In late January, only a few weeks into the new year, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning to U.S. citizens that urged them to avoid the border area in Mexico because of escalating violence due to narco-trafficking activities.
Few in the media questioned the veracity of the warning. After all, if the government says it’s so, it must be so. But what do the numbers tell us?
If U.S. citizens are facing a greater risk to their safety along the border, shouldn’t there be a way of measuring that increased risk, an accounting of the increase in murders, kidnappings and disappearances?
The State Department warning began as follows:
This Public Announcement is being issued to alert U.S. citizens to the current security situation along the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border in the wake of increased violence among drug traffickers. Although the majority of travelers in the region visit without mishap, violent criminal activity, including murder and kidnapping, in Mexico's northern border region has increased. The overwhelming majority of the victims of violent crime have been Mexican citizens. Nonetheless, U.S. citizens should be aware of the risk posed by the deteriorating security situation. This Public Announcement expires on April 25, 2005.
The warning has been buttressed by a barrage of media reports blaming the supposed rash of violence against U.S. citizens on the evil deeds of narco-traffickers along the border. The FBI even issued a bulletin warning that narco-traffickers were plotting to kidnap and murder federal agents along the border -- a plot that the FBI admitted was not credible a few days later.
Critics of Narco-bogeyman scare being fueled by the State Department, FBI and mainstream media point out that narco-traffickers rarely kidnap or murder U.S. Citizens who are not linked to the drug trade. Such activity, the critics explain, would focus more law-enforcement attention on the activities of the narco-traffickers, which would be bad for their business.
The Narco-bogeyman hype, these critics point out, has more to do with bolstering the White House’s leverage in Mexican affairs --particularly in the upcoming Mexican presidential elections -- than it does with protecting U.S. citizens. Convincing the public that their safety is being threatened by violent narco-thugs, critics contend, opens the door for U.S. policymakers to more directly interfere with the affairs of Mexico -- and to prop up a Mexican presidential candidate more in line with official U.S. interests.
So how can we know the truth beyond the rhetoric? Narco News set out to answer that question.
Seeking answers
Narco News filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Jan. 27 with the U.S. State Department in an effort to get hard figures on the number of U.S. citizens who have been kidnapped, murdered or who have disappeared in Mexico over the past 10 years. The FOIA request was filed only after Narco News attempted to get the same information from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and was greeted with the following response.
“We don’t have figures to respond to this question at this time,” said Diana Page, assistant press attaché for the U.S. Embassy Mexico. “The consular section is working on helping Americans, so getting statistics together has to wait.”
A couple weeks after filing the FOIA request, Narco News was contacted by Greg Blackman, a State Department program analyst. Blackman informed Narco News that the State Department would not likely be able to produce the 10 years worth of information being sought through the FOIA. In particular, Blackman said he was not aware of any report that tracks kidnappings or disappearances of U.S. citizens in Mexico on an aggregate basis over the course of multiple years.
“... I severely doubt we have the information you're looking for, “ Blackman said. "... I have people looking into it now, so I don't know for sure what records are kept or how yet."
What? Does that mean the State Department is warning U.S. citizens about an increased danger to their safety in Mexico, yet they don’t even track, in a systematic fashion, how all those threats are playing out?
That might be true in part. Although Blackman is not aware of any reports or coordinated tracking system for kidnapped or missing U.S. citizens in Mexico, that doesn’t mean the data doesn’t exist. Maybe there is such an accounting record buried somewhere in the bowels of the State Department bureaucracy, which is what the FOIA request is designed to bring to the surface.
But clearly, if there is no such record maintained, then it certainly does raise serious questions about the basis for the State Department’s warnings with respect to the threat to U.S. Citizens along the border.
Blackman did shed some light on another part of the numbers game, however. He pointed Narco News to a report on homicides in Mexico, a report tucked away within the cyber-seams of the State Department Web site.
By the numbers
A little known provision of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal 2003 requires that the State Department “collect and make available on the Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs Internet Web site certain information with respect to each United States citizen who dies in a foreign country from a non-natural cause.”
So, as of Sept. 30, 2002, the State Department began tracking such U.S. deaths abroad, including homicides. The information is updated every six months. As a result, there are two full years of statistics related to U.S. citizens who were murdered in other countries, including Mexico.
The data does not reflect kidnappings or disappearances, but it still provides a revealing snapshot of the level of violence experienced by U.S. citizens who are either living in or visiting another country. As a result, it should be viewed as at least one major indicator of whether narco-trafficking has suddenly flared up in Mexico over the past year, as the State Department’s narco-scare advisory indicates is the case. After all, these are the State Department’s own figures.
