TIJUANA (Border Report) — Tijuana closed the year with 2,000 homicides for the year, about 200 fewer than in 2019, when it recorded 2,208 murders.
City officials, including Mayor Arturo González Cruz, were hoping for a 30 percent reduction in the number of homicides in the city.
“We closed the year at 2,000,” González Cruz said. “I’m worried because, and you have to say it clearly, we have not had the results we were expecting. If we had help from the state, it would be much different.”
The mayor was critical of state prosecutors for what he said is not putting murder suspects on trial and letting them “operate with impunity.”
“Two thousand homicides, how many have been prosecuted?” he asked.
“We have to work in a coordinated manner to avoid this, that’s why the state government has to be willing to work in a joint effort to take care of the problem,” the mayor said. “How many were tried, how many murderers were sentenced?”
The State’s Chief Prosecutor Hiram Sánchez said his office has prosecuted 418 murder cases in just the past year.
But close to 85 percent of murders go unsolved or the suspects are allowed to roam free.
Sánchez emphasized that his office does all it can, saying about 640 agents, investigators and state guards work on solving homicides throughout the state of Baja California.
In 2018, the number of murders in Tijuana was 2518.
