SPECIAL: Four years: 140,532 people executed

EXCLUSIVE report by Rosario Mosso Castro of ZETA Tijuana Weekly.

* 96 homicides per day during the four-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

* 131% more deaths than in the first four years of Felipe Calderón's administration and 59% more than under Enrique Peña.

* Government does not count all the murders: in January 2023 they shaved the 29 victims of the second "Culiacanazo".

* Guanajuato, with 15,207 homicides, is the state with the most victims.

*Colima, Baja California, Zacatecas, Morelos and Sonora, with the highest number of deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants.

Seventeen conurbate municipalities in Mexico appeared in the top 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World at the end of 2022, a ranking presented for the last 15 years by the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, AC and Rescue Mission Mexico.

Colima, Zamora, Obregón, Zacatecas and Tijuana occupy the first five places.

To improve the perception of insecurity and its numbers, the Presidency headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Secretary of Citizen Security, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, present other data.

First, they separate the statistics of violent deaths from femicides, as if gender-related homicides were not intentional homicides; they speak of 136,000 deaths, taking more than 4,000 women's corpses out of the general death toll.

In the end, AMLO's presidency accumulated a total of 140,532 intentional homicides in four years, or 143,186 murders if the corpses from January 2023 are added.

These violent deaths are 131% more deaths than in the first four years of the so-called "War on Drugs" of the PAN's Felipe Calderón; and 59% more fatalities than in the initial four-year term of the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto. Both former presidents, whom after four years, López Obrador continues to blame for the violence.

As for the announcement of a 13% improvement in fatality statistics during AMLO's four-year term, the numbers show a smaller improvement of 11% compared to his first year and 7% compared to the immediately preceding year.

The progress that is real, in comparison to his predecessors, is that while Calderón's statistics worsened year by year, from 10,000 to 20,000 deaths in four years of the PAN; and Peña's statistics were maintained from 23,928 in the first year to 23,194 in the fourth year, those of López Obrador were contained in the first two years and were reduced, although minimally, in the last two years, from 35,687 deaths in 2019 to 31,945 homicides in 2022.

NOT ALL MURDERS ARE REPORTED

In this dance of figures there is an additional problem, and that is that there is no certainty that this number of more than 140,000 murders is reliable, because the prosecutors' offices are not reporting all the homicides and the Federation knows it.

The most recent example, which became evident, was the statistics recently published in January 2023 by the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, in which Sinaloa reported only 46 violent deaths, of which 29 were perpetrated with firearms.

However, on February 1, various Sinaloan media announced that the state Attorney General's Office had reported 48 homicides that month, including the deaths of two members of the La Conquista gang and a man killed on the morning of January 31.

They also reported that the same state authority acknowledged that their figures did not include the toll of the second "Culiacanazo"-occurring on January 5, 2023-, the 29 deaths reported by the Mexican Secretary of Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, during the capture of Ovidio Guzmán, son of the drug trafficker imprisoned in the United States, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, of which 19 were criminals and 10 were members of the Armed Forces, it was assumed, because no further information was withheld.

This means that the real number was 77 violent deaths in January, but it is not known if it was the total, because it is not known if the other 35 injured soldiers recovered or died, as there was no further public information on the matter.

The excuse of the FGE Sinaloa was that these deaths are being investigated and registered by the Attorney General's Office (FGR), and that is why they are not being counted.

UNRELIABLE INFORMATION

"They make an exercise of information that is not attached to what the numbers say, not only in intentional homicide, but in other crimes. The issue is not to inform citizens of how it is going, but rather to misinform citizens, and present results that are not real," said Francisco Rivas, president of the National Citizen Observatory (ONC).

"They compare periods that are not equivalent, you cannot say 'homicide has dropped since the beginning of the administration by 20% as they have mentioned on some occasions', if you randomly take the highest month of the Peña administration versus the last month of this administration.

"In November 2022, the Federal Government reported a reduction of 23.5% in the incidence of intentional homicides in the month of November 2022 with respect to the historical maximum recorded in July 2018. When you talk about intentional homicides, they have to include all murders that are not incidental or accidental, but there is intentionality in executing them; those related to other common crimes, such as robbery, kidnapping, confrontation between criminal groups; and you must incorporate gender crimes, femicide, disincorporate femicides from the total number or the rate of intentional homicides. This is a significant methodological error," Rivas emphasized.

HOMICIDAL VIOLENCE IS ON THE MOVE IN THE STATES

Seven of the 10 most violent states are governed by Morena.

Colima has been the most violent state in the country for seven years, the Lopezobrador government found it plunged into insecurity, with a murder rate of 87 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, and increased to 94 murders per 100,000 inhabitants during 2022. In total number of homicides it ranks 15th out of 32 states.

