Violence by Organized Crime Groups in Mexico Shows Signs of Having Peaked WSJ.com
go to original June 29, 2013

Mexico’s falling murder rate may be helped by a better economy and exhaustion by criminal gangs, says security expert Alejandro Hope. (Laurence Iliff/WSJ.com)

MEXICO CITY - Drug-related killings that turned parts of Mexico into the bloodiest spots on the globe appear to have decreased in recent months - a welcome trend in a nation exhausted by years of violence associated with organized crime, even if the reasons behind it are hard to pin down.

The bloodshed is still alarmingly high, as the northern border and even the Acapulco beach resort continue to suffer from cartel turf wars.

In his first six months in office, around 6,300 people died in killings seen as linked to organized crime. But that is a drop of about 18% compared with an estimated 7,700 in the previous six months.

A separate study by a nonprofit group, the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness, used all reported murders, not just those classified as organized crime-related. It then seasonally adjusted the murder rates - since summer months tend to see a spike - and came up with a less-pronounced drop of 6% to around 10,000 murders, compared with about 10,600 in the six months before Mr. Peña Nieto took office.

The study's lead author, Alejandro Hope, a former government intelligence official, said the seasonally adjusted decline seems to have flattened out in recent months, suggesting further gains may be hard to come by.

"The situation is improving at a very slow rate," said Mr. Hope. "My nightmare scenario is that we get used to 20,000 or 25,000 people getting killed every year."

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