Mexico downplays violence in image rehab

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Mexico's government is struggling to salvage its image as drug-related deaths mount, sometimes as many as 30 in a day, political analysts say.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora this week pointed out that despite more than 11,000 people killed since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led drug offensive in December 2006, the per-capital rate of homicides in Mexico is actually down since the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

"The levels of violence that the country is experiencing are very serious," the U.S. newspaper quoted Medina Mora as telling a gathering of advertising executives this week. "But they are much less than we had 15 years ago."

But the Times said that position, while technically true, is dismissed as political spin by opposition politicians, analysts and many ordinary Mexicans who contend the death toll is actually evidence of the government's failure to make Mexico safer.

"Never, not even in the Revolution, were we in as grave a situation as we are today," Sen. Gustavo Madero of Chihuahua, a member of Calderon's own National Action Party, told the newspaper. "If the state of Chihuahua were a country, today we would have the fourth-highest level of major violence in the world."