A police officer guards a crime scene in downtown Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.JOSE LUIS GONZALEZ / Reuters
In the first half of 2020, Mexico registered 17,123 murders, 653 less than in the same period of the previous year, according to the data published this Tuesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INEGI).
It is the first decline in the numbers of intentional homicides since the 2014-2015 biennium, when they fell to just under 10,000.
The problem is precisely that the country stabilizes its records at very high figures, well above the numbers of the worst years of President Felipe Calderón's drug war (2006-2012).
The decline coincides with the first months of the pandemic.
Without imposing a total confinement to the population, local governments throughout the country decreed total closures of the activity in March, April and the following months.
It remains to be seen how the stoppage affected the record in the second part of the year.
For its part, the Government, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been insisting for months that it has managed to stop the constant growth of homicides, a trend in recent years.
In October, the Secretary of Security, Alfonso Durazo announced that in the last two months murders had decreased by 8.4% nationwide.
Durazo, who left the Secretariat at the end of last year to seek the governor of his state, Sonora, said: “This is a process of social decomposition, consequently we have to go through a process of social regeneration that allows us to recover peace and tranquility.
Our responsibility is to limit the times of this process of social regeneration and that is what we are doing ”.
INEGI figures also show a gender disparity.
Although there are fewer murders of men, those of women, albeit slightly, increase.
In the first six months of 2020, Mexico registered 1,844 intentional homicides of women, 10 more than during the same period of the previous year.
Murders of women have increased every year since INEGI began counting in 1990, when it registered 704.
With these figures, the murder rate in Mexico is 13 per 100,000 inhabitants, lower than that registered in 2019. In any case, this number responds only to the middle of the year.
In September of last year, INEGI gave the final figures for 2019. The institute explained that Mexico had registered 36,476 murders in all of 2019, for a rate of 29 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
These figures are higher than those presented by countries that have historically recorded rates higher than Mexico, such as El Salvador, which ended 2020 with a rate close to 20 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
Or Colombia, which ended last year with a rate below 24.
This same month, López Obrador referred to the homicidal violence that has shaken Mexico for years, taking as a reference the case of Guanajuato, one of the states with the highest increase in murders in recent years.
The president said that of the 68 murders registered on January 13, 19 had occurred in Guanajuato.
In a sense similar to that expressed months before by Durazo, López Obrador said: “We need to address more the problem of social decomposition and avoid the hodgepodge, the collusion of crime with authorities, that is, municipal police, municipal presidencies or city councils, judicial authorities .
We are working on that ”.
