Thursday, January 8, 2009

Unaligned Numbers

Me last month, writing about statistics from the Pan-American Health Organization, and quoted by a UN expert on the region:
Mexico's murder rate is 10.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. That's pretty high, double the figure that the UN says is that of a safe society. At the same time, it's well below Brazil (31), Venezuela (34.1), Colombia (38), and El Salvador (43.4).
Pedro Ángel Palou, writing in the most recent edition of Poder about the culture of death in Mexico:
In the second State of the Union Address, President Calderón himself acknowledged that in 2007, there 28,677 homicides in Mexico. This is 26 for every 100,000 residents. In Colombia, which already touched bottom, the figures have lowered substantially from 60 to 18 homicides per 100,000 residents.
They're both talking about 2007, so that's quite a discrepancy. As far as Mexico goes, the first stat comes from an established organization endorsed by the reference from a UN expert, while the second appears to be a product of Palou's own calculations. At the same time, the calculation is pretty simple, and 28,677 murders in a country of just over 100 million people would seem to be right about 26 per 100,000 annually. Can anyone shed some light on this? More investigation is clearly and urgently needed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've never seen such a high figure for Mexico. Conversely, a story in Colombia's El Tiempo a few days ago claimed an official figure of over 15,000 homicides in Colombia in 2008 (not counting combat deaths), which would signify a rate of 30-35/100,000 - and Colombia's homicides did NOT almost double in a year, so the 2007 number is suspect.

These statistics get batted around all the time and are very unreliable. What is most frustrating is that murder rates are supposed to be one of the best tools for cross-country crime comparisons since rates of reporting for most crimes vary greatly but (with all due respect to Wire season 4) you can't hide the bodies. I would (pardon the bad pun) kill for a good, intense analysis of LatAm homicide rates.

(Aside: the current word verification to submit my comment is "commie." In red no less. Whatever, Blogger, you fascist pig.)

pc said...

Yeah I'm wondering if the wrong number is 28,000. There were 2,500 drug murders in Mexico, and that would mean 25,500 killings apart from drugs. That seems high. Even violent Mexicans cities typically don't have huge numbers of murders aside from cartel killings. Like I said, more investigation is needed. The more I think about it, the more I think Poder is wrong. They have something of a track record here. I remember them referring to Norman Mailer as dead several months before he actually was. It's much less likely that the UN would embrace numbers so far off the mark.

I think blogger did that to honor the Cuban revolution. I had CheNewMan as my word. Just kidding.