"Officially, there is no war" against drug trafficking in Mexico: López Obrador

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced on Tuesday the end of the "war on drug trafficking" launched in 2006 by former president Felipe Calderónand it's the worst escalation of violence in Mexico.

"Officially, there is no war, we will achieve peace," said López Obrador during his morning press conference, in which he stressed that For the first time in a long time, this Tuesday, there were only 54 homicides in the country, after a daily average of 80.

"Yesterday I saw the report, I felt satisfied because, according to our records, there were only 54 homicideswhen the newspaper has an average of 80 ", he said.

"That's what counts for me: reducing the number of homicides, the number of robberies, the absence of kidnapping is the fundamental thing, not the spectacular "Said the president.

López Obrador badured that the arrest of drug lords will not be their priority because your government will focus on the safety of citizens.

"The strategy is no longer for agents to stop the capos"he said. "What we are looking for is that security is ensured and that we can reduce the number of daily killings," he said.

The President explained that in his government "The capos have not been stopped" because it will not be their main function. "The main function of the government is to guarantee security."

The president said that the "spectacular" operations had been abandoned to arrest the leaders of the big criminal gangs, in which "A lot of time has been lost and nothing has been solved".

Now, instead, his attention is focused on the murder of homicides, kidnappings, the high impact crimes that affect the citizens.

The López Obrador government has begun publishing a new statistics on victims of intentional homicide, which generates daily an "interdisciplinary team" – as the president calls it – made up of different federal agencies.

Unlike the data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP), these statistics are published daily. However, as the Government states in the methodological note, this is information for strategic purposes, but it is not official data.

The official information corresponds to the monthly publication at the National Information Center of the SESNSP.

On January 3, the Secretary of Public Security and Citizens, Alfonso Durazo, stressed that During the first month of the government of López Obrador, insecurity has tended to decline..

As the figures of this government began to be published on December 5, it is impossible to make a monthly comparison. However, the government report reports an average daily of 79.7 victims of intentional homicide in December.

The updated data of the SESNSP show that in December 2018 (the first month of the administration of López Obrador), there were 2,842 victims of willful homicide and 74 femicide. A total of 2,916 people were killed.

These data are converted December 2018 in the most violent of all December until now.

Compared to December 2017 (corresponding to Peña Nieto's six-year sentence), the rate of intentional homicides rose from 1.79 to 1.95.which equates to a 9% increase. And compared to December 2011 – the most violent year of the six years of Felipe Calderón – it is an increase of 33.5%.