MEXICO CITY - Gruesome murders appear to be commonplace in Mexico. The severed heads of eight men found in pairs along highways in Durango. Seventeen people massacred at a birthday party in Torreon. The bodies of 55 people found dumped in a mine near the town of Taxco.
Mexicans and their American neighbors are being bombarded by news of shootouts, bombings, kidnappings and murders as drug smugglers battle each other and the government for control of the narcotics trade.
But a closer look at the latest crime statistics indicates that much of Mexico has modest murder rates. The horrific violence that is jacking up the country's national death toll is occurring largely in nine of Mexico's 31 states.
And despite a wave of killings in those states, the national murder rate in 2009 was still lower than it was a decade before, long before the Mexican government began its crackdown on the cartels.
"If you look at history, today we have fewer murders, both in raw numbers and rates," said Mario Arroyo, a researcher with the Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies, a Mexico City think tank.
Experts caution that murder statistics give only a narrow view of crime.
Mexico's 2009 murder rate of 14 per 100,000 people was still more than twice as high as the U.S. rate of 5.4 in 2008, the latest year for which full U.S. statistics are available.
The numbers also do not reflect the increasingly macabre nature of Mexico's drug killings as the cartels try to intimidate Mexicans. Bodies are dismembered or hung from bridges. Mass shootings have become common as hit men hunt down their rivals at parties or drug-rehabilitation centers.
"There's a disconnect between the statistics and the perception of the public," said Elias Kuri, president of Light Up Mexico, an anti-crime association.
Mexico's Public Safety Secretariat released the 2009 murder totals in July in response to a request by the Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies. The institute used population data from the government's National Population Council to calculate murder rates for each state.
How many of the murders are due to the drug war has been a matter of fierce debate. On Tuesday, the head of Mexico's intelligence agency said that, from late 2006, when President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs, through this year, there have been 28,000 drug-related deaths. La Reforma newspaper, which keeps a running tally of drug deaths, counts 20,842 since the drug war began, with 6,587 taking place in 2009. Whether a murder was drug-related is often hard to determine because few murders in Mexico are ever solved, Arroyo said.
The government's murder statistics from 2009 show:
• The most deadly state in Mexico was Chihuahua, the sparsely populated Texas and New Mexico border region where Juárez is located. It was followed by the marijuana- and heroin-producing states of Durango, Guerrero and Sinaloa.
• Sonora, the state bordering Arizona, saw its murder rate triple from 2002 to 2009, from seven to 20 per 100,000. But that's still lower than in the late 1990s, when the rate was about 24.
• Six Mexican states had a lower murder rate than Arizona's rate of 6.3 per 100,000 people in 2008. They include popular tourist destinations like Quintana Roo state, where Cancun is located, and Baja California Sur, where Cabo San Lucas is located.
• The state with the lowest murder rate is Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico state known for its Mayan ruins. Its murder rate of two per 100,000 was comparable to the rate for Wyoming and Montana.
• The rate in Washington, D.C., was nearly quadruple that of the Mexican capital, Mexico City. Washington's murder rate was 31.4 per 100,000 people in 2008; Mexico City's rate in 2009 was eight.
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