Mexico is “safer than the United States,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador declared in an impassioned response to growing criticism from Washington this week.
The numbers — mostly — don’t back him up.
On international safety rankings, homicide and crime rates, and kidnapping statistics, Mexico fares poorly in most cross-border comparisons. Still, the angry rhetoric and growing list of irritations on both sides of the border signal a rough patch for two countries long linked by geography, demography, culture and trade.
Mexico’s national homicide rate in 2022 was 28 per 100,000 inhabitants, almost exactly four times as high as the U.S. national rate. Many individual American cities — including St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Kansas City, Missouri — do have homicide rates in excess of Mexican levels, according to the World Population Review, but Mexican cities occupy nine of the first 10 places on a global list of the deadliest cities with populations of at least 300,000 not involved in war....more
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