President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday about the high death toll in Mexico because of the drug cartels operating in that country, vowing to “build the wall.”
“Mexico was just ranked the second deadliest country in the world, after only Syria. Drug trade is largely the cause. We will BUILD THE WALL!” Trump tweeted.
Trump may have been referring to a new report by Mexico’s National Public Security System (SESNSP). As Breitbart Texas reported:
… from January to May 2017, [Mexican] state officials recorded more than 18,880 homicides, 586 kidnappings, and 2,480 cases of extortion. The new statistics mark May as the deadliest month in recent history with 2,186 official murders, resulting in 3,998 victims. The statistics only date back to the late 1990s, but provide a glimpse into how violence appears to be surpassing all previously recorded years.
Another recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published last month shows that Mexico (23,000) is second only to Syria (50,000) in the number of deaths in 2016.
“This is all the more surprising, considering that the conflict deaths [in Mexico] are nearly all attributable to small arms,” said John Chipman, chief executive and director-general IISS, on the occasion of the report’s release and as reported by CNN.
“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17,000 and 16,000 lives respectively in 2016, although in lethality they were surpassed by conflicts in Mexico and Central America, which have received much less attention from the media and the international community,” Anastasia Voronkova, the editor of the IISS survey said in the CNN report.
Voronkova said the number of homicides rose in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states during 2016.
Breitbart Texas’s Border experts say, since 2006, more than 125,000 people have been killed in Mexico, with an additional 50,000 missing.