Last week the Trans-Border Institute’s Justice in Mexico Project released their fourth special report on drug violence in Mexico. These reports (see the 2010, 2011, and 2012 ones too) provide some of the most in-depth analyses of homicide trends in Mexico by using a range of government and media sources, as well as their own data.

The authors, Cory Molzahn, Octavio Rodriguez Ferreira, and David A. Shirk, conclude that Mexico’s homicide rate has peaked. Using the Mexican government’s National Public Security System (SNSP) data—which you can see in the graph below—the number of organized crime related homicides dropped some 28 percent over the last year. Other tallies from the newspapers Reforma and Milenio showed a 21 percent decrease and a 1 percent increase respectively (the substantial differences stemming from the ways they categorize organized crime related homicides). But by all counts, the violence has at least leveled out, if not fairly dramatically declined.

via Mexico’s Murder Rate Plateaus | LatIntelligence.