Six other states have remained on the unhonorable list of the 10 states with the highest homicide violence, and they are on two lists: by total number of homicides and by number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

Two of them were found to be violent and got worse:

Michoacán has 9,917 violent deaths in four years. It went from 2,095 homicides in 2019 to 2,467 in 2022, and the rate increased from 36 to 42 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

Sonora added 6,843 victims,1,397 in 2019, reached 1,974 deaths in 2021 and fell to 1,774 in 2022. But its rate grew from 36 to 46 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the last four years.

In the other four states, the incidence has been contained, but has not yet achieved a significant improvement:

3. Baja California reached 11,935 murders in four years. It started with 2,889 in 2019, rose to 3,051 in 2021 and concluded with 2,752 in 2022, reducing its rate from 71 to 63 deaths per year per 100,000 inhabitants.

Guanajuato, where the PAN governs, has the highest number of victims in this four-year term: 15,207 bodies. It began with 3,558 homicides in 2019 and added 3,286 in 2022; the rate dropped from 47 to 43 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

5. Chihuahua (also governed by the PAN) accumulated 9,984 homicides. It dropped from 2,607 bodies in 2019 to 2,013 in 2022, and from 57 to 43 victims per 100,000 inhabitants.

6. Guerrero, with 6,301 deaths. Its rate dropped from 44 to 31 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

In addition, there are the other states that in this government entered the violence statistics: Zacatecas, which went from 645 murders in the first year to 1,355 deaths in the fourth year; Morelos (governed by the Social Encounter Party) increased from 1,059 to 1,211 victims in the same period.

And those that have not yet entered the top 10, but still increased their homicide figures from the first to the fourth year of the Morenista government: Nuevo León (governed by Movimiento Ciudadano) went from 956 to 1,430 victims; San Luis Potosí (governed by Partido Verde Ecologista de México) grew from 522 to 662 bodies; and Campeche went from 82 to 158 deaths in the year.

"If you look at the states governed by Morena, with the exception of Mexico City, all the other states got worse.

"Zacatecas, Sonora, were already in a process of decomposition, but now it is worse, the issue of Caborca is impressive, as is the issue of Fresnillo. Campeche was also the second city only behind Yucatan with less homicides, and last year it had a significant worsening. The states that have dragged the improvement in this apparent drop in homicides, one is Chihuahua, others Guanajuato, Queretaro, State of Mexico", commented Francisco Rivas.

Regarding the federal strategy of sending more elements to the states to combat homicide, the analyst added: "We have no evidence that the National Guard is acting well or badly, we do not know what it is doing, we report that, according to data from Transparencia, the National Guard in 2022 had only around 7 thousand people detained, of which more than 90% were released because the detention was not in accordance with the law. Of these, only 13 were detained for an investigative matter. All the rest were arrested in flagrante delicto and the crimes were minor, no drug trafficking, human trafficking or kidnapping. In fact, there are more than 200 thousand calls made to 911 that were not attended by the National Guard".

THE MOST VIOLENT CITIES

On February 21, the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, AC and Mision Rescate Mexico, presented the annual ranking of 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World, the first 10 are:

*Analysis of conurbations with more than 300 thousand inhabitants
*Rate per 100 thousand inhabitants

The other Mexican cities and where they were included are:

13. Irapuato

14. Cuernavaca

29. Cancun

30. Chihuahua

Morelia

38. Lion

44. Ensenada

San Luis Potosi.

In 9 of 15 annual editions of this ranking, the most violent city has been Mexican: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.

"There is no precedent in the world of a national government -as is happening today in Mexico- that has adopted a public security policy of giving criminals a free hand to exercise violence and openly proclaiming it. On the contrary, in countries that have not followed complacent policies with criminals, there has been notable progress," said José Antonio Ortega, of the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, AC, in a virtual conference regarding the figures and the policy of "Hugs, not bullets".

"The situation in Mexico's cities is the result of failed policies that have consisted of tolerating the violence of criminal groups and the very existence of their private militias, which challenge the State's monopoly on violence," said Leonardo García Camarena, of the organization Misión Rescate México, regarding the freedom of operation that has been given to organized crime cells.

AC Consultores presented a comparative report of the last three six-year terms, in which it detailed that Felipe Calderón faced the violence of eight cartels that resulted in eleven splits or additional cells associated or not with the mafia that gave rise to them; Peña Nieto faced eleven cartels that ended with 13 splits; while AMLO's strategy has him facing eleven cartels and 33 splits.

MODIFY STATISTICS AFTER PUBLICATION

The National Citizen Observatory, which periodically reviews the Secretariat's statistics, explained that crimes are misreported, sometimes with malice, and sometimes because prosecutors simply do not have the capacity to do so correctly.

As an example of the former, Rivas cited Veracruz, which has misreported since the time of Governor Javier Duarte (2010-2016).