The report, called U.S. Citizen Deaths From Non-Natural Causes, By Foreign Country, does include a few caveats, which are covered in the introduction to the report:
Important Note: The table below should not be considered a statistically complete account of U.S. citizen deaths in foreign countries during the reporting period. The table includes only those deaths reported to the Department of State and for which information available to the Department establishes the death was by a non-natural cause. Most American citizens who die abroad were resident abroad. In some instances, it does not occur to surviving family members to inform the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate of the death. The report may not include some deaths of U.S. military or U.S. government officials. To accommodate privacy concerns the table omits identifying information.
Still, even with those reservations, it is clear that these are the only deaths that the State Department knows of in an official way. Any travel warning issued by the government would have to rely, in large part, on this data, then – unless our government is prone to extrapolating anecdotal evidence to create its foreign policy.
So, to the point: What do the figures show?
In 2003, the first full year for which homicides figures are recorded, a total of 42 U.S citizens were murdered in Mexico, the report shows. A total of 18 homicides that year occurred along the U.S.-Mexican border.
In 2004, through Dec. 31, a total of 35 U.S. citizens were murdered in Mexico, with 17 of those homicides occurring along the border.
That’s right. The murder rate actually dropped between 2003 and 2004.
So how can we explain the recent travel advisory issued by the State Department? It appears the numbers, at least in terms of homicides, don’t support the Narco-bogeyman scare.
Granted, there is no way to determine the circumstances of the homicides. The murders could have been due to any number of factors, including love gone bad, robberies, family dysfunction, drug trafficking and just plain whacked-out behavior.
But the fact remains, based on the State Department’s own figures, U.S citizens were less likely to be murdered in Mexico in 2004 than during the prior year. And remember, the State Department’s travel warning was issued on Jan. 26, 2005, and was drafted, in part, as a response to murders that occurred in 2004.
The following is from a Jan. 27 story in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Liza Davis, spokeswoman at the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, said incidents along the Texas border were the "initial impetus" for the alert.
...With 39 homicides in the Tijuana region this year, "the embassy felt it merited inclusion in a general announcement to American citizens," Davis said.
Her concern may be genuine, but it’s not quite clear what hat Davis pulled the number 39 from, however. According to the State Department report, a total of seven U.S. Citizens were murdered in Tijuana in 2004. That figure is actually down from the 13 homicides recorded in 2003, the report shows.
One area south of the border did experience a sharp increase in homicides. In Mexico’s Baja region, located south of Tijuana, the murder rate for U.S. citizens jumped from four to 11 between 2003 and 2004. But this area also has become a haven for not only U.S. tourists, but also U.S. citizens looking for cheap beachfront housing for permanent residences.
An Oct. 26, 2003, article in the New York Times describes the scene:
NOPALÓ, Mexico — Slowly but surely, acre by acre, Mexico's Baja Peninsula is becoming an American colony.
"For Sale" signs are sprouting all over the 800-mile-long peninsula, offering thousands of beachfront properties. Americans are snapping them up. They have already created communities where the dollar is the local currency, English the main language and Americans the new immigrants transforming an old culture.
"Everything's for sale, every lot you can imagine," said Alfonso Gavito, director of a cultural institute in La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur, a state with 400,000 citizens and some of the last undeveloped beaches in North America. "It's like 20 years of changes have happened in three months."
This new land rush, involving billions of dollars, tens of thousands of Americans, and hundreds of miles of coastline, is gaining speed despite the fact that Mexico's Constitution bars foreigners from directly owning land by the sea
... Baja is closer by land and air to the United States than it is to the rest of Mexico; state officials recorded more than 30 million trips by Americans who spent well over $1 billion last year. They say they have no idea how many Americans are living in Baja today, because a certain number are illegal immigrants who never register their presence. Anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests that the number is more than 100,000, probably far more, and growing fast since the Sept. 11 attacks and the souring of the economy in the United States two years ago.
Maybe Baja is not only attracting U.S. citizens, but also the problems that come with their culture. Given the track record of violence in the United States, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the increased murder rate in the Baja may well be do to gringos killing gringos – just as they are prone to do in the United States.
Another conclusion that can be drawn from the State Department report, which some in the U.S. government might find shocking, is that Mexico appears to be a safer place to be for U.S. citizens than their own homeland. The State Department figures show that a total of 77 U.S. citizens were murdered in Mexico during the two-year period ending Dec. 31, 2004. That’s for the whole country.
By comparison, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, in 2003 alone, 109 people were murdered in the mid-sized city of Milwaukee. In Washington, D.C., where State Department officials cook up their policies, a total of 248 people were murdered in 2003, the FBI report shows. New York City weighed in with 597 murders that year.
Maybe the State Department should consider issuing some domestic travel advisories as well, because it appears U.S. citizens face far greater odds of being murdered in the United States than they do in Mexico.
With that said, maybe it’s also time for U.S. policymakers to put the Narco-bogeyman on ice.
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Crunching the numbers of authentic journalism
Submitted February 28, 2005 - 10:44 pm by Bill ConroyThe following exchange is lengthy and a bit quantitatively thick at times, but I believe it is an important illustration of how authentic journalism must be practiced. The writer is not an island, nor are the stories he or she pens immutable. Reader participation in the process, as we all know, is what advances stories, opens dialog and makes authentic journalism a vital part of real democracy.
So I share the following exchange with you, the readers and writers of Narco News, in the hope that it will prompt more of you to weigh in on the discussion, or to at least walk away with more thoughts on the subject that might lead to other acts of authentic journalism down the road.
For the record, I found this reader’s input extremely valuable and presented in a very intelligent, nonconfrontational manner. I have redacted information from the e-mails that would identify the reader. However, I can tell you that the individual has considerable experience dealing with the commercial media marketplace.
Dear Bill Conroy:
Dan Feder gave me your email address in response to my note to him. I wanted to comment on the article you wrote on Friday concerning the inconsistencies between actual numbers of US citizens killed near the border in Mexico and the State Department and media warnings about increasing dangers.
… I often forward Narco News stories to a long list of people because I think NN provides facts and analysis not available elsewhere. My friend … told me about your investigative work over the past year in relation to the "death house" in Juarez. Except for the reporting by Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News, your stories are all there is. And thank goodness for them. Eventually this stuff will have to come out -- that US agencies and agents are intimately involved in these murders and covering them up – and it will be all the more important that you and NN and Corchado laid the groundwork.
I especially liked your recent story for revealing a reliable (if problematic) source for real information about US citizens killed in foreign countries. I'm always on the lookout for data sources and this State Department record is a good one to know about. U.S. Citizen Deaths from Non-Natural Causes by Foreign Country
And your analysis of the "reality gap" between what the State Dept numbers show and what the recent warning bulletins say is correct and to the point. However, the following "conclusion" (your choice of words) at the end is just bogus:
How can it possibly be valid to compare the number of Americans killed in Mexico to the number of Americans killed in any city in the US? Do we even know how many Americans are traveling or living in Mexico at any given time? And even if we did, the numbers still wouldn't be comparable. And I'm certain that you know that. I just can't see why, in an otherwise excellent article that provides new and verifiable information about the actual situation of US citizens in Mexico and the "dangers" that they may face, that you would have to make such an off the wall "conclusion."
I mean, how many Americans LIVE in Milwaukee, or New York or Washington DC? In order for these numbers to mean anything, you'd have to determine what percentage of the population of those cities is represented by the murder statistics. And then to compare it to the number of Americans killed in Mexico, you'd have to know how many Americans were there at any given time, or at least, how many Mexicans live there and how many of them were murdered and what percentage of the population, etc. etc.
There's all kinds of missing data here, and I'm sure you've encountered the problems of trying to get reliable data about the numbers of people murdered or missing in Mexican cities. I know you read (Charles) Bowden's DOWN BY THE RIVER, which, if it says anything, it says that nobody knows how many Mexican dead there are!
Anyway -- the real numbers are always going to be elusive, but every little bit helps and the State Dept. data that you found is a good source to have in our little arsenal of facts. As is your valid conclusion that the State Department contradicts its own data when it issues these inflammatory warnings. Enough said! The other stuff is just rhetorical fluff and doesn't help at all.
Thanks for entertaining my critique. And keep up the good work.
Reader,
Thanks for the feedback on the article. I do appreciate the time you took to analyze and comment on the story.
A little food for thought on the comparison of U.S. citizens murdered in Mexico to the number of U.S. citizens murdered in the states. (Again, we are not talking about Mexicans killed in Mexico, which is a far higher number; but we are talking about U.S. citizens.)
One estimate for the number of U.S. citizens living in Mexico is about 600,000 -- and that is likely an undercount. And 600,000 is about the same as the populations of Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee. I lived in Milwaukee for 10 years and have been across the border many times as well over the years. I do feel safer in most border towns (as U.S. citizens typically stay within the well-defined tourist areas) than I did when I was reporting/living in the inner city of Milwaukee, where I've had a gun held to my head and bullets fly my way.
