two on the numbers...
Molly Molloy
Drowning by Numbers
By CARLOS PUIG
MEXICO CITY — There are meetings that should not take place. That was my first thought when I talked last week to the Mexican officials who get together every Tuesday to figure out how many people have been killed in the country’s drug war.
The first officials to report at these meetings are the representatives from the army, the navy and the federal police. If an army patrol came across bodies on a road in Sinaloa, if a police patrol found a dead man in a vacant lot in the State of Mexico, they are included in an initial tally. Then, to avoid double counts, the representative of the National Public Security System — with which municipal, state and national authorities share crime information and that develop decides national strategies on public security strategies — cross-references them with reports from the state attorneys.
Some dead bodies are of special interest: those with shots to the back of the head, those that show signs of torture, those that are the result of a battle between gangs or a clash with security forces. The caliber of the bullet, any message left with a corpse, whether the victims were kidnapped before being killed — all are factors that help determine whether or not these homicides are linked to organized crime.
It is, fundamentally, an intelligence exercise: Detect trends, analyze how criminal organizations are behaving, which cartel is fighting which cartel, who is winning and who is losing. The information helps the government decide how to deploy police and military forces, and whether to contain or raid the operations of drug cartels.
Keeping this count became a necessity around 2009, three years after President Felipe Calderón started an unprecedented assault on Mexican drug cartels that caused the total number of homicides to double, between 2007 and 2010, to 20,000. But now the exercise has become a political tool.
The numbers discussed at the weekly meetings were long kept secret, partly because, as officials told me last week, they are uncertain, preliminary inferences. But the new government of President Enrique Peña Nieto began to release them in January: It was only too eager to claim that the number of homicides related to organized crime has dropped significantly in recent months.
That claim is not exactly true. Yes, since Peña Nieto took office last December, the tally of murders linked to organized crime has been about 5,300, which is about 18 percent less than during the last five months of Calderón’s term. But numbers depend on context, and if you consider a different time frame you draw a different conclusion.
If you compare the government’s own figures for February and April, for example, the number of homicides connected to organized crime actually increased by 7 percent. And according to the most recent tally of all homicides reported by state authorities to the National Public Security System, the total number of felony homicides was up by 4 percent between October 2012 and April 2013. (Felony homicides include homicides related to organized crime but also crimes of passion and other homicides.)
“The new strategy is working,” Gen. Oscar Naranjo, a former head of Colombia’s national police who is now Peña Nieto’s chief security adviser, said on Monday in an interview with a Colombian radio. In reality, the strategy is successful only in framing the figures.
Carlos Puig is a columnist for the Mexican newspaper Milenio and the anchor of the television show En 15.
Mexico: far fewer people disappeared than feared
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s top security official said Friday that far fewer people disappeared during Mexico’s drug war than were feared when the government released a list of about 26,000 cases.
Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said federal and state governments are working to weed out people who have been located. He noted that many of those included on the original list of 26,121 released earlier this year had left home for personal reasons or emigrated.
He says a new list will be released with a few months and ‘‘it will be much lower.’’
The list was compiled by the administration of former President Felipe Calderon, and largely covers disappearance reports from his 2006-2102 term. Osorio Chong said some of the people on the list had returned to their families, but relatives never bothered to cancel the original missing person report.
The issue has become a sensitive one in Mexico, where kidnappings are rife and thousands of people say their relatives have been abducted by drug gangs.
Osorio Chong also claimed that the number of deaths related to the drug war has been steadily dropping, and he expects that by the end of the month, figures would be about 20 percent lower than the same period of 2012. He said figures show about 34 drug-related killings per day so far in May, down from 41 in the same period in 2012.
However, experts have questioned what they say is atypical behavior in the statistics.
The Interior Department reported in April that drug-related deaths fell 14 percent from December to March, as compared to the same period a year earlier. But non-drug-related deaths rose by 6.8 percent during the same period, raising the question of whether some deaths were reclassified to improve the country’s image and to help President Enrique Pena Nieto appear to meet a key campaign pledge: to reduce drug-related violence.
Osorio Chong responded to those doubts by saying ‘‘we don’t make up statistics,’’ and offered to arrange a meeting between reporters and experts who compiled the death tolls, to discuss the methodology used.
He also said Mexico had requested changes both in the way it shares intelligence with the United States, and the way the U.S. deports migrants. Mexico has requested the United States no longer just dump migrants at the border, but rather advise Mexico about who is being deported, and in some cases arrange for ‘‘interior deportation,’’ flying deportees to their home cities rather than releasing them in border towns where they could be targets for recruitment by drug gangs.
‘‘If you send people back, at least give me minimal information to know who you’re deporting, and send them where I ask you to,’’ said Osorio Chong. He said that if they’re simply dumped at the border, ‘‘the drug cartels are going to grab them. They (the migrants) are going to try to cross again, or they’re going to join organized crime.’’
The interior minister also defended Mexico’s new policy of channeling all cross-border intelligence sharing through a single office, rather than allowing each Mexican agency to communicate with its U.S. counterpart, as in the past.
Osorio Chong said the previous policy had encouraged organizational infighting in the Mexican government. ‘‘It looked like a big dispute, with agencies fighting among themselves.’’
‘‘Now, we are being more effective than ever, the United States has more information than it did before,’’ he said. ‘‘Ask them. Ask them if we’re not being faster, more agile in information sharing.’’
The U.S. embassy had no immediate response to the interior minister’s statements.