"They falsify information, they lower the crimes of one year and raise them a year and a half later. For example, they publish 200 homicides in 2021, and in May or June of 2022 they increase them, but as it is the statistics for 2021, then you don't even notice them, because they were already published and those data were already talked about, so you don't detect those increases so easily.

"Sonora, historically a disastrous prosecutor's office, has problems of records due to lack of capacity, lack of understanding of the classification of crime, and very few states have validation tables for the work of MPs, such as Guanajuato, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Hidalgo," he said.

In reviewing the numbers from the Executive Secretariat, ZETA found two more examples; in the 2015 figures two records can be found, one reports 18,763 victims of intentional homicide, and the second, counts 18,312 bodies.

But the case of 2014 is worse: while one statistic shows 17,342 victims of intentional homicide, the second shows 15,600.

VICTIMS OF OTHER CRIMES AGAINST LIFE AND BODILY INTEGRITY

Then there is another factor, "because some prosecutors have confessed to us that, for example, where there is a crime that attempts against people's lives, the attempted homicides, in the end in those criminal acts, if the person does not lose his life at the moment and dies days later, in the statistics it is not reclassified as intentional homicide, but remains as a crime that attempts against people's lives", said the president of the Observatory.

"And if we look at the growth of this statistic, it is very important, which would imply that criminals are less and less capable of committing intentional homicide, or that their intention is not to kill them, but to harm them, which is also unlikely."

The figures of the Secretariat indicate that indeed, these "other crimes against life" are increasing in the records: in 2019 they were 10,219; by 2020 they grew to 12,237; in 2021 they increased to 14,997; and in 2022 they reached 15,349.

The strange thing is that states such as Jalisco register this crime at zero, and entities such as Baja California, which in 2022 classified 2,848 crimes in this section, but in total has 9,602 victims of "Other Crimes against Life and Bodily Integrity" in four years, which is the highest figure in the country in this category.

For three days, ZETA asked Baja California's central prosecutor, Rafael Orozco Vargas, who is in charge of submitting the statistics to the Federation, which crimes were included in this category, but he chose not to answer.

Other states that also report more than 1,000 of these "other" crimes are Mexico City and Querétaro. While Guanajuato seems to have found a niche opportunity, because from 126 in 2019, it increased to 1,652 its "other crimes" in 2022.

FEWER DEAD AND MORE MISSING

Within these statistics, it is not being considered that only in four years of administration more than 57,000 people have disappeared, when adding the incidence of Calderón and Peña there were a little more than 50,000 disappearances. In other words, in four years of the current President's administration there are more disappeared people than in the 12 years of the two previous presidents, highlighted the National Observatory in its January report.

"And this data is not even entirely correct, because the figures of missing persons have a very important problem, they are balance-type figures," clarified Francisco Rivas.

Balance means that, if in January 2023 100 missing persons are reported missing and 20 are located, even if those found are missing from last year, the final result for January will show that there are only 80 missing persons left. In addition, there is no detail of how many of these people are found alive or dead.

"We are close to the collectives that constantly report new disappearances, we know that it is a phenomenon that is more present than ever, that is also expanding in terms of terrain, to municipalities other than those that traditionally concentrated this problem, but they are no longer willing to give us the information," said Renata Demichelis, coordinator of the Mexico office of Elementa DDHH.

"The prosecutors' offices have not sent information to the National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons (RNPDNO). In the Registry, Baja California currently has approximately 2,300 records, and it cannot be considered a source close to reality, because the data comes directly from the Local Commission and the National Commission", exemplified the activist with respect to this state, whose case Elementa has followed closely.

"According to information we received from the FGE of Baja California, at the end of 2021 there were a little more than 14 thousand disappearances, that shows the delay of the National Registry, with the aggravating factor that last year that same prosecutor's office stopped responding to us, began to evade us and we began to appeal, trying to update the 'real' figures, total that, in their last response, they had the idea of sending us to consult the National Registry and they even sent us the link in the mail. In fact, the last time they gave us the updated information, we noticed a considerable difference with respect to the first one, and there we realized that records had disappeared. In other words, it is not that they are finding people or identifying remains, but they are closing and eliminating folders.

"Around that time, prosecutor Ricardo Carpio began to state that they were reviewing the files and reclassifying the crimes, and the collectives also told us in meetings that they began to pass their files to other prosecutors, such as anti-kidnapping," Demichelis recalled, but kidnapping statistics did not increase.

FINDINGS OF HUMAN REMAINS AND GRAVES

In order to consider that there is a victim of intentional homicide, at least one head or torso must appear, and one of the problems is that the classifications of these findings in the prosecutors' offices are not standardized.

In some cases they speak of skeletal remains, in others they use the term osamenta, in others findings, others even break down with the name of the bone or the part of the body located, so this information cannot be compared. Furthermore, these data are not available to the public, they must be requested through Transparency.

Report reproduced by Opinion 51 with the authorization of Zeta Tijuana Weekly.

The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.