Security & Strategic Review - August 2013 (ISSN 1741-4202)

President Enrique Peña Nieto has trumpeted the fact that the number of homicide cases has fallen significantly in his first eight months in office, and has attributed this to greater cooperation between federal and state authorities and improved intelligence. However, a  leading private tally of ‘executions’ shows that this year the decline that began in April lost steam in the ensuing two months and turned into a sharp increase in July. Official data also show another major crime, kidnapping, rising to its highest level in a decade.

On 27 August, addressing the 34th session of the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Pública (CNSP; National Public Security Council), President Peña Nieto announced that since he took office last December the number of homicides ‘related to federal offences’ (a proxy for killings related to inter-cartel wars and the government’s fight against the cartels) had fallen by 20%, and that the most pronounced declines had been recorded in the country’s most dangerous cities and regions. All this, he said, was the result of the coordination and good intelligence on which the new public security and justice policy, unveiled last December, is built.

Also in that period, he noted, the authorities had captured ‘62 of the 122 most dangerous suspected criminals and in most cases without firing a single shot.’ ‘The strength of the state,’ he said, in a clear dig at his predecessor, ‘must not be measured only by its firepower, but by its ability to apply the law with the least possible violence.’

Peña Nieto did not dwell on the fact that official data released three days earlier had shown that kidnappings in January-July rose to their highest level in a decade: 911 reported cases that the public prosecution service took seriously enough to investigate. This was 26.5% more that the total recorded for the same period of 2012, and 15% higher than the previous peak level of 791 cases recorded in 2011. Since the beginning of the year the authorities have initiated investigations into 4,666 cases of extortion and 32,572 of car theft with violence.

The President’s use of the phrase ‘related to federal offences’ is in line with the trend initiated during the Felipe Calderón administration (2006-2012) to take some distance from the previous, much-criticised association of certain killings with the ‘executions’ carried out by the warring drug cartels and their affiliated gangs of gunmen. On 9 August the interior ministry (Segob) went further when it announced that it would no longer distinguish cases of homicide linked to activities of organised crime, but would publish only figures on all intentional homicides.

Moreover, Segob drew attention to the fact that the figures on intentional homicide are not to be taken as tallies of the number of victims, because they list only cases of homicide investigations initiated by the public prosecution service, and such cases could involve more than one victim. The security data in the new format is accessible at the Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (SENSP) website (see link below).

Another view

The interior ministry (Segob) tallies 10,899 cases of intentional homicide  in January-July. Lantia Consultores, in its continuing tally of ‘executions’, counts 8,052 cases in the same period. Most interesting is its finding that there was a sudden rise, of 37%, in the number of ‘executions’ in July, reversing the downward trend observed in the earlier three months: -17% in April, -2% in May, -1% in June. This made July the month with the worst record of violence since Peña Nieto became President.

Sharp increases were recorded in July in Durango, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Sonora and Guerrero. The states with the highest number of ‘executions’ were, again, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Sinaloa, Jalisco and Coahuila. Michoacán, where Los Caballeros Templarios (LCT) have been taking on the federal and state authorities, suffered a 177% increase in the number of  killings — and its actions, Lantia notes, has had a knock-on on nearby states: Guerrero, Morelos and México.

In Chihuahua, the continuing confrontation between the Sinaloa/Pacífico cartel and La Línea/Juárez, has not only kept it at the top of the homicide table, but has also placed four of its municipalities (Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua city, Hidalgo del Parral and Guadalupe y Calvo, jointly accounting for 65% of the state’s toll) among the ten most violent municipalities countrywide.

Acapulco has risen again to the position of most violent city in Mexico, accounting on its own for just under half of all killings in Guerrero, whose toll rose by 88% in July.

Source: Lantia Consultores.

Link

▪ New format SNSP data: http://www.secretariadoejecutivosnsp.gob.mx/es/SecretariadoEjecutivo/090820132

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