Eduardo Medina Mora says that Mexico is more peaceful today than it was 15 years ago. That may well be true (I remember reading last year that Mexico in 2008 was still better than Mexico in 1999), although it's odd that no one in Calderon's government thought to use that piece of info until today. The measurement he used to make the claim is that the murder rate was 18 per 100,000 people in 1994, compared to 10.7 in 2008.
That last figure is the slippery one. I'm not sure where Medina Mora's numbers come from, but the UN figure of 10.8 is the lowest I'd seen. The problem is, the UN figure is from 2007. There were almost 4,000 more drug murders in 2008 than 2007, which would work out to about 3.5 more per 100,000 residents than in 2007. In other words, assuming the non-drug murders remained constant, and using the UN figure from 2007 as your baseline, you should come up with about 14 murders per 100,000 residents in 2008. That is still significantly less than 18 (not to mention the 75 in Colombia in the 1990s, or the 40-plus in El Salvador today), and it doesn't make Medina Mora's point any less valid, so why monkey with the stats?
It's a bit off topic, but this stat is impressive (in a bad way): Mexico has seized more than 52,000 firearms in the past two years, and more than 10,000 AR-15 or AK-47 assault rifles, or enough for a small infantry division, in 2009 alone.
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What happens to all these weapons that get seized? Do they get recycled?
Good question. I really don't know. I imagine most are destroyed, but since local police famously lack firepower and the towns are running out of money, I wonder if they haven't considered registering some of them and handing them over to the police.
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