Saturday, February 20, 2010

Good News from Tijuana

The military stationed in Tijuana is reporting a 70-percent drop in "high-impact" homicides from last year. It doesn't explicitly define "high-impact" (and one suspects that the numbers could be cooked a bit through that bit of semantic limbo), but the piece refers to it as though it were a synonym for organized-crime murders.

But assuming there's some degree of truth to the report, great news. Let's hope it stays that way. It's also pretty odd given that Teo García, the king of the town's underworld, was arrested a few weeks ago, and such arrests usually lead to a vacuum and power struggle. I suppose this is a reminder that the logic guiding organized crime (or what seems to be the logic from an outsider's point of view, which is by definition a bit distorted) frequently contradicts itself.

I'd not read a lot about Tijuana this year, but most of what I had focused on a series of attacks on seemingly innocent teenagers. Although Daniel Hernandez's warning about not being overly content with drops in crime rates while the overall level of violence remains severe is worth repeating.

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