Mexico Faces "Three Wars" - Independent Researchers

CNN Mexico: Laura Yaniz

Mexico City (CNNMéxico) - According to the 2012 Atlas of Security and Defense of Mexico, the violence that Mexico is experiencing is due to "three wars": the

• War waged by organized crime for control of territory; the
• State's offensive against those organized crime groups; and the
• War waged by the State against itself in the fight against corruption.

Research presented today by the Collective Analysis of Security with Democracy (CASEDE) reported that deaths related to the "first war" went from 2,826 in 2007 to 12,903 in 2011. Deaths from alleged clashes between rival groups multiplied by a factor of almost a thousand, from 171 to 10,200 in the same period.

Another variable that portrays the clash between rival groups is the number of territories controlled by organized crime. In 2010 Los Zetas was the criminal group that controlled the most municipalities, 405; followed by the Gulf cartel with 244 municipalities; and La Familia Michoacana with 227 municipalities, according to the report.

The "second war", that is, the State offensive against crime is reflected in

"the increase of members of the Federal Police--the largest deployment of troops across the country with rotations of 10,000 to 50,000 per month and the increase of salaries-- shows government action against organized crime," Armando Rodríguez Luna, coordinator of the Atlas statistical annex, explained to CNNMéxico Atlas.

Although the clash against criminal groups also causes deaths, there is no classification for victims of this kind of confrontation.

The "third war", waged by the State against itself to fight corruption,

"is one where the State monitors officials with access to resources, officials who are exposed by their activities in the field."

Despite the National Anti-Corruption Commission proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto,

"Mexico does not have an agency for the proper monitoring of the use of resources, because [such an agency] has to be independent," said Rodríguez Luna.

"It should be an anti-corruption proposal led by civil society, but there is no group that can take responsibility for this," he added.

The aim of the figures presented in the 2012 Atlas of Security and Defense of Mexico is to count on "targeted programs" to fight unemployment and poverty as generators of violence, according to Roberto Campa, Undersecretary of Prevention and Citizen Participation of the Secretariat of Government Affairs [SEGOB].

Lack of Information Means Security is 'In Play'

The CASEDE, made up of more than fifty researchers from various universities across the country and funded [jointly] by the Ford Foundation Open Society [program] and the Mérida Initiative, faced disparities in the information provided since the government of Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

The lack of systematized and unified information about the fight against organized crime motivated  members of CASEDE to create the collective in order to "sort and clean" the data, to "understand" the violence affecting the country and to create information accessible to anyone. The researchers collected and compared data from different sources.

"There was much dispersion in government agencies and in the numbers provided by the then-PGR (Attorney General's Office), the INEGI (National Institute of Geography and Statistics), the SEDENA (Secretariat of National Defense), the Navy and the Presidency--[numbers provided by] each one were different," explained Raúl Benitez Manaut to CNNMéxico.

On Wednesday, the federal government announced that 4,249 people have died in incidents presumably related to organized crime in the first four months of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto. The new figure represents a decrease of 17% compared with the number of deaths reported in the same period of 2012 (December 1, 2011, to March 31, 2012). The head of the Secretariat of Government Affairs, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said that the government is not going to

"hide even one figure; these are not statistics, they are hard data because they are validated."

The death toll for the first four months of Peña Nieto's government is almost certain, now what is missing in the studies is the impact of the violence, considers Raúl Benítez Manaut, president of CASEDE. The next step, he continued, is to

"undertake research on the social consequences of organized crime. It isn't just the murders. A large gap remains regarding other effects, such as the abandonment of towns, internal refugees, victims of kidnapping," said the specialist. 

Spanish original