From the New York Times article quoted and linked to my story:
But of course, millions of U.S. citizens also cross the border annually as tourists -- some for short day stays; some for longer vacation stays.
So, I think the conclusion I draw is not really out of bounds. The murder rate for Milwaukee in 2003, a one-year period, was higher than the two-year total for U.S. citizens in Mexico. The same holds true for Washington, D.C., which had an estimated 2003 population of 563,384, according to Census Bureau figures. Milwaukee's 2003 population was 596,974, according to the same Census figures.
New York is much larger, I agree, but given the millions of American tourists that visit Mexico annually, and the millions of U.S. citizens that visit New York annually as a tourist destination, I don't think the comparison is over the top.
The truth is that you are less likely to be murdered in Mexico as a U.S. citizen than you are to be murdered in the United States, even when you compare apples to apples.
This makes sense intuitively, if you think about it.
I think what you would find, in general, for most countries, is that foreigners are relatively safer than are citizens when it comes to crimes like murder because they tend to be insolated from the extremes of a particular countries social/criminal problems.
Mexico, the U.S., etc., go to great lengths to ensure the safety of foreign visitors for political, economic (tourism) and international-relations purposes, and those foreigners also tend to live in higher-end communities (if they can afford to live overseas) or are in well-protected tourism islands if visiting.
I think where we would see that not be true is in countries with hostile relations with the U.S. or with poorer folks who move to the states (or other first-world nations) to find work and typically have to mix into lower-income, high-crime areas. In those situations, I suspect the homicide stats are skewed upward.
Most U.S. citizens don't find themselves in that predicament, though, when going overseas. Mexicans, however, as well as people from other poorer countries (although there are a lot of middle class Mexicans who visit the states to be sure), do tend to come to the states in greater numbers for low-wage work -- as opposed to pleasure or the experience of living abroad. So I think besides the raw numbers, it would be helpful to have some kind of socio-economic breakdown on victims to really tell what's going on.
That's just my theory. As I think about it though, it sure sounds cold to talk about murder victims as just so many statistics. I guess numbers can never really get at the human toll in all this; that's something I know I always have to keep in mind.
Again, thanks for your feedback.
Bill Conroy
Bill
You make some good points, but I guess I stand by my original thought-- if you are going to use numbers, then you have to be consistent about what you are counting. If there are 600,000 Americans living in Mexico, you still can't compare it to an American city of that size, because the folks in Mexico are scattered around the whole country. And your argument that Americans who live or travel to Mexico are generally safer than those who stay home (based on social class issues, economics, etc) is probably true, but then you are using yet another measure that doesn't fit into the straight numbers thing.
Anyway -- I think we could agree that -- whether it is statistically significant or not -- it takes only one horrific murder or kidnapping of an American in or near a border city to generate a huge amount of media attention. At the same time that several women a month were being killed in Juarez with barely a notice, one (U.S.) college freshman … was found murdered in the desert (1998) and it was the biggest story around for a couple of years...
http://www.casac.ca/issues/juarez_killing_elpasoti mes.htm
http://www.roundupnews.com/news/2003/05/05/News/ne w-Detectives.In.Town.Tues-432316.shtml
http://www.roundupnews.com/news/2003/05/05/News/ne w-Detectives.In.Town.Tues-432316.shtml
It will always be the case that the murders of the relatively rich will get more attention than the murders of the poor, whether that is as a national group, or on an individual basis. Such is our society.
If that is the case, then again, the numbers don't have much meaning. I think it is important though, to find out what numbers exist and to require the keepers of the numbers to use them honestly. Pointing out when they do not is useful. In my opinion, it is more useful than the other more complicated social issues you mention in your email. And the way that you compared things in the story just doesn't ring true and (again, my opinion) takes away from the serious points of the story.
Like I said, keep up the good work.
Reader,
I think we're on the same page. But I still can't let my point go completely.
You said:
If you think about it in those terms, then, you would have to compare the murders of U.S. citizens in Mexico to the murders of all U.S. citizens in their homeland, which by last count stood at 16,503 (in 2003, from a quick search of FBI stats). That compares to 42 in Mexico in 2003 (again, U.S. citizens only).
Given that there's at least 600,000 U.S. citizens, likely more, living full-time in Mexico, and millions more than visit for various lengths annually, I think the numbers still show that you are far more likely to get murdered in the states than in Mexico -- if you're a U.S. citizen. At the very least, I don't think my argument can be dismissed out of hand.
