SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — During a Thursday visit to Baja California’s capital city of Mexicali, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said making sure all citizens are safe and secure is “getting complicated.”
The statement comes after figures released by Mexico’s Secretary of Defense show that since López Obrador became president in 2018, serious crime such as murder, robberies, car theft, assaults and kidnappings have gone up in Mexico.
According to these statistics, four Baja California cities including Tijuana, Rosarito, Mexicali and Ensenada account for 97 percent of all crime in the state.
And figures also show Baja California is number one when it comes to car theft in all of Mexico.
According to Mexico’s Defense Secretary, 1,008 cars were reported stolen in Baja along with 167 homicides just in the month of January.
López Obrador attributed the killings to the ongoing battle between drug cartels, but he said homicides have actually gone down by 20 percent during his administration, a claim official figures don’t support.
When pressed by reporters to provide a source for his assertion, he said “the strategy to protect citizens hasn’t failed, it’s just gotten complicated to put the plan into action.”
Despite security concerns in Baja California and other states in Mexico, López Obrador has remained a very popular president.
According to an AS/COA Online poll published last week, he enjoys a 66 percent approval rating among citizens in Mexico.
