Nathaniel Parish Flannery: Is Mexico Really the World’s Second-Most Dangerous War Zone? Nathaniel Parish Flannery - Forbes
go to original May 10, 2017

A new report suggests Mexico's violent drug wars made it the second-deadliest conflict zone in the world last year (Newsy)

Spring 2017 has been marked by a number of alarming reports in Mexico. In the central state of Puebla civilian gunmen in bulletproof trucks attacked a military patrol on May 3, killing several soldiers. As Mexico's federal government has sent in a heavy military presence to try and clamp down on a billion dollar oil theft racket local residents have responded with large protests, blockading highways, burning piles of tires, and sending noxious black plumes of smoke into the air. A few days earlier in a coordinated assault Mexican marines killed a senior Gulf Cartel member in the border city of Reynosa just south of Texas. In response to the operation cartel enforcers burned businesses, set up blockades and torched trucks. Residents heard a series of explosions and in the morning they found seventy buildings had been burned. Over the course of one recent weekend in the border state of Chihuahua gunmen killed 17 people. In one shootout over 2,000 shots were fired and police found shell casings from AK-47 and R-15 assault rifles.

In recent years Pepsi andCoca-Cola have seen assaults against their delivery trucks in Mexico. A senior Pepsi executive was kidnapped. An employee of ArcelorMittal was killed. Recently police in the US found marijuana hidden inside a shipment of Ford trucks that were manufactured in Sonora, Mexico. Beer producer Grupo Modelo, an AB-Inbev company, has also faced threats from organized crime against its employees.

Mexico's Drug War has now dragged on for over ten years. Despite some achievements, in 2016 and 2017 violent crime looks like it is rising again. In a recent article for Bloomberg Marc Champion explained, "Mexico has surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan to become the world’s second-most deadly conflict zone after Syria, according to a study of wars around the globe. The number of fatalities from the expanding war among Mexico’s criminal cartels grew to 23,000 in 2016, compared with 17,000 in Afghanistan and 16,000 in Iraq."

While Mexico's absolute number of murders is stunning, per capita data shows a different story. On a population-adjusted basis Mexico is far from the most violent country in Latin America, let alone the world's second most dangerous conflict zone. To try and put Mexico's current security dynamic into context I reached out to David Shirk, a researcher from the University of San Diego, the co-author of a recent report on violent crime in Mexico.

Read the interview at Forbes

Related: Mexico Rejects Label as World's Second-Deadliest Conflict Zone (Bloomberg)

Related: Eight Mexican, and 4 U.S. Cities on World’s Most Murderous List (World Tribune)

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