A glimmer of hope

WHEN FEUDING BETWEEN drug traffickers was at its most brutal in Ciudad Juárez, a border city on the edge of the Chihuahua desert, the deadliest time to step into its mean streets was 4.45pm. The main television news bulletin is broadcast at 5pm, and Juárez’s gangsters, experts in public relations, would time their murders to lead the evening headlines. “They would kill in the streets, by the highways, on the main avenues. They wanted to send a message to the authorities,” says David García, head of the city’s forensic service. Five years ago his team dealt with about 400 homicides a year, giving the city of 1.3m a murder rate roughly equal to that of New York in the early 1990s. By 2010 the small mortuary had to accommodate 300 murdered bodies a month, making Juárez by some reckonings the most violent city in the world.

The explosion of killing in Juárez is only the most extreme example of an appalling national trend. Five years ago Mexico was one of Latin America’s gentlest countries, with a murder rate of nine per 100,000 people, not much higher than in the southern United States. But since then the numbers have more than doubled (see chart 4), in tandem with an increase in robbery, extortion and kidnapping. Sadistic killings have been beamed around the world over the internet.

Many parts of Mexico, including its gigantic capital, are relatively peaceful, so the country’s overall murder rate is still no higher than Brazil’s and much lower than much of Central America’s. Yucatán, the quietest state, is statistically as safe as Finland. But very few places are unscathed by the trend: nearly all states saw more killings last year than five years earlier. Polls show that insecurity is Mexicans’ biggest worry.
Now, for the first time since murders began to soar in 2008, the rate is subsiding. In the first nine months of this year killings were 7% down on the same period in 2011. Twenty of Mexico’s 31 states recorded a decline. In Juárez Mr García’s mortuary is back to handling about 40 bodies a month, little more than during what juarenses still know as the “pre-war” years. Mr Calderón describes the past year as a “turning point” for the country, but cautions that it took Colombia many years to bring its murder rate under control. In Juárez people once again drive with their windows rolled down and eat their burritos on the pavement, but achieving the same results elsewhere will not be easy.
After the Caribbean cocaine-smuggling route was shut down in the 1980s, Colombia’s drug lords turned to Mexico, whose 2,000-mile border with the United States, the world’s biggest drug market, made it a convenient stepping-stone. As the net closed around Colombian capos in the 1990s they ceded more of their operations to their Mexican partners, whom they began to pay in cocaine rather than cash. Shortly after the turn of the century Mexico’s gangs became more powerful than Colombia’s, reckons Antonio Mazzitelli, the regional head of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime.