Mexico: Welcome TO The Badlands

MEXICO

Welcome to the Badlands

A recent tweet from the Oval Office notwithstanding, Mexico is not the most dangerous or most violent country in the world. But as a presidential election approaches, the country logged a record high number of murders last year, and the carnage shows no signs of slowing.

Just before Christmas, six men were found hanging from bridges in the state of Baja California Sur, CNN reported. A teenager famous for posting drunken videos on YouTube was riddled with bullets after he insulted the leader of the New Generation Cartel of Jalisco online, noted the Washington Post. And this month, police discovered at least 33 human skulls buried in the western part of the country that they believe are casualties of fighting between the Jalisco outfit and the Sinaloa Cartel, Reuters reported.

Such news has become routine in Mexico. But 2017 marked a new burst of violence, driving home the impression that the country’s war on drugs is failing and the changes made by departing President Enrique Peña Nieto have only made things worse.

Following a then-record 22,852 murders in 2011, Peña Nieto temporarily reduced the killings by scaling back the drugs war – which often escalates fighting between cartels whose leaders have been successfully targeted by the police, the Economist reported. But in 2017, violence came roaring back, as Mexico recorded 23,101 murders in the first 11 months of the year, Reuters reported. At the same time, the number of people in prison fell by a fifth compared with 2014, as the result of reforms designed to curb police excesses, Reuters said.

To many, such statistics lend credence to US President Donald Trump’s call for a wall along America’s border with Mexico. And earlier this month Trump capitalized on the spike in the murder rate to declare on Twitter that Mexico had become “the number one most dangerous country in the world.”

That’s not the case, noted Factcheck.org. Mexico’s 25,000-odd murders totaled less than half the number recorded in Brazil, and El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala all have far higher per capita rates of homicide.

Meanwhile, there are various explanations for the spike – including aggressive crime fighting. The Economist argued that the re-arrest of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, for instance, triggered conflicts within the Sinaloa gang and clashes with the Jalisco New Generation cartel. More broadly, the drugs war has broken large cartels into smaller gangs that focus on local distribution and crimes like kidnapping and extortion – which are more violent than large-scale trafficking.

As a result, at least two candidates running for president in July are promising to again de-escalate the war on drugs. Leftist frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has suggested some form of amnesty to reduce violence by rehabilitating gang members, Reuters noted. And former first lady Margarita Zavala has pledged to strengthen the police force while withdrawing the thousands of troops that her husband, former president Felipe Calderon, deployed in the fight against drug traffickers in 2006, the agency said.