The good news? Auto thefts down. The bad news?

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told reporters that the military operation has reduced crimes including auto thefts, commercial robberies and bank heists.

“We have to make adjustments, but there is no radical change in the method of operating,” Reyes said, adding that the municipal government was examining whether to request a six-month extension of the army’s presence until March 2010. “We can’t say the operation has been a failure, because it hasn’t concluded,” the mayor said in separate comments.

Murder is one crime that definitely has not gone down since the initiation of Joint Operation Chihuahua. The latest press accounts report more than 1,000 people murdered in Ciudad Juarez alone during the course of 2009 — a rate much higher than in 2008 before the reinforcement of the army and federal presence in the border city.

Frontera Nor/Sur (translation via Newspaper Tree, El Paso)

Although we’re assured by Monte Alejandro Rubido Garcia, the Federal Government spokesman for security that “90 percent of the [11,000 killed in the “drug war” since the Calderon Administration took office] were ‘delinquents’,” and I assume he’s more or less correct, it still might not be a bad idea to give the delinquents a proper trial.

There seems to be some reliance on “body counts” to measure “success” in this so -called war, which makes me wonder if all the “delinquents” were even involved in the narcotics trade, or… if the reason auto thefts and bank robberies also dropped, isn’t that — as in Colombia — there might not be a temptation to goose the kill ratio.

Leaving aside evidence that suggests death squads, both in Juarez and in Quintana Roo — and the possibility that not all so-called “drug war” deaths are related to narcotics trafficking, assume that ninety percent of those killed are delinquents.  It could be — but I hope it isn’t — that the numbers are being inflated with  people that even if they were tried and convicted  of their crimes in those barbaric regions of the planet (like Texas) where capital punishment is still practiced, would have been legally executed.

At least some Mexican politicians are starting to consider alternatives to the “drug war”… insisting on more attention be paid to money laundering and gun running.  We have nothing to lose … except maybe old Volkswagens without alarm systems.