| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2008 
Killings in Drug War in Mexico Double in '08
 Marc Lacey - International Herald Tribune
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| | Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora | |
Mexico City - Killings linked to Mexico's drug war have more than doubled this year compared with 2007 and are likely to grow even further before they begin to fall, Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora said Monday.
The prosecutor tied the sharp increase in deaths to a battle for control among cartels and a power vacuum created by a series of high-profile arrests and seizures.
The number of gangland killings reached 5,376 from the beginning of the year until Dec. 2, a 117 percent increase over the 2,477 killings in the same period in 2007, Medina-Mora said in a luncheon meeting with foreign correspondents.
The bulk of the killings have occurred in the border states of Chihuahua and Baja California, where traffickers have sought to wipe out rivals on the streets of Juárez and Tijuana, and in Sinaloa, where one of the country's most powerful cartels has its base.
"These criminal organizations don't have limits," said Medina-Mora, who previously served as Mexico's public safety director and spy chief. "They certainly have an enormous power of intimidation."
Even while acknowledging that there was a "significant increase" in drug-related homicides, Medina-Mora said the overall level of violence in Mexico remained moderate compared with that in other Latin American countries.
Mexico's overall homicide rate last year, 11 deaths per 100,000 people, was a small fraction of the rates in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador and Brazil, he said.
Even as he released the new statistics though, the number of killings in Mexico was climbing. At least 18 people were killed in two southern states on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. They include two people whose heads were left in plastic buckets near the office of the governor of Guerrero State, and 10 suspected drug traffickers and one soldier killed in a gun battle in Arcelia, Guerrero.
Taking on the cartels that supply most of the illegal drugs consumed in the United States has been a frustrating exercise for Mexico. Officials complain that the guns the criminals use are coming from the United States and that the billions of dollars in drug profits have corrupted many institutions in Mexico.
The attorney general's office itself recently found that numerous officials in its organized crime unit were working for traffickers, receiving cash payments to tip off the cartels about impending raids.
But Medina-Mora said that the arrests of those officials showed that Mexico was taking seriously its fight to root out criminals wherever they are found. |
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