LAST month 12,000 people marched in protest through Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-biggest city, after authorities revealed that three missing film students had been dissolved in acid. The month before, a bottler for Coca-Cola shut down its operations in the state of Guerrero because of the rampant violence there. Meanwhile the morgue in the northern border town of Tijuana, where the murder rate has nearly tripled in two years, is so full of bodies that residents complain about the smell. As repellent as they are, these tales are just a taste. Some 25,340 Mexicans, says the government, were murdered last year, well above the previous peak of 2011. The toll for 2018 is on track to pass 30,000. Why is Mexico’s murder rate rocketing?

Mexico has the misfortune to lie directly between South America’s coca fields and the United States, the world’s biggest drug market. The drugs trade created criminal gangs who fight over turf and kill those who try to stop them doing business. Guns, easily bought in the United States, flow back into Mexico. Weak law enforcement lets gangsters kill with virtual impunity. Some scholars think the rise of democracy at the end of the last century broke up truces between criminals and the ruling party, spurring more conflict and violence. As gangs wreaked havoc, Felipe Calderón, president from 2006 till 2012, sent the army to defeat them, unleashing an unprecedented wave of violence. Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in 2012, vowed to halve the murder rate—and it did drop during the first few years of his tenure.

But three new trends have brought the violence up to new levels. First, the capturing of “kingpins” has left gangs fragmented, undisciplined and prone to fighting among themselves. These fissures have helped spur the second trend: diversification. Gangs look beyond drug-trafficking and into activities like extortion, kidnapping and—especially—the theft of fuel from pipelines. These new lines of work are just as bloody as the old ones. The third trend, a result of the first two, has been decentralisation. During the Calderón era, much of the killing was linked to the moving of drugs into America and was concentrated in states and cities along the border, such as Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua. But now gangs are spreading to states which have not known widespread bloodshed, such as Quintana Roo, Guanajuato and Colima. Almost every single state has seen a rise in murders since 2015.

Unsurprisingly, security has been a big issue in the lead-up to Mexico’s presidential election, due on July 1st. José Antonio Meade of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and Ricardo Anaya of the National Action Party both push measures to strengthen the state. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing candidate who is the favourite to win, wants to offer amnesty to a vaguely defined cohort of criminals. “We cannot solve violence with violence,” he says. But three in four Mexicans oppose the idea. So far, all three plans are light on detail. The last two presidents have left behind a more violent country than they found. Few voters are confident that the next leader can avoid doing the same.

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Mexico’s murder rate heads for a new record (May 2018)

