I wouldn’t fully trust Mexico numbers (I’m Mexican), specially if they are “official numbers”.
Current government is known to play very imaginative games with numbers. For instance, there are “less murders” but many more “missing people” (most likely dead and thrown in a mass grave somewhere). Even recently they changed the definition of “missing people”… to reduce those numbers.
This is typical for most countries of the world. From what I've seen, Mexico is actually better than average on collecting statistics, even crime statistics. One reason is that just like the USA they collect homicides using both criminal statistics and health statistics so the two can be compared (also like in the USA, health are better!)
But if someone goes missing you can't just say they are dead until you found the body. So of course murders are undercounted, but every country in the world deals with this problem to some degree, although thanks to the cartels it's a much worse problem in Mexico.
Well, there was a scandal recently because of the Mexican government changing the definition of “missing people” to reduce the number of missing people overnight.
No long ago a teacher also appeared in a “narco video” tied and surrounded by armed cartel members to threaten people that don’t pay “protection money”. She appeared dead shortly after and the government said that the cause of death was a “heart attack “.
So yeah, this government is becoming less transparent by the day.
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u/salter77 7d ago
I wouldn’t fully trust Mexico numbers (I’m Mexican), specially if they are “official numbers”.
Current government is known to play very imaginative games with numbers. For instance, there are “less murders” but many more “missing people” (most likely dead and thrown in a mass grave somewhere). Even recently they changed the definition of “missing people”… to reduce those numbers.