Big Number

Alejandro Poiré announced that 15,273 people were killed in Mexico in 2010 in murders linked to organized crime. That represents a 100 percent jump from 2009 (though they have adjusted those number retroacticely a great deal, so I may be off on that) and a ten-fold spike since 2005, the year before Calderón was elected. Although Poiré still managed to point to a silver lining: the number of murders in the fourth quarter was down 10 percent from the third quarter.

Update: The final adjusted number for 2009 according to the government was 9,614, so this isn't a doubling, but is more than a 50 percent increase.