Posts Tagged ‘cartel’

Great Op-Ed piece in the NY Times about the US perceptions of the drug cartel violence here.  I feel like I need to chip in my two cents here.

Mexico is not without its warts and the drug wars do indeed represent a huge problem but the view from the street bears little resemblance to the pornography of violence that one sees in the media (my Mom called me the other day (from the Midwest) and asked me how I was dealing with all of the beheadings!)

I’m not sure which cartel was the mastermind behind this heinous act, but we DID have some lawn chairs stolen from our porch.  That’s been the extent of the crime that we’ve witnessed here.  I’m sure that there is violence around us but I’ve not seen any, neither have any of my friends, nor their friends.  Let’s put this into perspective:

Gun violence in the U.S. kills 14 out of every 100K people.  In Mexico, it’s 12 out of every 100K.  Dig a little deeper and you find that 4 out of 5 gun deaths in Mexico are narcos killing other narcos (Mexico’s “self-cleaning-oven”).  Unless my math fails me, that means approximately 2.5 out of every 100K normal everyday citizens are killed by guns here.  I don’t know what the narco-on-narco numbers are for the US but I suspect that they are negligible.  Add it up and you are 5 times more likely to be shot and killed in the US than in Mexico.  

Are my numbers accurate?  Who knows.  There are so many variables (crimes committed vs reported, non-gun murders, etc. etc.)  but certainly Mexico doesn’t deserve the bad rap it’s been handed as of late.  As mentioned in the article: “Let’s leave caricatures where they belong, in the hands of cartoonists.”