On May 25, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador set a record of 156,136 murders in the time since his taking office in December 2018. This number has already surpassed the 6-year time period of the previous administration, with a year and a half still to go. It should be also noted that the figures slightly differ depending on the agency doing the counting, and do not include those who are missing.
According to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (Sesnsp), and the Daily Report of the Secretariat for Citizen Security and Protection (SSPC), the strategy “Hugs, not Bullets.” has not worked.
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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Term
December 2018-May 2023 (Term Ends September 2024)
156,163+ Homicide Victims
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Former President Enrique Peña Nieto’s Term
December 2012-November 2018
156,066 Homicide Victims
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Former President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s Term
December 2006-November 2012
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Former President Vicente Fox Quesada’s Term
December 2000-November 2006
In addition, the López Obrador government also registers the most violent days on record: December 1, 2019, 127 murders; May 24, 2022, 118; June 7, 2020, 117; July 4, 2021, 115.
AMLO Claims Violence Was Inherited
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that his government is already the most violent six-year term in Mexico’s recent history. However, he claims this was due to the “bad inheritance” that previous governments left him. López Obrador accused his predecessors of having created these criminal groups, since he accused that there was a “Narco State,” but assured that the crime of homicide is going down.
“Now they tell us ‘What a barbarity, the current government is the government that has the most homicides!’ Yes, but why don’t you put the homicide sheet (he instructed his spokesman Jesús Ramírez) to see how they left the country to us, because this is a bad inheritance in security, but that’s how they left us health, education and that’s how they left us everything.”
The president assured that in the past six-year term, homicides increased by 59%, while the worst jump occurred in the Calderón government when they rose by 192%, following the militarization of the drug war in 2006. That variable favors him, because according to his statistics, in the last five years, it has fallen by 17%. “This has cost us a lot, and we hope it continues to decline,” said the president.