By KELIN DILLON

Though Mexico’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection may have detailed the country’s year-to-year homicide rate reduction during a press conference on Monday, May 24, continued reports of rampant violence throughout the country have put the veracity of the government’s purported lower rates into question.

According to data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Security System (SESNSP) and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), there have been 118,732 murders committed throughout the first three-and-a-half years of the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), taking place between December 2018 to April 2022.  With this in mind, the López Obrador administration is on pace to exceed the 120,341 homicides that occurred during former President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s entire six-year term.

Likewise, the organizations have revealed that the rate of femicides – or gender-based homicides committed against women – have gone up under AMLO, accumulating more of these murders in one 12-month period than experienced throughout all six years of predecessor President Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year administration.

Ironically, AMLO used Monday’s press conference and the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection’s figures to claim his government has fixed Mexico’s homicide crisis, claiming “we stopped this trend.”

While López Obrador has increased the amount of military patrolling the streets of Mexico, the violence has not stopped. With nearly 124,000 soldiers deployed, Mexico’s daily homicide rate has only gone up, hosting 81 homicides and femicides per day in January, increasing to 83.7 on average in February, 87.9 in March, and 87.6 in April, clearly demonstrating that increasing troops does not correlate to a reduction in the murder rate.

With Monday’s mass murder of 11 people in the city of Celaya and the recent violation of a woman inside the headquarters of the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office, despite AMLO and the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection’s claims, Mexico’s widespread violence streak does not seem to be coming to an end any time soon.