Pubdate: Thu, 12 Jan 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Tracy Wilkinson

Mexico Under Siege

GOVERNMENT WITHHELD DATA FROM PUBLIC ON DRUG WAR DEATHS

Under Pressure, Officials Release Partial Figures That Indicate the 
Toll Is 50,000

Reporting from Mexico City- Six months before a presidential election 
that his party is widely expected to lose, President Felipe Calderon 
is on the defensive about the government's blood-soaked drug war, 
with new revelations that it sought to conceal death toll statistics 
from the public.

By unofficial count, at least 50,000 people are believed to have been 
killed since Calderon deployed the military in the first days of his 
presidency in December 2006.

A year ago, the government released an official death toll up to that 
point - 34,612 - and pledged to periodically update a database and 
make it public. But official documents show that the offices of both 
the president and the attorney general late last year refused formal 
requests for updated statistics filed under the Mexican equivalent of 
the Freedom of Information Act.

After the reports first surfaced on the Mexican news website Animal 
Politico, a Calderon administration official told The Times that the 
government wanted to verify the numbers before releasing them. "It is 
not a lack of transparency on our part," the official said.

Under pressure, the attorney general's office Wednesday released a 
partial death toll for 2011. As of Oct. 1, it reported, 12,903 people 
had been killed in incidents tied to "rivalry among criminal organizations."

Until now, without official data, the public had to rely on tallies 
kept by Mexican newspapers. The partial official numbers show a 
notably higher death toll than the newspapers had calculated and 
suggest that the overall count since Calderon came to office will 
easily surpass 50,000.

As the Calderon administration claims a measure of success in the 
drug war, a burgeoning peace movement, academics and opposition 
politicians keen to take power have all asserted that the military 
offensive was flawed from the start and has caused violence to soar.

Although the government maintains that its reluctance to divulge the 
numbers was simply a matter of verification, some Mexicans suspect 
other motives. For one, the government may have been loath to draw 
attention to the high death toll in the lead-up to an election that 
will choose Calderon's successor. His conservative National Action 
Party is expected to take a drubbing, in part over his handling of 
the violence.

The government also saw damage to its credibility in 2010 when 
different agencies released contradictory statistics.

"The lesson we got from releasing figures is that no one believed 
them," said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the 
matter and did so on condition of anonymity.

The failure to disclose the statistics, meanwhile, had the effect of 
fueling greater doubt and suspicion.

"It can create the perception that the number of murdered is 
alarmingly higher than what is thought," said Ciro Gomez Leyva, a 
journalist and radio host. "And that instead of releasing solid and 
reliable reports, [the government] is opting to hide cadavers."

The majority of the dead are traffickers and their henchmen, but 
civilians, human rights defenders, migrants and children are 
increasingly being slain.

One such victim was the son of poet Javier Sicilia, who was killed in 
late March along with six other people who had been at a bar in the 
bougainvillea-filled town of Cuernavaca. That killing propelled the 
elder Sicilia into a crusade as arguably Mexico's most successful 
peace activist and one of the most outspoken critics of Calderon's 
drug war policies.

The government said the 2011 numbers showed that the pace of killing 
had slowed. The attorney general's statistics, though partial, 
indicate that killings were up by 11% in 2011, compared with a 
staggering 70% increase in 2010. Still, the aggregate numbers of 
dead, plus the brutality, have reached levels unthinkable just a few years ago.

The deadliest city, according to the new government figures, remains 
Ciudad Juarez, on the border across from El Paso, although its 
homicide rate has dropped. Juarez was followed by Acapulco, the 
tourist mecca hit by a surge of killing among gangs battling for market shares.

At the same time, violence spread to other parts of the country, such 
as the eastern coastal state of Veracruz, where the dumping of large 
numbers of bodies became a hallmark of gang warfare in the last half 
of the year.

Behind much of this mayhem is the intensifying struggle between the 
two dominant cartels, the vicious Zeta paramilitary force and the 
more businesslike, albeit ruthless, Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's largest.

The government's strategy of arresting leaders of drug-trafficking 
organizations has triggered a fragmentation of many of the bigger 
groups into smaller factions that have turned increasingly to other 
crimes, such as extortion, protection rackets, kidnapping and human smuggling.

Scores of clandestine mass graves have been discovered in the last 
year, yielding hundreds of victims, many of whom were poor immigrants 
from Central America, while others simply go unidentified, further 
complicating the amassing of accurate statistics.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom