Despite Jurez Violence, Mexico’s Murder Numbers Aren’t The Worst

If you ask Kevin Casas-Zamora of the Brookings Institution, despite the bloodshed in Ciudad Jurez, Mexico’s national murder rate doesn’t even crack the top ten in Latin America.

“It pales in significance when you compare it to the murder rate in places like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador,” Zamora told CNN.

Casas-Zamora said four states – all in the country’s north – comprised 60% or more of Mexico’s drug-related murders in 2009.

“If Chihuahua was a country,” he said, “It would have the highest murder rate in the world.”

As ABC-7’s Paul Cicala reported in his series of special reports last month, Mexico, in many ways, is beginning to resemble what Colombia looked like 20 years ago.

Casas-Zamora said he agrees with that and added he sees another parallel with the war in Afghanistan.

“(The drug war in Mexico) is to some extent a war that has to be fought but nobody really knows in a clear way why, how and until when.”