The murder rate in the U.S. in 2003 was 5.7 per 100,000, the FBI figures show. That looks at murders as a percentage of the entire U.S. population.
To be fair, you would have to look at U.S. citizen murders in Mexico also as a percentage of the entire population -- some 105 million. In 2003, the U.S. citizen murder number is 42. (That’s a murder rate of .04 per 100,000 I believe.)
OK, I keep beating a dead horse here, but I just want you to know I did give this thought; it wasn't shot from the hip. And I agree we can all draw different conclusions from the same numbers, as it's difficult to isolate all the variables. But with that said, I also stand by my conclusion (an opinion if you like) in this case.
Anyway, I appreciate the intellectual banter; you have a very sharp mind and I hope you continue to read my articles and keep me on my toes in the future. After all, this should be participatory; readers should be able to affect the course of the journalism being practiced.
Thanks again,
Bill Conroy
Hey Bill
I still can't make it work -- you can't compare US citizens killed in Mexico to US citizens killed in the US... It's just TOO different. Especially if you are talking about the numbers at the level of the whole country. Even if there were 1 million US citizens in Mexico, there are nearly 300 million of them/us in the US, so, (I'm sure you are better at math than me) how many US citizens out of 300 million would you have to kill to get to the ratio of 42:1,000,000 (that of US citizens killed to total # living in Mexico... I know it
is middle school math, so, turning to Dr. Math (http://mathforum.org/dr.math/), I get a number of 12,600 (the number of Americans you'd have to kill out of a total of 300,000,000 to get a similar ratio of the 42:1,000,000 killed in Mexico...
And, you found an annual number of US murder victims of 16,503, so, it looks like it takes us in your direction... I tried it using the ratio 42:600,000 (the official estimate of US citizens living in Mexico) and got the number 21,000 (number you'd have to kill in US out of 300,000,000) -- quite a bit higher than the 16,503 number from the
FBI...
… Unless you want to think that maybe it is all just so safe and idyllic to be a US citizen living in Mexico, compared to say, Chicago, or San Antonio, or Washington...or (say) Las Cruces... Where the front page … today tells the chilling story of the first murder of 2005,
Maybe you are right....
Reader
OK, last email on this, I promise ... I hope.
I think you do have to use a country population to U.S. citizens killed formula for both Mexico and the U.S. to get an apples to apples comparison.
If 42 U.S. Citizens were murdered in Mexico in 2003, in the whole country, regardless of how many citizens live there, the per capita murder rate for U.S. citizens in Mexico is still .04 per 100,000.
That is, your odds of getting killed (murdered) in Mexico as a U.S. citizen are precisely that, compared to your odds of getting murdered in the states -- 5.7 per 100,000.
(This number, of course, is constantly changing.)
By way of turning the reasoning around, the murder rate for any ethnic, nationality or gender group in the United States will vary if you extract them from the larger population.
For example, if we were to extract only African Americans in the United States and compared their murder rate (by examining the ratio only as a percentage of all African Americans) I suspect the murder rate would increase exponentially as well. I suspect we would find higher and lower murder rates in the United States sample depending on how we broke down the sample using your methodology -- by age, ethnicity, gender, income, nationality, etc. That might be interesting to do as a basis for a story in and of itself.
But it is not valid, in my opinion, to extract only a sample in the case of Mexico (ie., U.S. citizens) and calculate the murder rate based only on their population in Mexico and then compare that to the murder rate for the entire population of the United States ... it's apples and oranges.
An interesting statistical analysis, if the numbers could be found, would be to do what your saying (U.S. citizens murdered in Mexico based only on the pop of U.S. citizens there) and compare it to the number of Mexican nationals living in the United States who have been murdered as a percentage of all Mexican nationals living here. I think we might be shocked by the results as well, but that is total speculation.
At any rate, I agree with the thrust of what you're saying. Regardless, it's really not very safe anywhere in this world it seems; and it is particularly sad when it hits close to home, when we see it down the street. Instead of pitting one nation against another in terms of which is more violent, the better approach for the future, for our kids, I think, would be to work together, community by community, nation by nation, to help find ways to stem the violence, both within our borders and across the globe.
But then I guess they'll just accuse us of being out-of-touch world-peace fruitcakes. Still, I'd rather work for peace and justice than to be content with the cynicism that allows our friends, children and fellow human beings be dismissed as just so many statistics to be used by one special interest group or another to justify further militarization of our world.
I will dream on ... it's all we have sometimes.
bc