Mexican Drug War

Nov 22nd 2012, 16:34 by Economist.com

Mexican states compared with entire countries' body counts, murder rates and populations

MEXICO’S murder rate has doubled over the past five years, to nearly 19 per 100,000 people per year. But what does that really mean? To give an idea of how safe or dangerous the country's various states are, we have compared their crime statistics with those of whole countries. Visitors can relax in Yucatán, the safest state, which has about the same murder rate as Finland. Tlaxcala, not far from Mexico City, is about as safe as the United States. At the other end of the spectrum Chihuahua, the most violent state, has a murder rate equivalent to El Salvador, one of the most violent countries in the world. Another way of looking at the data is to compare the gross totals. The state of San Luis Potosí, for instance, has seen as many murders in the past year as all of Spain, despite having a population of just 2.6m.

Mexican violence

The brief history of Mary Susan was marked by glamor, beauty and tragedy. At age eight her father was killed during a confrontation. Then the girl was under the care of her mother, but she found solace in the beauty contests in which she began to participate.

arms trafficked into Mexico from The States

By Tom Brown

MIAMI | Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:49pm EST

(Reuters) - The mother of a former U.S. Marine jailed in a notoriously violent corner of northern Mexico said on Monday that her son was losing hope after being arrested in August for possessing a shotgun that was a family heirloom.

the Mexican Dirty War

Anything Goes in Dirty War

Miguel A. Rodríguez

Margarito Genchi Casiano -- the former Mayor of Florencio Villarreal and local congressional candidate for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) -- was assassinated in the Costa Chica of Guerrero. The tragic event took place June 11 in Llano Largo, near the municipality of Cruz Grande. Just four days earlier, Genchi Casiano had attended a campaign rally for PRD's presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The remains of 14 unidentified bodies were found  inside a pick-up truck stationed a few blocks away from the Mayor's office of Mante, Tamaulipas. The Governor of Tamaulipas has confirmed that the corpses were abandoned in broad daylight inside a privately owned pick-up truck.

Authorities add that the Police and Forensic Medical Examiners have been unable to identify the cadavers of the 11 men and three women.

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