicides in Mexico, with an emphasis on Ciudad Juarez. She translated and co-edited “El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin” (Nation Books 2011) and has written for The Nation, Phoenix New Times, Narco News Bulletin and other publications. Molloy often serves as a consultant for academic researchers, attorneys and journalists about the violence in Mexico.

For more on the Mexican death toll, see Molloy’s article, “The Mexican Undead: Toward a New History of the ‘Drug War’ Killing Fields,” in the Aug. 21, 2013, edition of Small Wars Journal.