Arrests of suspected criminals from the beginning of the year to mid-September totalled 34,347, or 30% more than in the same period last year. Reported crimes since López Obrador took office in 2000 averaged 478 a day, down from 586 in 1999-2000 and 654 in 1995-98.
`We have been able,' he said on 17 September, `to contain public insecurity and significantly reduce the rates of some crimes, and he have achieved this at a time of economic recession, when crime usually rises sharply [...] Obviously, we are not satisfied: the rates are still too high — so I reiterate my commitment to go on working on this.'
CIUDAD JUAREZ | More police, plus a commissioner. In late September the central government ordered the deployment of a further 700 federal policemen to Ciudad Juárez, in response to the furore over the high rate of unsolved murders of women in the area, which do not appear to have been halted by the mobilisation of 2,000 officers from federal, state and municipal forces.
The issue has already attracted a visit by US legislators (who recommended that the issue be included in the US-Mexican agenda), and a complaint by Amnesty International about the delays in responding to the situation — including the appointment of a commissioner, which had been promised by President Vicente Fox. In mid-October, after the discovery in the area of another woman's body (the 24th so far this year), Fox announced the appointment as commissioner for Juárez of lawyer and poet Guadalupe Morfín, former president of Jalisco state's human rights commission and member of the consultative commission of the Academia de Derechos Humanos.
She has said that she sees her task as threefold: `listening, working to rebuild the social fabric [of Ciudad Juárez] and building bridges to the future to guarantee governability and stability.'
CHIAPAS | Drugs-related killings on the rise. The office of the federal chief prosecutor (PGR) in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, reported in mid-October that some 50 people have been murdered in recent months in the area close to the Guatemalan border by sicarios (contract killers) working for drug traffickers, people traffickers or other forms of organised crime. Of the 24 cases handled by the PGR, local delegate Martín Salido says, two have been solved. The municipalities most affected by the violence are Mapastepec, Suchiate, Tapachula, Tuxtla Chico and Villa Comaltitlán, all on the routes favoured by illegal migrants and drug traffickers on their way to the US.
The chief prosecutor of Chiapas state, Mariano Herrán, has come out with a caveat: only 18 of the 50 murders cited, he said, can be traced to organised crime — the rest are related to land disputes and domestic or personal problems.
Last year Mexican immigration authorities in that area intercepted and repatriated 119,000 illegal Central American immigrants. Of that total, 60% were from Guatemala, 30% from Honduras, and 10% from El Salvador. As in Mexico's northern border area, much of this migration is handled by unscrupulous `people traffickers', and there is evidence of links between these and the drug traffickers.
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