MEXICO CITY: Mexico’s Citizens’ Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice (CCSPJP) published its 2022 ranking of the world’s 50 most violent cities Monday, designating the west-central Mexican city of Colima as the most deadly.
Colima reported 181.94 homicides per 100,000 residents, Anadolu Agency cited the CCSPJP.
The northern city of Ciudad Juarez, however, held the all-time record for the homicide rate. In 2010 during the height of Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’, it reached 229 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
According to the ranking of the 50 analysed cities with over 300,000 inhabitants, nine of the top 10 most violent towns were also Mexican.
The report said Colima’s rate was close to the rates that prevailed in Medellin, Colombia between the late 1980s and early 1990s due to the “war” of drug lord Pablo Escobar and his allies against the Colombian state to prevent his extradition to the United States.
The civil association criticises Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s current administration, which has allegedly paved the way for criminal organisations active in the country to act unchallenged.
“There is no precedent in the world of a national government – as is the case in Mexico today –
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 policies that have been complacent with criminals, there has been remarkable progress,” said the CCSPJP’s report.
The report cited countries such as El Salvador, which used to hold the record for the most violent city worldwide, and Guatemala as examples of effective policy-making to curb homicide rates.
Mexico’s steadfast violence has shown an unrelenting pace since the onset of the war on drugs during the administration of then-President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012.
The ‘war’ was a military-led strategy that resulted in the fragmentation of large cartels into several criminal gangs fighting for control in the country and the destabilisation of local governments, leading to an exponential increase in homicides nationwide.
By the end of Calderon’s administration, homicide rates had experienced an unprecedented 193 per cent increase, a trend that Lopez Obrador has been unable to counteract. – BERNAMA
