Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has affirmed claims made by Donald Trump that Washington DC had a better homicide price than Mexico Metropolis, a statistic utilized by the US chief to justify his takeover of policing in the US capital.
“He mentioned one thing like ‘Washington is extra unsafe than Mexico Metropolis,’ which is true,” Sheinbaum mentioned on Tuesday. “What we don’t agree with is when he mentioned that it’s essentially the most unsafe metropolis in Latin America.”
Sheinbaum’s feedback got here after the US president introduced on Monday that he had ordered the nationwide guard to Washington DC and seized management of the town’s police power, describing the US capital as “one of the harmful cities anyplace on this planet”.
“The homicide price in Washington right this moment is greater than that of Bogotá, Colombia, Mexico Metropolis, a few of the locations that you simply hear about as being the worst locations on Earth,” Trump mentioned.
A few of Trump’s claims had been overblown or patently false. “Trump regularly brings out numbers which might be exaggerated and that distort actuality,” mentioned Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican safety analyst.
Whereas DC does have a excessive homicide price, the justice division noted that violent crime dropped 35% from 2023 to 2024 and is at “the bottom it has been in over 30 years”. In the meantime, there are at least 49 cities on this planet with greater murder charges than the US capital.
Nonetheless, his comparability to Latin American capitals was principally correct, and unwittingly pointing to the truth that many of those cities – which have stereotypically been seen as lethal, crime-infested locations to reside – have turn into safer than some US metropolises.
Mexico Metropolis’s murder price in 2024 was 10 per 100,000 residents, based on authorities figures, versus 27.5 per 100,000 for Washington DC. In the meantime Bogota had a homicide rate of 15.2 and Lima noticed 7.7 per 100,000.
“Mexico Metropolis has a 3rd of the homicides that Washington has,” said Mexico City’s mayor Clara Brugada. “It’s essential to make clear this as a result of in any other case it could possibly be misinterpreted, and other people may assume that Mexico Metropolis has one of many highest murder charges within the Americas, and that’s simply not true.”
Regardless of its comparatively low murder price, nevertheless, Mexico Metropolis did report practically 1,300 lacking or disappeared individuals final yr, a few of whom may be murder victims whose our bodies had been by no means discovered.
Guerrero mentioned that Mexico Metropolis, with its massive, centralized police power, its decrease charges of extortion to organized crime, its state monitoring over taxi fleets, and the entry it affords to facilities for skilled coaching and schooling, is exclusive within the nation, which remains to be wrestling surging ranges of violence fueled by organized crime.
The neighboring state of Mexico, for instance, has a murder price of 19 per 100,000, practically double that of the capital’s, and nationwide, Mexico had an overall homicide rate of 24 per 100,000 in 2023 – a price greater than six occasions greater than that of the US.
“Mexico Metropolis is a form of island of tranquility once we examine it with the remainder of the nation,” mentioned Guerrero.
