In 2020, according to a report by the Mexico City-based Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, seven out of the ten “most violent” cities in the world were located in Mexico.
The organisation ranks cities with populations of 300,000 or more – which are not in declared conflict zones – based on official tallies of intentional homicides.
The city of Celaya in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato came in first with 109.38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Ciudad Obregón. Guanajuato’s Irapuato took fifth place, while Baja California’s Ensenada took sixth. Uruapan in the state of Michoacán came in eighth.
For the country as a whole, 2019 and 2020 were the most violent on record, with more than 34,000 intentional homicides each year. Many critics of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have blamed his “hugs, not bullets” policy vis-à-vis the drug cartels for the bloody state of affairs.
But while AMLO is certainly deserving of more than a little criticism – particularly with regard to his appallingly dismissive attitude towards Mexico’s surge in femicides during the pandemic – he did not exactly create the current landscape of violence out of thin air. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.