For years, the Mexican government has been ordering its various law enforcement agencies to doctor their crime statistics in order to downplay the number of murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes often tied to drug cartels. The effort was apparently done to make it seem like the current Mexican government was making progress in improving the country’s security conditions.

The order to hide Mexico’s true crime numbers came from the former Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, Mexico’s SinEmbargo.Mx reported. According to information revealed by the former head of Mexico’s National Security System, Juan Miguel Alcantara, Osorio Chong would order them to hide the true number of crimes in order to make the ruling party look favorable.

In 2015, Osorio Chong publicly claimed that Mexico’s security conditions were the best they had been in a decade, Breitbart Texas reported. The outlandish claim was made as the country was undergoing a fierce escalation of cartel violence as rival criminal organizations fought for drug trafficking and production areas.

One of the ways the government would doctor the statistics would be to only count the number of case files instead of counting the number of victims. This means that in cases of multiple homicides, they were counted as one murder in the statistics, SinEmbargo.Mx reported.

Breitbart Texas has reported about how the Mexican government works to portray an image of security as cartel violence continues to spiral out of control. The new revelation from Alcantara raises questions about the most recent crimes statistics where 2017 was the year with most murders in Mexico. Based on the new information, the true numbers would likely be much higher.

In a country where cartel gunmen not only murder their victims but also dispose of their bodies by incinerating them, burying them in clandestine graves, or by dumping the bodies in lakes, Mexican authorities have found a new way to hide all those murders, Breitbart Texas has reported. All those individuals whose body has been disposed of are simply recorded as “disappeared” and not as kidnapped or murdered.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com.

Brandon Darby is managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and Stephen K. Bannon. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.