Examining the drug-war death-toll debate
The most commonly cited figure among media reports is of “over 60,000 deaths,” but in the absence of up-to-date official statistics, other estimates range wildly.
Sixty-thousand appears to be the most conservative estimate, with the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity claiming over 80,000 have been killed and another 20,000 have disappeared. Italy’s ANSA Latina makes it 83,541 deaths, while France’s Le Monde puts the figure at 95,632.
One of the highest estimates came in March from U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who said 150,000 people had been killed in Mexico’s war on drugs, citing unpublished figures from Mexican officials.
That speculation is so rampant is partly because the Mexican government has stopped releasing an official body count. The last figure to come from the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) was of 47,515 deaths from December 2006 to September 2011.
Assuming the death rate has continued since then at the monthly average recorded between January and September 2011 (although it may actually have fallen slightly this year), the total number of people killed during Calderon’s administration would reach 74,155, equivalent to about 0.06 percent of Mexico’s population.
Report links US gun laws to rise in violence in Mexico
In August, the Social Science Research Network published a study entitled “Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico,” examining how the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban (FAWB) has impacted security in Mexico.
Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, the FAWB prohibited the sale of a range of military-style automatic and semi-automatic firearms across the United States. It was allowed to expire a decade later by the George W. Bush administration, with subsequent efforts to reinstate the ban having proved fruitless.
“Our estimates suggest that the U.S. policy change caused at least 239 additional deaths annually in municipios near the border during [the] post-2004 period,” concluded Arindrajit Dubey, from the University of Massachusetts’ economics department, and Oeindrila Dubez and Omar Garcia-Ponce, both from New York University’s politics department.
They reached these conclusions after examining the number of fatal shootings in northern Mexico in which assault weapons were used for the two years before the FAWB expired and the two years that followed. The findings are the result of extensive research and sophisticated logarithms, taking into account the impact of independent variables.
“The results are robust to controls for drug trafficking, policing, unauthorized immigration, and economic conditions in U.S. border ports, as well as drug eradication, military enforcement, and trends in income and education in Mexican municipios,” they explained. “Our findings suggest that U.S. gun laws have exerted an unanticipated spillover on gun supply in Mexico, and this increase in arms has fueled rising violence south of the border.”
With assault weapons banned across Mexico, the expiration of the FAWB suddenly made it much easier for drug gangs to purchase powerful guns across the border in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas (California has maintained its own state ban on assault weapons).
In light of their findings, the academics advised that “stricter control of guns in the U.S. could help curb rising violence in Mexico,” later adding, “our paper holds a broader implication, as it provides evidence of a positive relationship between guns and violent crime.”
With the elementary school shooting brutally illustrating this point, stricter gun laws are now back on the political agenda in the United States. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein announced this week that she will introduce legislation to reinstate the FAWB when Congress meets in the new year, with President Barack Obama also pledging to support the bill on Wednesday.
Mexico’s former President Felipe Calderon was quick to welcome the news. “In 2004 the ‘Assault Weapons Ban’ expired in the U.S. It is one of the causes of the violence in the region. Senator Feinstein is proposing to reinstate it,” Calderon wrote on Twitter Tuesday night. “Well done Senator Feinstein for presenting an initiative restricting the sale of assault weapons. [It will be] good for the U.S. [and] good for Mexico.”
To read the full academic report, visit http://www.ssrn.com/ and search “gun laws Mexico.”
FBI: ‘El Chapo’ was target of airport killing
The assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo at Guadalajara airport in 1993 was an accident, with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman the intended target, according to a newly released FBI report.
The conclusions of the FBI investigation into the high-profile killing were finally published in the Houston Chronicle last week, following a request made four years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix brothers attempted to assassinate Joaquin Guzman at the Guadalajara Airport. They mistakenly killed Guadalajara’s Archbishop, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, instead,” reads the FBI’s heavily redacted three-page report from October 1993. Eventually released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the file was originally shared with the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The cardinal and his driver were shot dead when gunmen riddled their Grand Marquis vehicle with at least 38 bullets at the airport on May 24, 1993. His successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez, has always maintained that Posadas was the victim of a conspiracy, but then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his Attorney General Jorge Carpizo McGregor both said they believed the killing was a mistake, with the assassins from the Tijuana cartel meaning to kill Guzman, head of the rival Sinaloa Federation.
Efforts to capture Guzman intensified after the killing and he was arrested in Guatemala on June 9, 1993. He was convicted of possession of firearms, drug trafficking and the murder of Posadas – although the latter charge was later dismissed by another judge – and was held in the maximum-security Puente Grande prison just outside Guadalajara until his escape in 2001.
Guzman remains Mexico’s most wanted criminal and is widely considered the most powerful drug trafficker on earth, with an estimated fortune of one billion dollars.
The Tequila Files 