EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – On an average day in Mexico, 12 people are found dead with signs of torture or dismembered, burned or buried in clandestine graves.
In that 24-hour span, first responders also pick up the bodies of mass-shooting victims and women and children who have been brutalized prior to succumbing to strangulation, stab wounds or being struck by blunt objects.
Homicidal sadism swirls around places where drug cartels are engaged in fierce turf wars, but nowadays, no state in Mexico is exempt from extreme violence, according to the Mexico City nonprofit Causa en Común (Common Cause).
The group this week released its semi-annual report on extreme violence in a country where researchers say authorities often underreport crime and society is starting to dismiss it as normal. The report documented 2,185 “atrocities” involving 4,959 victims between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2024.
Fernando Escobar Ayala, an investigator with Causa en Común, said the point of the report was not to scare people or sensationalize crime in Mexico. Rather, it is meant to point out violent crime often is underreported, and so people don’t grow to accept murder and inhumanities as normal.
“We know that official crime figures are deficient, manipulated. Also, as a society we have lost interest, to a degree, to face this atrocious reality of violence and insecurity in our country,” Escobar said this week in a radio interview with Grupo Formula.
The report includes 20 types of crimes as atrocities. Torture-slayings led the way with 507 cases, followed by dismembered bodies (290) and mass-shootings (187), which involve at least three fatalities in a single event. There were also 111 clandestine graves found with one or more sets of skeletal remains.
Other categories include femicides, lynching, death as a result of burns inflicted on a person or as a result of a narco-terrorist act, and homicides involving vulnerable groups such as children.
Three states where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is fighting local groups for control of criminal activity recorded the most atrocities: Guanajuato (203), Jalisco (180) and Guerrero (163). In the north, Baja California (152) replaced Chihuahua (69) as the border state with the most sadistic homicides and mass shootings.
Rene Gerez Lopez, another Causa en Común investigator involved in the report, said the drug trade is a common denominator in many inhumanities, but not the only one.
“At first, yes, organized crime and control of territory increases crime, but not all violence in this country is drug-related,” he told Grupo Formula. “’They’re just killing each other’ (is) the argument the government uses to explain and (dismiss) the killings. But the truth is at this stage violence has become generalized and, in some places, become a way to solve conflicts. […] The numbers are absurd.”
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