PDA: Los Pinos publishes narco body count

Originally published at http://www.plazadearmastx.com/

On Friday, Jan. 7, one day before Gabrielle Gifford was shot in Tuscon, Arizona, another politician turned up riddled with bullets in a state that borders Texas. Saúl Vara Rivera, the mayor of Zaragoza, Coahuila, was discovered in a field outside of Monterrey, his back pumped full of 23 bullets. Of course it came as no surprise that the Coahuila incident failed to trigger media motion sensors in the United States, where the news cycle was utterly consumed with the Arizona madman's mass murder and political assassination. Sadly, though, Vara Rivera's slaying barely garnered any national coverage in Mexico, either.

There are undoubtedly multiple reasons for the disparate press responses between the two countries to the shooting of a politician (and let's remember that Gifford survived), but clearly one prominent factor is that political assassinations have simply become business-as-usual in many parts of Mexico. Vara Rivera was the first mayor of the year to be liquidated, but in 2010 between 13 and 15 mayors had their lives snuffed out by narco cartel gunmen, not to mention the dozens of police commanders and security officials who met similar fates. Moreover, on this occasion Mexico's national media had more grisly fodder for their coverage: 15 decapitated bodies were dumped in Acapulco in a parking lot on Jan. 8.

On Wednesday, Jan. 12, the federal government unveiled a new national database of homicides related to narcotics violence, the first time it has published a rigorous, full accounting of the cartel carnage. The report was methodically compiled in conjunction with independent citizen groups and prominent academics. The database showed that in the 49 months from Dec. 2006, when President Felipe Calderón assumed office and launched a sweeping security crackdown on drug traffickers, up through December 2010, a whopping 34,612 men, women and children have lost their lives.

Almost one-fifth, or 18.6 percent, of drug-linked homicides occurred in the infamously lethal Ciudad Juárez, a large maquiladora city crowded up to the river banks across from El Paso. More broadly, the large state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, claimed the lion's share of narco homicides during the same period: an astounding 29.3 percent. (Curiously, though, nearly all of the remaining 3,698 Chihuahua victims were located in the interior of the state and not along the New Mexico or Texas border. Juárez is the exception, albeit a blaring one.)

The second-deadliest Mexican state with a shared border with Texas was Tamaulipas – also the closest to San Antonio. A distant second it is, though– only 4.3 percent of the national total, trailing far behind Chihuahua's 29.3 percent. Los Pinos' new database tallies 1,475 narco-related slaying in Tamaulipas – roughly one per day through the four years and one month it covers. Reynosa, Tamaulipas held the dubious distinction of topping the list with 230 killings, or 5 per month, followed by San Fernando, away from the border and on the coast with 173, and then Nuevo Laredo, our closest neighboring Mexican city, with 159, or about 3 per month.

The state of Nuevo León, which shares a very small segment of border with Texas but claims much more important cultural and economic linkages due to the prominent ties between San Antonio and Monterrey, suffered 971 narco-related slaughters, only 2.8 percent of the grand national total, and only 0.02 percent of the state's relatively large population. Monterrey was the deadliest city in Nuevo León, registering 297 losses, some 6 per month.

Finally, Coahuila, the fourth state to border Texas, recorded 659 trafficking deaths, a slim 1.9 percent of the 34,612 body count during Calderón's war on drugs. The vast bulk of these occurred far from the border in the battlefield of Torreón and nearby Matamoros (not to be confused with the Matamoros, Tamaulipas border city).