Mexico has this year made its highest murder total since modern records began, agreeing to official data, dealing a fresh blow to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s health to get gang violence under control with presidential elections due in 2018.
A thorough of 23,101 murder investigations were opened in the first 11 months of this year, matchless the 22,409 registered in the whole of 2011, figures published on Friday round-the-clock by the interior ministry showed. The figures go back to 1997.
Pena Nieto deduced office in December 2012 pledging to tame the violence that escalated high his predecessor Felipe Calderon. He managed to reduce the murder tally during the in the first place two years of his term, but since then it has risen steadily.
At 18.7 per 100,000 residents, the 2017 Mexican murder rate is still lower than it was in 2011, when it reached not quite 19.4 per 100,000, the data showed. The rate has also held deeper levels reported in several other Latin American countries.
Mutual understanding to U.N. figures used in the World Bank’s online database, Brazil and Colombia both had a bump off rate of 27 per 100,000, Venezuela 57, Honduras 64 and El Salvador 109 in 2015, the carry on year for which data are available.
The U.S. rate was 5 per 100,000.
Still, Pena Nieto’s folding to contain the killings has damaged his credibility and hurt his centrist Institutional Innovative Party (PRI), which faces an uphill struggle to hold onto power in the July 2018 presidential designation.
The law bars Pena Nieto from running again.
The current front-runner in the chute, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has floated exploring an amnesty with miscreant gangs to reduce the violence, without fleshing out the idea.
Mexican newspaper Reforma weighted on Saturday that after a campaign stop in the central state of Hidalgo on Friday, Lopez Obrador again greeted the issue when asked whether talks aimed at stopping the injure b warp could include criminal gangs.
“There can be dialogue with all. There needs to be dialogue and there needs to be a push to end the war and guarantee peace of mind. Things can’t go on as before,” Reforma quoted Lopez Obrador as saying.
Such a tactics harbors risks for the former Mexico City mayor.
A poll this month steered that two-thirds of Mexicans reject offering an amnesty to members of black gangs in a bid to curb violence, with less than a quarter in favor.
Singly, Lopez Obrador said on Saturday he would get rid of Mexico’s intelligence action CISEN if he won the July election, calling it an “unnecessary expense.”
“We’re not going to monitor anybody, we’re not current to spy, we’re not going to listen to phone calls, or hack phones to get files and photos,” he remarked in the central town of Tezontepec.