Mexico drugs war kills thousands
Conflict turns country into world’s second deadliest zone
MEXICO has become the world’s second deadliest conflict zone, only next to Syria, a new report revealed yesterday. The expanding drug war in Mexico claimed 23 000 lives last year, according to the annual Armed Conflict Survey by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The drug war began in 2006 when former president Felipe Calderon unleashed the military on the country’s drug cartels – a move immediately backed by a $1.8-billion military aid package by former US president George W Bush. Washington has provided further annual drug war aid to Mexico through the Merida Initiative.
In comparison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17 000 and 16 000 lives, respectively, last year.
“This is all the more surprising, considering that the conflict deaths are nearly all attributable to small arms,” said John Chipman, chief executive and director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Mexico is a conflict marked by the absence of artillery, tanks or combat aviation.”
The civil war in Syria claimed the world’s most lethal conflict for the fifth year in a row. Last year, 50 000 people died there, bringing the total number of deaths during conflict since 2011 to about 290 000.
The number of murders rose in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states, last year. The largest fatalities are seen in those states that have become key battlegrounds for control between competing, “increasingly fragmented” cartels.
“The violence grew worse as the cartels expanded the territorial reach of their campaigns, seeking to ‘cleanse’ areas of rivals in their efforts to secure a monopoly on drug-trafficking routes and other criminal assets,” the report said.
But unlike the conflicts in the Middle East, Mexico received much less attention from the media and the international community.
Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the US and the Americas Programme at London-based think-tank Chatham House, said he thought it was because the conflict in Mexico was not a war “in the political sense of the word”.
Overall, the number of people killed in armed conflicts around the world dropped last year, from 167 000 to 157 000. “Between January and August, 900 000 people were internally displaced in Syria alone,” Anastasia Voronkova, survey editor, said.