Mexico's Drug War Is Bloodier and Bloodier

American demand for heroin is adding fuel to Mexico’s deadly drug war. (Dimitris Kalogeropoylos / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Homicide records are being broken in Mexico, and American hands are far from clean.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Prosecutors opened 2,234 homicide investigations last month, according to government statistics released Friday. That’s an increase of 40% over June of last year and 80% over June of 2015.

Rising demand for heroin in the United States and a bloody power struggle inside one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels have put the country on track to record more killings in 2017 than in any year since the government began releasing crime data in 1997. … Though violence used to be concentrated in a handful of states, it is now rising nationwide, with 27 of Mexico’s 32 states recording an uptick in homicides compared with last year.

… Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope says he believes another structural problem is more likely to blame for the increase in killings: Impunity.

Only one in five homicide cases leads to arrests, and few result in successful prosecutions. That means that in Mexico, it’s simple to kill somebody and get away with it, he said.

— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

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