Politics: Criminal violence continues largely unabated, at a heavy cost to individuals and entire swaths of the economy
Although the number of intentional homicides has been falling somewhat in recent years (from a peak daily average of 100.7 in 2020 to 94.8 at last count), the tally remains shockingly high. In fact, in the four and a half years since President López Obrador took office, and facing a little over another year of his presidential term, the number of such murders has already surpassed the numbers reported for the full six-year terms of his predecessors, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.
And even the latest tally appears deceiving given the record levels of disappearances being committed. Such victims cannot be officially registered as deceased owing to a lack of physical evidence. Even when clandestine burial sites are discovered (slightly more than 3,000 have been uncovered so far under this government), the data of the unidentified deceased is not incorporated into the data base of intentional homicides.
Moreover, security crises continue to unfold in a number of states in which organized crime shakes down and otherwise extorts untold numbers of businesses, farmers, merchants and street vendors at the same time as the turf wars for control of all manner of economic activity represent enormous costs. In 2021, the total cost of insecurity and crime in the country's economic units amounted to 120.2 billion pesos, equivalent to 6.7% of GDP. Of this amount, only 42% corresponds to direct damage from crime and the remaining 58% to spending on preventive measures.
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