Mexican president’s state of the union avoids drugs, violence despite high levels – National | 24CA News
Mexico’s president on Friday delivered his second-to-last state of the union, and maybe what was most putting of his roughly 1 1/2 hour speech was what he didn’t discuss: medicine, crime or drug cartels.
Experts and residents agree that vast swaths of Mexico are underneath the de-facto management of drug cartels, however President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador talked about gangs — and medicines — precisely zero instances.
Mexico additionally has over 111,000 lacking individuals, who weren’t talked about within the speech.
Crime generally merited lower than one minute of the president’s speech, which targeted nearly completely on what the president seen as successes of his administration.
For instance, he cited a decline within the poverty charge in Mexico from 49.9% of the inhabitants in 2018 to 43.5% in 2022, although that was in some half as a result of enormous rise in remittances, the cash despatched house by Mexicans working overseas.
The solely factor Lopez Obrador needed to say about safety coverage was that his anti-crime technique was working, regardless that homicides stay at traditionally excessive ranges.
“Our strategy of applying the principle that peace is the fruit of justice is working well,” the president stated, a reference to job-training and youth packages he says will cut back the ranks of recruits for drug gangs.
He claimed Mexico has seen a drop of 17% in homicides underneath his administration, however actually homicides had already fallen about 7% from their mid-2018 peak when Lopez Obrador took workplace in December of that 12 months. The president is actually taking credit score for a drop that began underneath his predecessor, Enrique Pena Nieto.
The most dependable rely launched in July reveals that homicides in Mexico declined by 9.7% in 2022 in comparison with 2021, the primary important drop through the present administration. Mexico’s National Statistics Institute stated there have been 32,223 killings in 2022.
The nation’s murder charge per 100,000 inhabitants dropped from about 28 in 2021 to 25 in 2022. By comparability, the U.S. murder charge in 2021 was about 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants.
However, the variety of killings nationwide seems to have basically flatlined within the first half of 2023, when there have been 15,122 killings, in comparison with 15,381 in the identical interval of 2022. At the present charge, Lopez Obrador’s administration will see way more homicides than any of his predecessors.
It is frequent for Mexican presidents to tout the successes of their administrations in state-of-the-union addresses and downplay issues, however Lopez Obrador has taken that to an excessive.
There was no point out of the truth that lime growers in southern Mexico say that drug cartel threats and calls for for defense funds have reached ranges not seen since 2013.
There was additionally no point out of the truth that seizures of methamphetamines rose from about 36 tons in all of 2022 to a whopping 230 tons within the first eight months of 2023. On Friday, prosecutors introduced they seized 2.6 million fentanyl drugs hidden within the body of a freight truck on a freeway in northern Mexico that results in the U.S. border.
In July, Mexico’s authorities statistics company acknowledged it needed to pay gangs to enter some cities to do census work final 12 months.
And in current months Mexico has seen situations of brutality and drug cartel management it hadn’t seen because the darkest days of the 2006-2012 drug conflict.
Security officers have acknowledged that in current months, legislation enforcement officers and troopers have been focused by roadside bombs, automobile bombs and bomb-dropping drones.
In the western state of Jalisco, movies surfaced in August exhibiting a younger man kidnapped by a drug cartel — one in every of a gaggle of 5 pals — being pressured to execute one in every of his fellow victims. Forcing victims to struggle one another to demise was a trademark of the infamous Zetas cartel in 2011.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
