The human cost of Mexico’s war on drugs has been well documented, with almost every news story written about the country ending with the now obligatory statistic that over 60,000 people have been killed since December 2006.
But there is an even bigger killer in Mexico that rarely makes the headlines and fails to provoke such large media frenzies or public demonstrations: dangerous driving.
Mexico ranks among the ten worst countries on earth for road traffic deaths and it has the second most dangerous roads in Latin America, behind Argentina. According to British newspaper The Guardian, road traffic accidents in Mexico have caused 80,000 deaths in the last four years, with an average of 16,700 people killed each year since 2006.
An article in The Economist last year placed the death toll even higher, at 24,000 fatalities and another 600,000 injured every year. This was corroborated by the Cruz Roja (Red Cross), which said 24,129 people died on Mexico’s roads in 2011.
Locally, the situation is equally desperate. From January to June this year, 889 people died in traffic accidents across Jalisco, according to Spanish-language daily El Informador. Alcohol was a factor in around half of these incidents, which represent the leading cause of death among young people in the state.
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