The Grind:
On Monday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador actually said out loud during a press conference that Mexico is safer than the United States.
Don’t spit out your drink.
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.
The Details:
Ironically, while he was attempting to paint a picture that everything is awesome, the FBI just confirmed that three American women from Texas who were visiting Mexico have actually been missing since February.
Who needs bad news when you’re trying to run a country, right?
“Mexico is safer than the United States,” he assured the press. “There is not problem in traveling safely in Mexico.”
He’s probably going to want to backtrack that statement a bit. 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.” Read more…