Civilians And Soldiers Killed In Mexican Drug War

About 3,000 people were killed by the Mexican military between 2007 and 2012, while 158 soldiers died in the fiasco that is the Mexican drug war, according to a report by the New York Times, quoting official government statistics from Mexico.

“Some critics call the killings a form of pragmatism: In Mexico, where fewer than 2 percent of murder cases are successfully prosecuted, the armed forces kill their enemies because they cannot rely on the shaky legal system”, NYT reporters Azam Ahmed and Eric Schmitt write.

A decade ago, in 2006, the Mexican government deployed the armed forces to quell the flourishing drugs trade enriching the notorious cartels. The drugs war does not seem likely to be won by either side any time soon. The government in Mexico City stopped official reporting on the body count in early 2014.

A report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concludes that in total more than 100,000 lives have been lost in the past ten years of violence.