Mexico Murder Rates Drop For First Time In 6 Years

Mexico is feeling a respite from the spike in murder's since the start of former President Felipe Calderon's drug war in 2006. For the first time in six years, experts said Tuesday, there has been a slight dip in homicide. The trend, however, is disproportionate as some states and cities have actually grown more violent, Fox News Latino reported.

The decreased murder rate is only slight, with 22 per 100,000 as opposed to 24 per 100,000 people in 2011, Mexico's National Statistics and Geography Institute reported in its findings. States like Chihuahua and Guerrero, notorious for their respective battles with drug cartels, had a rate of 77 per 100,000 people. Surprisingly, Ciudad Juarez, located in the state of Chihuahua, with its own issues of violence stemming long before the drug war was one of the places were homicide dropped. In 2010, 6,407 people were murdered. Investigators found that 2,783 were killed last year. In Acapulco, a popular beach city for tourists located in Guerrero, killing went up from 1,555 to 2,684 during the same amount of time.

Mexico had 26,037 total homicides last year, investigators said. Mexico's population stands at around 117.3 million. Countires such as Honduras, however, had a staggeringly higher rate of homicides in 2011, with 91.6 killings per 100,000 people. Brazil was near par with Mexico with 21.8 per 100,000 people during the same year. Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico's domestic intelligence service, said this small drop shows hopes for the future of Mexico's newly implemented reforms.

"What this shows is that the ability of the state government in question counts, the level of their commitment counts," Hope said. "Wherever there has been a serious reform effort, for example in Chihuahua, there have been improvements."