INEGI also revealed that 70 percent of the murders committed during the first half of last year used a firearm, 10,615 of the deaths.
During the first half of last year , 83 homicides were committed a day in Mexico , the lowest figure so far in the current federal administration, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) in its report on Deaths due to homicide. from January to June of last year.
In its report on homicide deaths from January to June 2023 , the homicide rate was 12 per 100,000 inhabitants nationwide. This number of violent murders had not been reached for six years; In 2017, Inegi reported that from January to June there were 15,042 homicides.
According to data from the Institute, in the first half of 2023 fewer murders were committed than in the previous four years of the federal administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador; three thousand fewer deaths than in 2020, the year that reported the historical maximum.
It also revealed that 70 percent of the murders committed during the first half of last year used a firearm, 10,615 of the deaths . While nine percent of the deaths were due to the use of a knife and seven percent were due to strangulation.
Men were the largest number of victims, 13,270, which represents a rate of 21 homicides per 100,000. While in the case of women, the Inegi recorded the homicide of 1,697, a rate of two women per 100,000.
The institute explained that these results are preliminary, as are the data that they will publish on August 8 of this year, with the records for all of 2023.
He also explained that to obtain the information he collects data from Civil Registry Offices, public ministry agencies, forensic medical services, with the death certificate being the main tool to determine causes of death.
The researcher and public security specialist Fernando Jiménez, in an interview for El Sol de México , explained that this decrease should not yet be celebrated as an achievement , since it is minimal, compared to the levels of violence experienced in the country. country.
He attributed this slight decrease to the deployment of the National Guard, which functions as an inhibitor of violence in public spaces, coupled with the “great effort of state and municipal governments to reduce intentional homicides, more than the attack on organized crime.”
He also explained that there is a tendency for criminal groups to reduce homicides so as not to attract the attention of federal forces in the areas where they traffic , although he also mentioned that the issue of missing persons impacts the number of murder records, since it does not There is the victim’s body.
In the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the peak of homicides during the first six months of a year occurred in 2020 , when they reached 18,057 homicides, 99 per day . Since then, the number has been declining.
On the other hand, David Saucedo, security analyst and expert, told this newspaper that the Inegi homicide registry does not include the number of people found dead in clandestine graves found by search groups.
“In the civil registries, prosecutors’ offices and Semefos , they do not integrate the information of the people who are recovered from drug graves . We have an under-registration this way . If we add these under-registrations, with the number of missing people, there is practically no decrease in the number of homicides ”, He indicated.
The Director of Research of the National Citizen Observatory of Security, Justice and Legality, Doria Vélez, said that it is important to consider what the Inegi’s sources of information are , since it only takes death certificates.