The Mexican Drug War's Collateral Damage: More Murders Nationwide Nathan Collins - Pacific Standard
go to original April 14, 2015

Once the site of over 20 murders daily, Juarez City is today struggling to overcome its terrible past. In 2009-11, the city was the most dangerous place in the world with over 200 murders per 100,000 residents annually. Today, the authorities claim the city is on the mend, but has the brutal fallout from the cartel wars really improved? (PressTV)

Mexican president Felipe Calderon's time in office - from 2006 to 2012 - was marked by violence as soldiers took to the streets and forests, making the war on drugs an especially tragic one. That war was an abject failure, and one with a serious human cost: Military intervention led indirectly to roughly an additional 200 homicides per year nationwide, according to an analysis published last month in The American Statistician.

Researchers Valeria Espinosa, now at Google, and Donald Rubin, a statistics professor at Harvard University, were not the first to wonder whether militarizing the fight against drug cartels brought with it some collateral damage. An analysis in Nexos magazine suggested that the drug war had pushed non-combat homicides higher, though neither that report nor an earlier visual comparison of homicide rates and military action, also published in Nexos, was very rigorous. Visual comparison isn't really a recognized statistical technique, and neither analysis took into account a variety of potentially important factors, such as when military interventions began in each of the 18 Mexican states involved.

...Overall, Espinosa and Rubin estimated that murder rates in Mexican states where the military had fought cartels went up by 11 people per 100,000, an increase about two and a half times the total murder rate in the United States in 2013. Much of that increase was concentrated in the area around Ciudad Juárez, where military action indirectly pushed the murder rate up by about 86.5 deaths per 100,000 people per year.

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