(RepublicanWire.org) – On Monday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador actually said out loud during a press conference that Mexico is safer than the United States.
This response was in reference to the brutal cartel killings of two Americans and additional kidnapping of two others. President López Obrador continued by claiming that U.S. travel warnings and reports of violence in Mexico are exaggerated, and to take things a step further, actually a conspiracy by conservative politicians and the media just so they can make him look bad.
“Mexico is safer than the United States,” he assured the press. “There is not problem in traveling safely in Mexico.”
“These conservative politicians… dominate the majority of the news media in the United States,” he added. “This violence is not a reality. It is pure, vile manipulation.”
According to the Global Conflict Tracker put together by the Center for Preventative Action which was updated in January of this year:
“By 2016, drug-related homicides had increased by 22 percent, with more than twenty thousand killed, and in 2017 a mass grave containing the remains of more than 250 victims of crime-related violence was uncovered in Veracruz State. Since 2006, crime-related violence has resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths.”
Mexico’s nationwide homicide rate is about 28 per 100,000 inhabitants. By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate is barely one-quarter as high, at around 7 per 100,000.
The U.S. State Department has placed “do not travel” advisories on six Mexican states which have been the forefront of intense violence by the drug cartels.
