Is life better with less criminals?

Via the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute:

Ciro Gómez Leyva, Milenio, 6/2/2010

The majority of the dead are criminals, President Calderon repeats again and again.  And judging by the cold, hard facts, it is true.  But?  Do you have to keep killing them, Mr. President?  Is life better with less criminals?  How has the daily life of 110 million Mexicans improved from the butchering of 21,915 in these three and a half years?…

The perception of the people, in survey after survey, has been moving from caution to disappointment, from disappointment to hopelessness.

But President Calderon keeps repeating that they had to continue killing.  That Mexicans could not continue to live at the mercy of the criminals.  (original editorial here)

Questioned about “non-combatant” deaths in the so-called “drug war”, Felipe Calderón used the unfortunate phrase “collateral damage.”  While this might be of some comfort to people in the United States when talking about civilian deaths of people alien to themselves (like Iraqi farmers or Afghan wedding guests), this kind of bloodless bureaucratic bullshit does not go over well with people talking about their own countrymen, let alone their friends, relatives and neighbors.

As Gómez Leyva writes, the slaughter is nothing like what one would expect in a “war” with relatively matched forces.  There are 18 deaths on the “druggie” side to every one on the government side.  Of course, on the “druggie” side, you have inter-mural slaughters, with their own “collateral damage”, but there is no proof that all those killed by the government were serious criminals.  And, not having a death penalty in this country*, the “collateral damage” numbers are much closer to the estimated 22,000 “drug war casualties” during the Calderón Administration than we like to think.

* Although in practice, Mexico hadn’t had a state execution since 1961, the few remaining laws on the books permitting executions (mostly under the military code) were done away with in 2005.