Lorena Figueroa

El Paso Times

Juárez is no longer one of the most dangerous cities in the world, according to a group that releases annual rankings.

The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexican think tank, removed Juárez from its new ranking of the 50 most violent cities worldwide with a population of more than 300,000.

The rankings are based on homicides for 2015 and don't include deaths in combat zones or cities with unavailable data.

The nonprofit research organization said that Juárez had a rate of 27.17 homicides per 100,00 residents last year — fewer than Obregón, Mexico, which ranked last on the list with 28.29 slayings per 100,000 residents, according to the report.

The rate is a fraction of the 400 killings per 100,000 residents reported between 2008 and 2010, the city's most violent years when Juárez ranked first. The city was second in 2011. Juárez has a population of 1.35 million residents.

"We are proud that international organizations recognize and spread the effort of authorities and society to reverse the negative image acquired from the violence lived in those years," Chihuahua Attorney General Jorge González Nicolás said after the report was released.

He noted that in 2015 Juárez reported 311 homicides — the fewest number of slayings since 2007, the year when homicides began increasing as the Sinaloa cartel declared war on the Juárez cartel and moved in to take over its territory.

Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice President José Antonio Ortega Sánchez said the factors that were taken into consideration in removing Juárez from the list included not only in the official homicide statistics, but "an estimated higher number (of slayings)."

"The official numbers from the Chihuahua government continue to be not fully reliable," he said.

Sánchez said that the estimated number of homicides in Juárez in 2015 was 367, based on projections and statistics from the National System of Public Security and Mexico's census bureau.

Still, the estimated number of slayings in Juárez decreased significantly from the 538 homicides in 2014, according to the organization. That year, the state attorney general's office reported 438 homicides.

In 2014, Juárez ranked 27th on the list, up from 37th in 2013.

State and local officials have attributed the decrease to better coordination among the three branches of government in investigations, arrests, tougher sentencing and the better equipping of law enforcement agencies, as well as citizen engagement in reporting crimes.

The professionalization of the Juárez Police Department also has helped, as has the reduction of corruption among officers who now frequently undergo reliability tests, officials said.

Sánchez emphasized the effort by residents to rebuild the city's social fabric. The defeat of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes' cartel by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman's cartel contributed as well, Sánchez said, noting that it ended the turf war that left more than 10,000 people dead over five years.

According to the organization, the world's most violent city in 2015 was Caracas, Venezuela, which had a rate of 119.87 homicides per 100,000 residents.

And after being ranked first for four consecutive years, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with 111.03 homicides per 100,000 residents, moved into second place, followed by San Salvador in third place with 108.54 homicides per 100,000 residents.

Acapulco was ranked fourth with 104.73 homicides per 100,000 residents, and Maturin, Venezuela, was ranked fifth, with 86.45, according to the organization.

Other cities in Mexico on the list were Culiacán, which ranked 17th; Tijuana at 35th; and Ciudad Victoria, which came in 46th.

Other Mexican cities that fell off of the list for 2015 are Chihuahua City, Cuernavaca, Nuevo Laredo and Torreón.

Lorena Figueroa may be reached at 546-6129; lfigueroa@elpasotimes.com; @LFigueroaEPT on Twitter.